Focus on peasant protest

Thousands of Pakistani peasants in Punjab Province have locked horns with the military authorities over a land dispute which has caused the deaths of at least five people and injured a dozen more over the last two months, farmers and officials told IRIN. The dispute, smouldering for close to a year in some of the military controlled agricultural farms of the province - the country's bread-basket - has now escalated into an open confrontation between the tenant farmers and government authorities. The farmers' representatives say in Pakistan, whether tenants or owners, the community is already under stress for a number of reasons and forms the bulk of growing number of poor people in the country. "There is no question that we have asked them to do anything forcibly," army Brig Ahsan Tiwana told IRIN in the small town of Okara, 350 km south of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. "But we cannot accept creation of a law-and-order situation." Tiwana was commenting on the refusal by thousands of farmers to give up their status as tenants and accepting a lease renewable after seven years. The proposed change, first offered in June 2000, has stirred hostility, with peasants now demanding ownership of the land they have farmed for close to a century. "If they want property rights, they can go to the parliament or the courts," Tiwana said. "But this is not acceptable that men and women, armed with clubs and sticks, gather against the authorities." But peasant farmers, outraged at the latest shooting incident over the weekend in which one person was killed and five wounded, told IRIN that it was their right to demand ownership after having tilled the land since 1908 and giving half their produce to the military each year. However, as a protest against the proposed changes, the farmers have not handed over half their produce since August 2001. They also complained that many spurious cases had been registered against them in the police stations, and many village leaders were now on the run to avoid arrest. "They have filed nine cases against me and all of them are false," Abdul Sattar, a farmers' representative, told IRIN by telephone from an unknown location. "I am afraid for my life," he added. Meanwhile, the authorities denied all accusations of harassment. "Our demand is that we be given this land on cash payment, though on easily payable instalments," an agitated farmer, Ghulam Husayn told IRIN in a village near Okara. "If we are not Pakistanis, they can load all of us in a plane and bomb it and keep their land," he asserted. "But if we are Pakistanis, then we have a right to live freely and honourably." Husayn was one of the scores of farmers who say that the dispute was created by the change in the policy introduced in June 2000 by the management of military controlled farms. They said four farmers had been killed in similar incidents in the last two months on various farms in the province. "We were happily giving them half of the produce as per the terms of the tenantship," Muhammad Salim, another farmer, told IRIN. Tenantship gives certain rights to the farmers, which in a lease agreement they lose. "But when they asked us to lease the land we became suspicious that they can evict us anytime, saying we have breached the contract." Suspicion and mistrust on both sides have rendered negotiations difficult and their respective positions uncompromising. The authorities believe that some political groups and vested interests are preventing the farmers from reaching an understanding with the government. Tiwana and other government officials said the military had no intention of evicting any farmer, stressing that in fact the new agreement contained a clause ensuring that farmers' next of kin could remain on the farms. The military farm management was also prepared to grant ownership rights of the houses they lived in, even though they were on the government land. Khalid Masud Chaudhry, the top civil administrator of Okara district, told IRIN that almost half the farmers had agreed to sign the lease, and several hundred had already done so. But there were also quite a substantial number of peasants who had refused. "Now the problem is that of perception," he said, explaining many farmers agreed that the new terms gave them more autonomy in choosing crops and keeping the produce for themselves or selling in the market. But some farmers were saying that they would have to pay rent even if there was a crop failure, and this could render them liable to eviction. "They actually want to evict us... These lands are needed for the generals," Salim said. However, Tiwana flatly rejected this assertion, saying that the farms were crucial in providing the military with dairy products all across the country and that was why the farms could not be sold to anyone. "This land houses Asia's largest water-buffalo farm... It's a national asset," Tiwana said. Farooq Tariq, the secretary-general of the Pakistan Labour Party, told IRIN that this was not merely a dispute between the farmers of the Okara military farms and the authorities. "It is a mass movement of the peasantry." Speaking in his office in Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, he remained convinced that the farmers' rejection of the new terms and their refusal to hand over half their produce was tantamount to a rebellion. "Its a revolt, what else is a revolt?" Tariq stated. Some government officials privately acknowledge that by yielding to these farmers, a wrong precedent will be set, and other peasants across the country will start making similar claims. Indeed, Tariq said, the government was afraid that it could snowball into tenants of private lands demanding ownership rights as well. Kissan Board, a private group advocating for the welfare of farmers, says the living standards of the rural masses have been declining over the years as poverty increasingly gripped the country. "This profession [farming] has become a business of loss," said Sadiq Khan Khakwani, the chairman of the Board, who is trying to mediate between the military authorities and the farmers, adding that the farming community had traditionally suffered at the hands of police, big landlords, district administration and the middlemen. "Their self-respect is injured," he told IRIN. These difficulties were forcing millions of people to leave their villages for big cities in search of jobs, education and better health facilities. According to the Karachi-based Social Policy Development Centre, 2.5 million people were migrating to cities each year. Tariq said average farm income had declined to US $10 per month per person from double that in the 1980s. "This is mainly due to the imposition of a general sales tax on all crop inputs, and falling prices of cotton, sugar cane and wheat in the international market," he noted.