NGOs concerned about rising insecurity

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) working in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) have expressed strong concern over their ability to remain fully operational amid growing insecurity in the country.

“As NGOs we are very much soft targets,” Babar Aziz, deputy director of operations for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), told IRIN in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital.

While it appeared that the government and military were the primary targets in the latest spate of violence following the storming of Islamabad’s Red Mosque earlier in July, NGOs are also taking precautions but feel limited in what they can do, Aziz said. He added that they were closely monitoring the situation.

In NWFP, the IRC has a long history of working with Afghan refugees in the provincial capital Peshawar, as well as in the nearby towns of Kohat and Hangu. The NGO remains fully operational, but with a spate of violent attacks recently, that could well change.

Red Mosque siege

Close to 300 people were killed after security forces stormed Islamabad’s Red Mosque, whose religious scholars and students had been staging an aggressive campaign to enforce sharia law in the capital.

The battle for the mosque and its adjacent Islamic school ended on 11 July after a bloody week-long siege.

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A few days later on 17 July, a suicide bomber in the capital killed 16 people at a rally for Pakistan’s recently reinstated chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry. Chaudhry’s legal battle against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf - who suspended him from office in March, contributing to the country’s growing political instability - ended on 20 July following a decisive Supreme Court ruling.

Adding to the tension, on 19 July at least 52 people were killed in three separate incidents of suicide attacks, bombings and shootings blamed on Islamic extremists. In Hangu, a suicide car bomber blew himself up outside the gates of the town’s police college, killing at least seven people.

“The growing sense of insecurity in the country is affecting everyone and NGOs are part of it,” said Nishat Riaz, senior communications manager for Green Star Social Marketing, the largest reproductive and family planning NGO in the country. “Our operations in Peshawar are now closed. We are not providing any health services for the time being because of the security threats we have received.”

Death threats

Such action - including the closure of their sub-offices in Mingora, Swat and Dera Ismail Khan in NWFP - could well prove prudent, considering the direct threat the NGO has received.

On 18 July, the NGO’s Peshawar branch received a handwritten note attached to a toy bomb, saying: “Wind up your office within seven days from now, otherwise it will be destroyed.” The letter added: “You are doing all this at the behest of the US and Israel in order to eliminate our race through family planning.”

It’s not about NGOs or the issue of family planning. It’s the overall perception of NGOs working for or under the support of the international community.

Pakistan’s federal government has asked national and international NGOs working in quake-hit districts of NWFP to limit their field activities and adopt extra security measures in view of the situation, Pakistan’s English-language Dawn newspaper reported.

“It’s not about NGOs or the issue of family planning. It’s the overall perception of NGOs working for or under the support of the international community,” Riaz said about why extremists would target them.

Michael McGrath, country director for Save the Children, operating in NWFP, said that apart from their work in the province’s quake-affected Batagram district, the NGO’s activities had been unaffected.

“In common with all other NGOs and UN agencies, we have temporarily withdrawn our staff from Batagram district,” McGrath said, stressing that they were in constant discussions with the authorities over a speedy return.

On 10 July, a mob inflicted heavy damage on the compound of the French Red Cross and Care International in Batagram sub-district, after two bodies were brought back for burial from the Red Mosque incident in Islamabad. On 12 July, in Batagram’s Allai sub-district, the offices of several other relief organisations were also attacked.

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