It was a year that had a blood trail going through part of our tribal borderland from one month into the other. It was a year that was marked by violence that continued to haunt South Waziristan and ensured that the remote tribal region remained in the limelight as Pakistani security forces carried on their hunt for Al Qaeda members in the US-led war on terrorism.
With the casualty figures mounting, literally by the day, the MMA which owes its existence mainly to its opposition to the US invasion of Afghanistan, surprisingly chose to remain quiet. Politically speaking, therefore, the NWFP remained quite at peace with itself and the centre. There were no fireworks and no confrontation, although the MMA leadership continued to thump desks and create a rumpus in parliament in opposition to President Musharraf continuing to wear his military uniform.
January 1, 2004 will go down in history for its own significance as far as the NWFP and the MMA are concerned. It was the day when the MMA, despite having a majority, chose to abstain from the vote to endorse Gen. Musharraf as president of Pakistan. Only 30 votes were cast in support of President Musharraf, that too from the PPP (Sherpao) and the PML-Q. The MMA with its 67 votes abstained. Twenty-seven others opted to remain absent. Technically Musharraf managed to get a vote of confidence from the NWFP.
Months later, on September 15, the MMA would atone for its 'sin' by supporting a resolution asking Musharraf to quit one of the two offices by December 31, 2004. The resolution moved by PPP-P leader Abdul Akbar Khan received 55 votes with only 14 lawmakers from the PML-Q and PPP (Sherpao) opposing it.
With more than two years in office, the MMA government under Chief Minister Akram Durrani, continues to struggle to find ways to implement its Islamist agenda. Having enacted the Shariah Law, the MMA appears to find itself at a loss as how to show the 'change' that it had promised its electorate. Hence the clamor to introduce another law, the so-called Hasba Bill.
The controversial bill seeks to empower the clergy to interpret and implement what it considers Islamic values by setting up a kind of a vice and virtue department with a Hasba force at its enforcement agency, and has caused concern and fierce opposition from civil society and human rights groups.Critics of the proposed law claim that it seeks to establish a parallel judiciary. The government on the other hand insists that it would aid the judiciary and enable the people resolve their issues at the local level instead of indulging in prolonged litigation. The bill that has gone back and forth between the provincial government and the NWFP governor, with the latter raising objections to the draft law, was eventually sent to the Islamic Ideology Council for comments. The IIC returned the draft legislation citing various anomalies.
But the Durrani government, however, says it is determined to introduce the bill which, it claims, would complete the Islamization process and enable the people to 'reap the fruits' of the Shariah. That said, the provincial government seems weary and reluctant to introduce the bill that, it knows fully well, could put it on a confrontation path with the federal government which it wants to avoid at all costs.
And it is precisely this fear that has restrained the MMA from bringing the anti-Musharraf campaign to the NWFP and also Balochistan where it shares power with the PML-Q.
It however, continued to have an uneasy and uncomfortable relationship with the district governments. The district nazims blame the provincial government of interfering and taking away powers, a charge always denied by the government. The tussle for power reached its zenith when 20 district nazims filed a writ petition in the Peshawar High Court in May. The petition was accepted for hearing on October 28 and is pending.
Still reeling from the after-effects of attempts by Jamaat-i-Islami activists to tear down billboards and blacken images of female models, the provincial government took another controversial decision earlier in January by ordering the removal of mannequins from shops. The decision, however, was allowed to fade away in the face of negative publicity both at home and abroad.
"These (mannequins) do not reflect our cultural values. I have only asked the police to politely tell shopkeepers to remove them and that no force should be used," the chief minister told reporters, denying his government was out to introduce a Taliban style system in the NWFP.
In July, the provincial government, under pressure from its electorate to show results on the Islamization front, prescribed prayer times both for provincial servants as well as for Friday congregations, making it mandatory for mosques to commence the main weekly prayer at one time. But many mosques continue to follow their own timings and the decision has failed to take off.
But all this while, the MMA has also been under pressure from its junior partners jockeying for a berth or two in the provincial cabinet. After considerable delay and a lot of discussions between the two senior partners, the JUI-F and JI, the chief minister finally inducted six more ministers into the cabinet on July 23, raising its strength from the previous 12 ministers to 18.
Although a minister was brought in from the JUI (Samiul Haq) too, this did no good to its leader Maulana Samiul Haq who while remaining in the MMA continues to criticize the religious alliance and its two senior partners, accusing them of turning the conglomerate into a two-party affair.
Significantly, the move to induct more ministers into the cabinet came at a time when reports of a possible move by the federal government to engineer defections and bring about the collapse of the MMA government started appearing in the press. Those reports may also have influenced or hastened the expansion of the cabinet, analysts noted at the time.
