The blowback has come
On April 12, Army Chief Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa hit out at the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) in code. “Notwithstanding the genuine problems of peaceful citizens, our concern is that no anti-state agenda, in the garb of engineered protests aimed at reversing the gains achieved at heavy cost in blood and national exchequer, succeeds,” he said.
While he did not mention the PTM directly, the statement was made with reference to checkpoints and mines in the tribal areas, the resolution of which is a demand of the movement. What is the PTM, and why has Bajwa felt the need to unequivocally delegitimize an organic political campaign rooted in ethnic identity and grievances?
Only recently, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Asif Ghafoor, while raising concerns about support for the PTM from Afghanistan, described its leader Manzoor Pashteen as a “wonderful young boy,” saying authorities are trying meet the movement’s “genuine” demands.
The PTM’s origins can be traced to the extrajudicial killing of aspiring model and shopkeeper Naqeebullah Mehsud in Karachi by police in January. Branded a terrorist and then killed in cold blood, the murder galvanized the Mehsud tribe, and united young men and women from the terrorism-ravaged northern tribal areas in a protest in Islamabad in February.
While the arrest and prosecution of the police officer responsible topped the list of demands, others were included, reflecting the experience of a people who had for decades been caught in the crossfire between the military and militants.
Among these demands is producing “missing persons” before a court, clearing the tribal areas of landmines, curtailing the ethnic profiling of Pashtuns by security and law-enforcement agencies, and forming a judicial commission to investigate staged encounters by the police. Underpinning the demands is the right of Pashtuns to live with dignity.
While nationalist or identity-based political movements are not new in Pakistan, the PTM is operating in a new media-influenced world. Other nationalist movements have led to violence and bloodshed, not because they were nationalist, but because the state was unable to adequately respond or politically accommodate them.
While nationalist or identity-based political movements are not new in Pakistan, the PTM is operating in a new media-influenced world.
Amber Rahim Shamsi
Bajwa’s denouncement of the PTM as an “engineered protest” follows what appears to be a concerted campaign to either pretend it does not exist or discredit it. On April 7, as tens of thousands of protestors from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) gathered in Peshawar under the PTM’s banner, mainstream TV channels essentially blacked out the protest.
The problem, perhaps, are orders by the broadcasting regulatory authority a day prior to the protest, advising channels to refrain from broadcasting material that is “tantamount to casting aspersions against the superior judiciary and armed forces.” What equals these aspersions was not made clear in the order.
What is clear is that the critical slogans raised at various PTM protests have set alarm bells ringing. These popular slogans reflect the experiences of the people of the tribal areas, often punished or accused unjustly of terrorist acts.
Pretending that human rights violations did not occur during military operations will not address their grievances. Indeed, many leading Pashtun intellectuals have called for a truth and justice commission as a legitimate way to investigate the claims.
Leading the PTM is 26-year-old Pashteen, one of a generation of young tribal Pashtuns who have known nothing but war and its painful consequences. While the mainstream media has not covered the protest or the movement, social media has been both a boon and a bane. Protests are partly organized via social media, while Pashteen often publishes videos as an answer to his many detractors.
In his book “War in 140 Characters,” journalist David Patrikarakos argues that “social media has helped to dismantle traditional information and media hierarchies, and in so doing has given birth to a new type of hyper empowered individual, networked, globally connected, and more potent than ever before: a uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon I term “Homo digitalis.” So even as Pashteen, or Homo digitalis, asserts his and his people’s right to be heard, “the state will always fight back.”
Typically, the establishment has been resistant to decentralization, whether in the form of nationalist movements or information. Its recent diatribe against the 18th amendment — amendments to the Pakistani constitution passed in 2010, transferring certain powers from the federation to the provinces — is simply a continuation of the values that hold centralization dear. But as many have argued, the centralized 20th-century nation-state is now obsolete, in part due to the loosening of controls over communication networks.
So the state will ignore the demands of tribal Pashtuns at its peril, given how the PTM has clearly tapped into a groundswell of unaddressed grievance. History tells us that multiethnic societies cannot be homogenized. Whatever form the PTM now takes — whether it organizes into a formal political party or is driven underground — it should not be delegitimized.
— Amber Rahim Shamsi is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She has worked with the BBC World Service as a bilingual reporter, presenter and producer. She has also written research reports on women in media, and conducted workshops for working journalists and students of journalism. Twitter: @AmberRShamsi
