Why is Pakistan’s military repressing a huge, nonviolent Pashtun protest movement?

Madiha Afzal

On January 27, a man named Manzoor Pashteen was arrested in the middle of the night in Peshawar. He faced five charges, including sedition, criminal conspiracy, attacking Pakistan’s sovereignty, and promoting ethnic hatred. Pashteen is the young leader of the Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement, or the PTM: a non-violent protest movement demanding rights for Pashtuns in Pakistan’s former Federally Administered Tribal Areas.


Days after Pashteen’s arrest, PTM activists — elderly women among them — protesting for his release in front of the press club in Islamabad were arrested and also charged with sedition. Those activists were released on bail after a few days, but Pashteen remains under arrest.

The coverage of his two-year-old movement is censored in Pakistan. Newspapers and TV outlets are not allowed to report on the huge rallies the movement holds — with attendees numbering in the tens of thousands — or to air the movement’s demands. In a state that has routinely negotiated with right-wing Islamists who take to the streets, why have the PTM’s members been repeatedly arrested, and why does this movement of dissenters present such a challenge to its military?

THE MOVEMENT AND ITS DEMANDS

The movement alleges grave human rights violations by Pakistan’s military against Pashtuns in the country’s northwest. It says that Pashtuns have been the target of violence at the hands of both the Taliban and the Pakistani military for two decades. The movement claims that the military has killed innocent civilians in its operations against the Pakistani Taliban, and that it needs to answer for “missing persons.” It also contends that Pashtuns are regularly harassed at checkpoints and treated with suspicion, and that landmines continue to make their lives insecure.

These complaints festered for years before the movement was officially created in 2018. In 2015, while conducting interviews for my book, I met Pashtun students in Lahore who told me that the army’s ongoing, multi-year military operation — Zarb-e-Azb — was not what it seemed from outside the tribal areas.

The PTM demands a truth and reconciliation commission to address claims of extrajudicial killings and missing persons. The movement also claims that the military supported Pakistani Taliban (also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) militants, and its leaders have said — most explosively — that after the military claims to have decimated the Pakistani Taliban in Zarb-e-Azb, “the Taliban are being allowed to return” to the tribal areas in a “secret deal with the military.” One of its slogans translates to: “This terrorism— behind it is the uniform.”The military categorically rejects these claims, arguing that the movement is dangerous and that its rhetoric threatens Pakistan’s constitution. PTM leaders argue, in turn, that they are only asking for their constitutional rights. Two of the PTM’s leaders, Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar, were elected parliamentarians in the July 2018 election that also brought Prime Minister Imran Khan to power, giving the movement some parliamentary representation. Yet last May, after a protest turned violent (the PTM claims soldiers shot unarmed protesters; the state claims the protesters shot first), Dawar and Wazir were arrested and spent four months under detention.

FACT-CHECKING THE PTM’S CLAIMS

While sources have corroborated some of the PTM’s claims regarding missing persons and civilian deaths at the hands of the military, the assertion that Taliban militants are being allowed to return to these areas — some carrying weapons — remains mostly uncorroborated. This is in large part due to the fact that army has a kept a chokehold on the tribal areas, shuttling in journalists and officials for sanitized tours of the region. The army does not allow anyone except locals free rein to see for themselves the full effects of its kinetic operations against the Pakistan Taliban.

While the number of TTP attacks has fallen dramatically — lending credence to the military’s story — and the military has lost thousands of soldiers in operations against the Pakistani Taliban, some reports do claim that members of the TTP have been given amnesty in return for sharing intelligence, and allowed to return to the area. But these are sporadic accounts, largely due to the lack of access that the military provides to these areas. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/02/07/why-is-pakistans-military-repressing-a-huge-nonviolent-pashtun-protest-movement/