When Gilaman Wazir, a famous Pashtun poet known for his poetry of resistance, died in an Islamabad hospital on 11 July, news of his death sent shockwaves among tens of millions of Pashtuns across Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the global diaspora.
During his 29 years of life, Hazrat Naeem Wazir, who adopted the pen name Gilaman (Complainant), became a prominent figure in the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), which fights for Pashtun rights and against alleged abuses by the Pakistani state, including discrimination and enforced disappearances. He was also a vocal opponent of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant network.
Gilaman succumbed to injuries sustained in an attack by armed men in an Islamabad café after spending three days in a coma. For his supporters, the timing of his death fuelled long-held fears for the safety of outspoken Pashtun activists, from both the state security agencies and armed groups.
Not for the first time, activists fear growing tensions with Afghanistan’s mostly-Pashtun Taliban government and an uptick in militant attacks – often blamed on groups like the TTP – will be weaponised by the Pakistani government to marginalise and persecute Pashtun communities.
On 22 June, the Pakistani government approved Azm-e-Istehkam (Commitment for Stability), a new counter-insurgency operation aimed at addressing growing security concerns by clamping down on what it frames as extremism fostered in northwestern Pakistan and neighbouring parts of Afghanistan.
According to PTM, more than 32,000 Pashtuns have gone missing from these regions of Pakistan in the last decade as a result of past military offensives.
Gul Zada Wazir, a 46-year-old farmer, fled his North Waziristan district in 2014, when a similar offensive started.
“In the confusion of war, I lost my eldest son,” he told The New Humanitarian. “We were running for our lives and looked for him in the house, but we couldn’t find him.” Ten years later, he still doesn’t know if his son is alive or dead.
The Pakistani authorities are accused of forcefully disappearing many of the missing Pashtuns.
“As of today, there are 4,000 Pashtuns who have been forcefully disappeared by the security forces,” Alamzeb Meshud, a human rights activist from South Waziristan and one of PTM’s founding members, told The New Humanitarian. “There is no doubt about them being forcefully disappeared by the state.”
The military disputes such claims, saying the number of missing is much lower and claiming that many have gone off to join militant groups.
Haunted by memories of past campaigns
Pashtuns in the northwest, from where Gilaman hails, fear the coming military actions could further destabilise the region, leading to more deaths, displacement, and ethnic profiling.
These concerns are built on the bitterness of past experiences.
The Pakistani military conducted more than a dozen military operations in the mainly Pashtun regions between 2007 and 2017, extending from the tribal districts along the Durand Line separating Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Fazl ur Rehman Afridi, the PTM’s representative in Europe, said that over 200,000 homes and 25,000 commercial premises were destroyed in one operation alone, while all the military offensives combined displaced more than six million Pashtuns. The 2005-2013 toll has been put as high as 80,000.
Since 2017, many displaced Pahstuns have been rendered homeless as their houses were destroyed in the military offensives. Others fear going back due to the landmines that have killed or maimed hundreds of returnees.
Pashtun leaders believe economic interests also lie behind Azm-e-Istehkam, especially as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is rich in mineral resources.
“This new operation is again for resources,” Wajid Mohmand, leader of the PTM in Mardan, told The New Humanitarian. “Marble and chromite in the Pashtuns’ region are going to be exploited.”
With memories of the horrors of the former military operations fresh in their minds, Pashtuns have launched protest rallies against the new military campaign in several cities across the region.
Ethnic profiling and extrajudicial killings
Pashtuns have not only been victims of Pakistan’s military offensives, but also of state-promoted ethnic profiling.
“The state not only used direct repression but also employed its ideological apparatuses, such as radio and TV, to depict the Pashtuns as primitive, disorderly, and incapable of self-governance, which led to a very negative perception of Pashtuns,” Dervaish Afridi, a lecturer at the University of Peshawar, told The New Humanitarian.
For instance, in a popular sitcom called "Bulbulay", a Pashtun character asks Nabeel, played by the show’s producer, to receive a gift. Nabeel responds by saying, “Iska gift kya hoga? Ya naswar ya bomb!" (What could his gift be? Either naswar (chewing tobacco) or a bomb!). This portrayal sparked outrage among Pashtuns, leading to the trend #BoycottARY on social media and was even raised with concern in Pakistan’s National Assembly.
But anti-Pashtun stigmatisation is widespread in Pakistan: Many other Pakistani films have portrayed Pashtuns in a very negative light, and in the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, it is common for Pashtuns to experience verbal abuse and mistreatment due to their ethnicity.
“When I go to Sargodha, Punjab, I feel like I am in a strange land,” Nizar Khan, a 30-year-old Pashtun labourer from Swabi, told The New Humanitarian. “I hear people calling me different names and using racial slurs. I feel enraged, but I stay silent because I fear losing my job.”
Khan said he is often on the receiving end of derogatory terms like “uncivilised” and “terrorist”.
In a particularly egregious example in 2017, the Punjab police began surveilling Pashtuns from the tribal areas and considered issuing them chip-based national identity cards with security features. People were also instructed to watch out for "suspicious" individuals who appeared to be Pashtuns. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan was outraged by this action and condemned it.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly made highly insensitive comments about Pashtuns.
In one disparaging comment, Munir Akram, Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN claimed that the reason the Afghan Taliban – a majority Pashtun group – restricted women’s education beyond the sixth grade and their right to work was due to Pashtun culture.
These remarks outraged Pashtuns, prompting him to apologise later.
Gul Pasand, a close friend of Gilaman and a member of PTM’s central committee, told The New Humanitarian that Pakistan has become a living hell for rights activists, and for Pashtun rights activists in particular.
“It’s a cruel state that stands upon the foundations of tyranny,” he said. “Whoever talks about injustice and rights is kept in jail, and those who spread terror and are involved in acts of terrorism are the state's allies and roam freely.”
For Pashtuns, the worst fears are the extrajudicial killings they say are still being carried out with impunity by Pakistan’s state security forces.
Naqeebullah Mehsud, a 27-year-old Pashtun youth from South Waziristan, was killed by the Karachi police in January 2018 after being arrested along with two others on unfounded charges of terrorism. The others were released, but Mehsud was kept in prison, tortured, and later shot alongside three others. The police said he was killed in a raid – an example of the “fake encounters” that rights activists say are routinely set up by Pakistani police to commit extrajudicial killings against Pashtuns and others.
The PTM staged countrywide protests demanding justice for the dead. A year later, the Pakistani anti-terrorism court declared that Mehsud and the other three victims were all innocent.
"Thousands of Pashtuns have been killed extrajudicially. However, obtaining the exact number is difficult,” said the PTM’s Alamzeb. “We attempted to collect the data, but there were too many cases, and the families found it challenging to provide details because of safety concerns."
Edited by Andrew Gully and Ali M. Latifi.
