Fata lawyers term AI report on human rights abuses accurate

The Fata Lawyers Forum (FLF) on Sunday said that the Amnesty International (AI) report on the human rights abuses in the tribal areas of Pakistan was accurate and based on facts. The FLF General Secretary Samiullah Afridi told The News that the report titled “The Hands of Cruelty - Abuses by Armed Forces and Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas” was a good piece on the events taking place in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). He said the militants were engaged in killing of tribal people and destroying their houses and also abductions for ransom. The security forces, he said, during operations also destroy houses and detain thousands tribesmen for years. Such detentions, he argued were unlawful and done on basis of suspicion. He complained that human rights of the tribesmen had been trampled by both the militants and security forces as neither the military rulers nor civilian governments had given them fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. “They are being treated inhumanly under the Frontier Crimes Regulation 1901,” he added. In the Amnesty International (AI) report issued on December 13, it was stated that millions are locked in perpetual lawlessness in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal areas where human rights abuses committed by the armed forces and the Taliban are beyond the reach of justice. The report stated that thousands of men and boys have been detained by the Armed Forces and many have alleged torture, are held in secret places of detention and never seen again. It added that investigations into such cases are extremely rare and ineffective even when they do take place. “After a decade of violence, strife and conflict, tribal communities are still being subjected to attack, abduction and intimidation, rather than being protected,” Polly Truscott, Amnesty International’s Deputy Asia Pacific Director was quoted as saying in the report. It said that human rights safeguarded under the Pakistan’s Constitution and the courts were excluded from the tribal areas, where the Armed Forces were using new broad security laws and a harsh colonial-era penal system to commit violations with impunity. The report stated that Taliban and other armed groups continue to pose a deadly threat to Pakistani society as thousands have been killed in indiscriminate attacks or those deliberately targeting civilians over the last decade. “The Taliban and other armed groups are also carrying out brutal, unlawful killings of captured Armed Forces personnel or suspected spies, sometimes following quasi-judicial proceedings that fail to meet even the most basic international fair trial standards,” said the report. The report is based on interviews with scores of victims of human rights abuses, witnesses, relatives, lawyers, and representatives of the Pakistani authorities and armed groups in the region. It said that although the Pakistan armed forces have wrested back control of most parts of the tribal areas from the Taliban over the past three years, they have arbitrarily detained thousands of individuals for long periods with little or no access to due process of justice.