Refugees From Region in Pakistan Trickling Home

NEW YORK TIMES
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Hundreds of people who fled a military offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley began trickling back home on Monday after the Pakistani government announced the first stage of a three-part plan to return them.

They represented a tiny fraction of the nearly two million refugees who have been displaced by the fighting in Swat, which started after the collapse of a February peace deal that handed the Taliban effective control of the district, and a military campaign to uproot the militants began. The refugees, tens of thousands of whom have spent months in government camps, are eager to return home, but many have expressed trepidation about their safety.

Buses and trucks provided by the government began shuttling hundreds of families to Swat on Monday from three camps in the Mardan and Charsadda districts, south of the valley.

Mohammad Shumon Alam, the spokesman in Pakistan for the aid agency Oxfam, said many families were sending one or two people as scouts to check the area and their homes before putting everyone, including children, into vehicles to return.

“It’s not a big wave,” Mr. Alam said. “It’s limited. People want to go back, but they are extremely skeptical and concerned.”

The government of North-West Frontier Province announced over the weekend that 23,040 displaced families would receive assistance returning to Swat in three phases. The provincial government plans to complete the process in two weeks.

Ahmad Rajwana, the chief coordinator of refugee camps for the government of the North-West Frontier Province in the Swabi district, said 800 families were scheduled to return to Bari Kot in Swat on Tuesday as part of the first stage.

“To be honest, people in the camps wanted to go back for a long time,” Mr. Rajwana said of the mood of the displaced people in the camps. “The government is not forcing them. The refugees have signed a declaration that they are not being forcibly returned.”

Two weeks ago, about 4,000 refugees voluntarily left the Chota Lahore camp in Swabi, he said.

Ishaq Khan, a resident of Saidu Sharif, a town in Swat, said that the military had divided the return by area, with those whose homes were closer to the camps returning first. Mr. Khan, a graphic designer, said he was scheduled to depart on Friday.

“They said it was quiet, no shooting, no violence,” he said by telephone from Rawalpindi, where he has been living since early May, citing what others who had returned on Monday were finding. Early accounts of those who returned today were cautiously good, he said, but added that he was glad that he was scheduled to return later to be able hear the experience of others first.

The camps have been shrouded in stifling summer heat, and some aid agency officials have warned that keeping them in camps longer than absolutely necessary would only breed resentment of the government.

Elsewhere, at least nine people, including seven children, were killed when a blast ripped through a house in a farming village in the southern part of Punjab Province, police officials said. At least 60 people were injured in the explosion, which occurred in the house of a member of an outlawed militant group who had stored explosives, officials said. The blast destroyed half of a village near the town of Mian Channu in the Khanewal district, residents reached by telephone said.

The police said that the house where the explosion occurred belonged to Riaz Kumboh, who, according to local residents and the police, had set up a private religious school and had hidden explosives.

He belonged to a banned militant organization, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and had received militant training from Afghanistan, a resident said.

Police officials said that Mr. Kumboh had hidden explosives in the house. What set off the blast remained unclear.

“The blast was so loud that it was heard over a distance of six miles,” Ghulam Jilani, 36, a resident of Mian Channu, said by telephone. “Half of the village is destroyed. Most of the houses were made of mud and bricks.”

Rescue teams from nearby towns headed to the village after the blast. Local television news networks broadcast images showing people rummaging through the rubble to pull out the injured.

The blast raised concerns about the ease and ability of the militants to operate quietly and unnoticed in the rural areas of southern part of Punjab. Militant groups in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, have joined forces with the Taliban in the country’s west, and have been jointly conducting attacks in major cities, a trend that has worried Pakistani authorities.

But Muhammad Aslam Bodla, an opposition politician and member of Parliament from Khanewal, said in a telephone interview that Mian Channu was a peaceful town not known for any extremist or militant activity. “The blast today is the first incident of its kind in Mian Channu,” he said.