Swat valley schools prepare to close doors to girl students

Publish Date: Saturday,27 December, 2008, at 01:22 AM Doha Time

ISLAMABAD: The future of 40,000 girls in the Swat valley is at stake following a Taliban ban on schooling for girls.

Shah Duran, the deputy of Swat-based Taliban cleric Fazlullah, this week warned the administrations of government and private educational institutions not to enrol girls in schools.
The Taliban also issued a deadline of January 15, 2009 for the ban to be implemented, following which they said they would bomb the buildings of schools allowing girls to study.
The Taliban have blown up more than 100 girls’ schools in Swat in the past 14 months.

Locals say they are helpless and have no option but to accede to the Taliban’s pressure as the government has failed to provide securuty.
“This is terrible,” the principal of a private school in Mingora said.

He said the Taliban decision had proved that the government had lost its writ in the valley. “This is a question of the future of our children. The Taliban decision will throw more than 40,000 girls out of schools,” he said.
He said the school owners in Swat district were planning to convene a meeting and form a committee with the help of elders to have dialogue with the Taliban.

The announcement has stamped the statement of the ruling Awami National Party Senator Muhamad Adeel who had told a seminar in Peshawar a fortnight ago that the government had lost control over Swat.

A social worker said people had already started migrating from Swat following threats by the Taliban. “Things are changing dramatically. We cannot say anything because the people and the whole government is helpless before these armed people,” he said.
The man said his three daughters were studying at an English medium school. He had no other option but to shift his family to some other area to educate his children, he added.

Schools are the most vulnerable target since the beginning of trouble in Swat. According to figures provided by a Swat-based non-government organisation, Pakistan Coalition for Education, Taliban have destroyed over 100 of the 490 primary schools for girls in Swat so far.
The destruction of schools and recent threats to teachers and students have forced over 50,000 girls out of schools, the PCE figures said.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday condemned a ban on female education by Taliban extremists in troubled northwestern Pakistan, calling it un-Islamic and a way to oppress the area’s Pashtuns. A Taliban commander in Pakistan’s Swat valley has banned girls from attending school, this week threatening to kill any female students who went to class after January 15, local officials said.

Karzai called the move “un-Islamic and inhuman”, saying in a statement that Afghanistan had experienced similar “terrorist” threats against education in the south, an area where Taliban insurgents have strong influence.
“Based on Islamic responsibility and humanity for our Pashtun brothers and sisters, we condemn every step which causes this large tribe backwardness and misfortune,” he said. “These kinds of elements, through releasing such statements, want to deprive Pashtun children of education so that they will always be needy.”

Karzai is a member of Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority. The powerful tribe also dominates Pakistan’s western border area where the Taliban, also mostly ethnic Pashtuns, operate.

Education has suffered badly in Swat as a result of the ongoing fighting between Taliban-linked militants and security forces, with only a handful of schools still open in the region’s main city Mingora.

The region has been turned into a battleground since radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah, who has links to Pakistan’s Taliban movement, in 2007 launched a violent campaign for the introduction of Islamic Sharia law in the valley.

Rockets fired by Taliban militants yesterday killed one girl and injured nine people including two paramilitary soldiers in a restive northwestern tribal region bordering Afghanistan, an official said.

The rockets fired in Bajaur district hit a paramilitary post. One blew up on a road nearby, killing the girl and injuring seven civilians, local official Israr Khan said.

–Agencies