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ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) Chairman Imran Khan called upon the government on Sunday to suspend the military operation in North Waziristan till complete evacuation of civilians from the area.
Addressing a press conference after visiting Bannu where a large number of people displaced from the tribal region have taken shelter, he urged the centre to provide Rs6 billion from the Coalition Support Funds to the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to enable it to provide relief to people leaving the operation-hit areas.
The press conference followed a meeting of the PTI core committee.
The PTI chairman said that a large number of people, including women and children, were still stranded in North Waziristan.
Mr Khan, who was accompanied by KP Chief Minister Pervez Khattak, regretted that the Sindh and Punjab governments were not allowing the internally displaced persons (IDPs) into the provinces where they wanted to live with relatives. “They are Pakistanis. They are angry. Let them go,” he said.
He urged the federal government to chalk out a plan in consultation with the KP government to help the IDPs.
“The prime minister should stop going on foreign visits and instead plan for rehabilitation (of the IDPs). This planning should have preceded (the operation) but the KP government was not informed about the operation,” he said.
Mr Khan said he had come to know through security briefings and information obtained from other sources that militants were planning to strike in different parts of the KP in four to six weeks. They have been told to beef up security in the province.
About his demand for providing Rs6bn to the provincial government, he said it was the KP which would have to face the brunt of the operation. A large number of the IDPs are going to Bannu which has a population of about one million.
Implying that the IDPs influx would lead to price hike and more patients in hospitals in Bannu, he said: “The hospitals cannot take the pressure of so many people. There will also be a further increase in prices as Ramazan is approaching.”
No Alliance with PAT
Mr Khan again categorically stated that his party neither had an alliance with Dr Tahirul Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek nor it planned to forge such an alliance. But, he added, the PTI stood with PAT workers who had recently suffered the worst kind of police brutality in Lahore.
He rejected a perception that the PTI wanted to topple the government through undemocratic moves and said that the party had only one-point agenda -- those people who had rigged last year’s general elections should be held accountable and punished.
Mr Khan said his party had been struggling for the past year to get justice. Now, at a public meeting in Bahawalpur on June 27, he said, he would announce a deadline for the fulfilment of demand for justice.
After this deadline, he declared, the government would be responsible for the consequences.
He said that during his visit to the Model Town residence of Dr Qadri, he was informed that two women had been shot point-blank in their mouths (during clashes between police and PAT activists on Tuesday).
The PTI chairman said “Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif and others responsible for the Model Town incident should be arrested and tried on murder charges.
“Punjab has become a police state. The Sharifs have always used police for their political objectives.”
The PTI would soon distribute copies of the former Punjab IG Abbas Khan’s 1992 report in which he had informed the Lahore High Court that merit had been ignored during the appointment of 25,000 policemen by the Nawaz Sharif government.
Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2014
