Pakistan – Tribal Area Armed Conflict – Displaced Women & Children + Girls’ Education Issues
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: August 11, 2008
WUNRN
PAKISTAN TRIBAL AREA ARMED CONFLICT
CRISIS
INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT – WOMEN &
CHILDREN
Please see 4 parts of this WUNRN
release.
IDP
News Alert, 21 August 2008
Pakistan:
Hundreds of Thousands Flee Army & Taleban Bombardments
Intense fighting between government forces and Taleban insurgents in
Pakistan’s Bajaur tribal agency, a district in the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan, have displaced
at least 250,000 people.
Local
aid agencies estimate the number
of IDPs to be in excess of 300,000. The army launched an offensive in Bajaur in
reponse to a 6 August attack
by insurgents on a military outpost, and the ensuing fighting involved extensive
use of heavy weapons by both sides.
Many of the internally displaced people fleeing Bajaur have taken refuge in
Peshawar, the capital of the adjoining North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The
NWFP provincial government has set up 17 relief
camps in the Dir, Malakand, Mardan and Peshawar and is trying to assist the
displaced people. Those who have not fled Bajaur have reported a lack of
electricity, food and other essential commodities.
_____________________________________________________________
Bajaur (Urdu: باجوڑ)
is an Agency (district) of the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bajaur
_______________________________________________________________________
The
often cited statistic that as many as 80 per cent of displaced populations are
women and children fails to convey the complete devastation that displacement
visits upon women and communities. Leaving homes, property and community behind
renders women vulnerable to violence, disease and food scarcity, whether they
flee willingly or unwillingly. Internally displaced women face additional
dangers as they are often invisible to the international community within
the context of violent conflict.
_______________________________________________________________________
REGIONAL RECENT ISSUES – GENDER –
GIRLS’ EDUCATION
|
Tariq
Mahmood/AFP/Newscom/File
May
31, 2007
Pakistani
Girls’ Schools in Radicals’ Sights
As
militancy surges in Pakistan’s remote tribal areas, girls’ schools have become
targets. Despite the threats, girls’ enrollment has continued to rise.
| Correspondent of The
Christian Science Monitor
PESHAWAR,
Pakistan
All throughout the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), Pakistan’s
impoverished western border with Afghanistan, lie the ruins of barbershops and
music and video stores – symbols of Western-oriented life that religious
extremists have destroyed in a growing wave of violence.
Now Islamist militants have a new target, and if they are successful,
observers say their campaign could be disastrous for Pakistan’s future.
In what appears to be an escalating spree over the last year, extremists
have bombed at least four girls’ schools and circulated violent threats warning
girls to stay at home. While no girls or school staff have been killed, girls
in some areas have stopped attending classes – marking a direct blow to
Pakistan’s national enterprise of “enlightened moderation,” which
posits female education as a central pillar.
Pakistan finds itself at a precarious tipping point: Tremendous gains have
been made in female education in recent years, but a considerable gender gap
remains. Extremists’ efforts to undermine education for women, who are
historically one of Pakistan’s most potent forces of moderation, could further
empower Pakistan’s growing ranks of Islamist militants.
“Because girls are the ones suffering from these oppressive ideas, if
they are educated they will be a better ally in the promotion of liberal ideas
and secularism,” says Farzana Bari, who heads the gender studies
department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
The continuing wave of attacks could tilt Pakistan’s sensitive political balance,
observers say, and hurt crucial economic development efforts. As female
education improves, infant mortality rates tend to decrease, family health
improves, national incomes rise, and female citizens become more politically
active and aware of their rights, say development experts.
“You’ll be keeping half the population of Pakistan idle [if the
bombings continue],” says Syed Fayyaz Ahmad, the joint education adviser
of the Ministry of Education in Islamabad. “[Girls] would not add to the
economic development of NWFP. If your female children are not educated, your
next generation of boys and girls are affected.”
Entrenched tribal, religious, and economic imperatives in conservative areas
regard the schooling of girls as either improper, since girls should not
venture outside the purview of the family home, or unnecessary, since girls are
often needed for work.
As a result, Pakistan has one of the highest rates of female illiteracy in
South Asia, at about 60 percent, and the lowest rate of primary school
enrollment for girls, at somewhere between 42 and 48 percent. Those
shortcomings are particularly pronounced in the NWFP, which, as of 2004, had
the lowest ratio of female enrollment of any province in Pakistan, according to
the International Crisis Group (ICG). In areas like the Federally Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA), where the government’s presence has historically been
weakest, only 1 percent of women and girls are literate.
The issue has become even more of a battleground in recent years, as resurgent
Islamic extremism bumps heads with the government’s recent efforts to expand
girls’ education. In 2002, the NWFP provincial government allocated 70 percent
of its entire education development budget to girls’ schools and created more
than 300 primary and middle schools for girls in the NWFP between 2002 and
2005, according to government figures. Local authorities also gave parents
small stipends and free clothing to encourage them to enroll their girls.
It is these new schools that extremists like Maulana Fazlullah, a powerful
preacher in Swat valley, tend to target. For months, using a pirated radio
channel, Mr. Fazlullah had warned locals against sending their girls to school,
calling it un-Islamic and a violation of purdah, the religiously mandated
confinement of women away from public scrutiny.
“A woman has been asked to remain behind the four walls of the house.
Men have been given preference by God,” Fazlullah explains in an interview
on the banks of the Swat River, where he is building a madrassah, or religious
school. In a recent peace treaty signed with the government, Fazlullah agreed
to stop preaching against girls’ education in return for keeping his illegal
radio station.
Others have delivered the same message through force. In March, police in
Orakzai agency, part of FATA, defused a bomb planted on the grounds of a girls’
school, and other schools in the NWFP, including the provincial capital of
Peshawar, have received written threats saying girls and female teachers should
wear full veils or face dire consequences. Many worry that the violence is
spreading.
‘”Everywhere these girls are going, the teachers are threatened,”
says Fazilla Gulrez, the manager of communications for the Society for the
Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) in Islamabad.
There could be little to stop it. Ms. Gulrez adds that the voices of
extremists, particularly when conveyed through bombs, are often much stronger
than those of concerned parents or civil society. “The parents are poor.
They don’t have a voice. The situation is so volatile, but civil society cannot
take a stand.”
Officials have publicly condemned the attacks, and say privately that a
citizen-led countercampaign should be mustered.
“If you want to break a tradition, naturally there will be a
backlash,” says Mr. Ahmad. “When you create an awareness program, the
chances of success are 50/50. For NWFP, even if it’s 50 percent, that’s a good
start.”
Indeed, if Fazlullah and others are against female education, it is probably
because girls are pouring into schools. In Swat valley alone, primary school
enrollment for girls has increased by nearly 31,000 since 2002, or 77 percent.
And even though Fazlullah started preaching two years ago, girls’ enrollment
in Swat last year grew by more than 12,000, according to government statistics.
As a result, female illiteracy has gone down by 9 percentage points in less
than a decade. And national statistics suggest that female enrollment at the
primary level has climbed by 12 percentage points between 1998 and 2005,
according to the World Bank.
“We have no problem,” says Ghulam Akbar, the executive district
officer of education in Swat. “The girls are still going. Very [few] have
stopped.”
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.
Categories: Releases