Six Pakhtun tribes plan grand Jirga to settle issue of Hazara province

Six Pakhtun tribes plan grand Jirga to settle issue of Hazara province








Saturday, April 17, 2010

By By Ikram Hoti



ISLAMABAD: Elders of six Pukhtun tribes have decided to devise a united tribal platform “to defy the latest attack on the Pukhtun community in the shape of conflict created in Hazara versus the rest of the population living in Khyber-Pukhtunkhwa.”



A meeting held here on Friday with Pukhtun Aman Jirga (PAJ) Chairman Syed Kamal Shah in the chair here on Friday, it was resolved that the leaders of Hazara Sooba Tehrik (Hazara Province Movement) would be approached through a grand Jirga shortly to apprise them of the “conspiracy” hatched to pit the Hazara and the rest of provincial communities “as the establishment has been doing in the recent past.”



Kamal Shah and the elders of the platform told The News that they approached some of the tribal elders supporting the Hazara Sooba Tehrik in Islamabad to put across the fears of the Pukhtun community that it was not for a province but the initiation of a “new attack on the Pukhtun community” that a certain political group had been instigating bloody riots in Abbottabad and Haripur over the previous week.



“We told them, and we will tell other Hazara leaders through a grand Jirga that this was part of the grand conspiracy against the Pukhtun nation. In the recent past, under the Zia dictatorship and in the years that followed, Arab, Central Asian, Pukhtun and Punjabi Mujahideen were organised to perpetrate attacks on the Pukhtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan.



“These mujahideen were lately converted into Taliban that intensified the attacks on Pakhtun community. Since the governments in Islamabad and Peshawar had lately been successful in decimating the Taliban onslaught on the Pakhtun community in Swat, Bajaur, Buner, Mardan, Nowshera, Karak, Bannu, DI Khan and Waziristan, etc, a new force was hatched in the shape of miscreants in the Hazara belt in the name of new province.”