PESHAWAR - Awami National Party-Wali Secretary Information for Fata Gul Nawaz Khan alleged that the Fata Secretariat and certain politicians were opposing the merger of tribal areas with Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa for the sake of their vested interests.

Terming it unfortunate for the tribesmen, he said that the tribal people were being treated as second class citizens even in the 21st century. Merging Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) with the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KP) meant that the tribesmen wanted to be Pakistani having all sort of rights and incentives that people of other parts of the country enjoy presently, he said while talking to media persons on Saturday.

In the light of Fata Reforms Committee’s report, majority of tribal people want integration with KP, he said, adding that the tribesmen were united behind the demand to be brought into the national mainstream.

We want Fata’s merger with the KP, where majority of the tribesmen have already been living since long, he said. Unfortunately, certain hidden-hands, a powerful lobby, Fata Secretariat and a few politicians, who have even no roots in Fata, are against the merger, he said.

The ANP-Wali Secretary Information for Fata further said that it meant that they were not in a position to decide their fate and those who have this authority actually did not want this to happen. Rejecting the proposed Rewaj Act, he said that there would be no difference between the proposed Rewaj Act and the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR). He said that the proposed Rewaj Act was not feasible as each tribal agency had different customs and traditions than other agencies.

He questioned that what did the Rewaj Act meant. We never asked for such an act, he said, adding that they had the only demand that the laws in action in other parts of the country should also be extended to Fata.  The injustice, he said, did not stop here, because in the national censes, tribesmen of three tehsils, Safi, Khuizai and Baizai of Mohmand Agency, had been registered in other parts of the country, as they were living there as temporarily displaced persons (TDPs). Their registration in censes as residents of other areas would benefit other areas, not Mohmand Agency. The law and order situation, he said, was not as good as it should be due to which people of the above-mentioned areas were still living in downtowns.

Moreover, he informed that rest of Pakistan was enjoying PTCL, mobile and internet services. But unfortunately the same services were not working for the last four months in Mohmand Agency, adding that the people had taken up the issue with the concerned quarters, but to no avail.

He further said that Warsak and Mohmand dams were situated in Mohamd Agency and fully operational; however the residents of Mohmand Agency were facing more than 20 hours long power-outages. There is no university or medical college in the whole of Fata, and the few schools, colleges and dispensaries that existed there had also been bombed by militants, he deplored.

The ANP-Wali leader said that peace is linked with development which comes by launching projects. But again Fata, where peace is comparatively too much essential, has been totally ignored in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) initiative, as all such fortune-changing projects had been diverted to Punjab, where there is too much peace than rest of the country. 

He alleged that natural and mineral resources, forests, timber, marbles and precious stones were being looted with both hands as deforestation and illegal mining was rampant without any check in Mohmand Agency. He asked the government to take note of the issue to stop such unlawful acts; otherwise it would have a severe impact on environment in future.