In June, the NWFP government presented a Rs 60.9-billion budget with some new taxes. The budget was divided into three categories of welfare, administrative and development, though no major project was included in it. The Annual Development Plan was overstretched and had to be scaled down considerably following concerns that it would add to the growing throw-forward liabilities of the NWFP.
Another issue that generated some interest early in the year was the abduction of Punjab Minister Naeemullah Shahani. Mr. Shahani, who had reportedly gone to Miramshah in the North Waziristan tribal region to buy a non-custom duty paid smuggled vehicle, managed to escape after nearly three weeks in captivity.
The PPP that has remained leaderless since the departure of its chairperson Benazir Bhutto from the country received another jolt in the NWFP when its provincial president Khwaja Muhammad Khan Hoti resigned in April, accusing his leader of running the party by email. Mr Hoti has since formed his own group and fielded a candidate against the PPP in the NA-35 bye-election. The bye-election on December 15 that was held to fill the Malakand seat that had fallen vacant due to the demise of Inayatur Rehman, a JI MNA, was won by another JI candidate, Bakhtiar Maani, defeating his chief rival and PML-Q leader Salim Saifullah Khan by a handsome margin of 13,000 votes.
But while the MMA ruled, the NWFP continued to suffer from the visible indifference of the federal government. Mr Shaukat Aziz, who visited Peshawar on his maiden visit in September for the first time after becoming prime minister, attended a provincial cabinet meeting and offered advice on good governance without making any major announcement, much to the dismay of the MMA as well as the hapless people of the NWFP.
The federal government did, however, continue to focus on the tribal borderland where the Americans thought the elusive Al Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden might be hiding. The situation there deteriorated as the security forces launched one operation after another to flush out foreign militants and their local supporters. The first high point of that operation came in March, when the security forces launched a drive in Kaloosha, sustaining in the process major casualties.
It was also during that operation that the security forces were at one point thought to have cornered a 'high value target'. The president quickly went on air, breaking the news to a foreign television channel, prompting speculation that the 'high value target' the president was referring to could be Osama's deputy, the Egyptian surgeon Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri. It turned out, however, that the man the security forces had cornered but had managed to escape was Qari Tahir Yaldashev, leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
On April 24, the military entered into a peace agreement with tribal militants protecting and harbouring foreign militants in an effort to bring peace to the troubled region. The Corps Commander, Peshawar, Lt Gen Safdar Hussain, flew into Shakai in South Waziristan to witness the ceremony to mark the agreement that collapsed soon afterwards, when a top militant commander, Nek Muhammad, refused to accept the registration of foreign militants. On June 18, the 27-year-old militant was killed in a precision-guided missile attack on a compound where was having a meal.
Around that time, the government slapped economic sanctions on the Ahmadzai Wazir tribe for failing to cooperate with the government in evicting foreign militants and handover fellow tribesmen suspected of harbouring them. The sanctions that were imposed on May 30 were lifted in September when Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz visited Peshawar and made the announcement.
All this while, militants continued to plant landmines and attack and ambush security forces. The situation went out of control when jets bombed what was widely believed to be a training camp for militants in Dela in the Mehsud tribe-dominated part of South Waziristan. The air raid on Dela on September 9 left 50 militants dead amid accusation and claims by some tribesmen that among the dead were also some civilians - claims denied vehemently by the military authorities.
Violence escalated as security forces and militants fought battle upon battle. The high mark of this whole problem was reached when a militant commander, Abdullah Mehsud, ordered the kidnapping of two Chinese engineers working on the multi-million dollars Gomal Zam dam in October.
The hostage-taking drama ended two weeks later, when military commandos killed the five hostage-takers and rescued one of the Chinese engineers unharmed; the other died from a single bullet that pierced through the body of one of the kidnappers.
The Sino Hydro Company, a Chinese state-owned construction firm, stopped work on the project due to security concerns as the government announced a Rs5-million head-money for the 29-year-old former Guantanamo detainee. Abdullah Mehsud, however, remains at large and on the run.
The government believes that a major part of its thrust to flush out foreign militants has come to an end at least in the Ahmadzai Wazir part of the tribal area when Waziri tribes and their wanted militants signed agreements of future good conduct and agreed to deny sanctuary to foreign militants.
It hopes it can conclude similar deals with the Mehsud tribes as well to bring to an end a long and bloody fight in South Waziristan that has killed by the military's own accounts over 200 of its men and wounded more than 400.
It was a year that had a blood trail going through part of our tribal borderland from one month into the other. It was a year that was marked by violence that continued to haunt South Waziristan and ensured that the remote tribal region remained in the limelight as Pakistani security forces carried on their hunt for Al Qaeda members in the US-led war on terrorism.
