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| April 20, 2007 | Friday | Rabi-us-Sani 02, 1428 |
Bilour may quit as chief of PA committee
PESHAWAR, April 19: The parliamentary leader of the Awami National Party in the NWFP Assembly, Bashir Ahmed Bilour, is likely to resign as chairman of the Standing Committee on Home and Tribal Affairs in protest against the deteriorating law and order situation and increasing trend of Talibanisation in the province.
Party sources said he would hand over his resignation to the assembly’s speaker in a few days.
The lawmaker had threatened to resign if the provincial government failed to arrest those involved in bomb blasts in Peshawar, particularly an explosion in the cantonment which left ANP’s provincial information secretary Syed Aqil Shah injured.
Mr Bilour said he had not taken a final decision but was mulling over the option of quitting the house committee as the government had failed to maintain the writ of the law in the province and given a free hand to religious groups to implement their own brand of sharia, including running illegal FM channels, threatening barbers and music shops and issuing letters to school administrations in settled areas.
He said that as chairman of the committee he had requested the federal government to send back to the NWFP 300 platoons of the Frontier Constabulary serving in different parts of the country, keeping in view the shortage of law-enforcement agencies personnel in the province and tribal areas but only 20 platoons were sent back.
He said he had requested the federal government to extend the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority law to the Federally and Provincially Administered Tribal Areas to close the illegal FM radio channels.
He said extremists and local Taliban were strengthening their grip on the province and Tank, Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Dir, Swat and other areas adjacent to the tribal belt had turned into safe havens for them.
He said Peshawar, Mardan, Nowshera, Charsadda and Swabi were also not safe from the increasing influence and pressure of the fundamentalist forces. Schools, particularly those for girls, were on the hit list of the extremist forces to discourage modern education and compel the students to join jihad training. Frequent bomb blasts and suicide attacks in the province, particularly Peshawar, had not only taken precious lives but also caused unending fear, panic and insecurity among citizens.
He said that on one hand Talibanisation was strengthening its roots in the whole province, on the other the government was losing its writ before the religious extremists. Yet, it was not adopting any concrete and effective measures to improve the deteriorating law and order situation and stop the Talibanisation.
It seemed that the government was intentionally encouraging the law-breakers and pushing the province towards Talibanisation. Clergymen belonging to banned religious organisations in the north of the province were provoking the masses against the government through their illegal FM channels, while in the south the extremists were removing electronic devices and tape-recorders from vehicles by force in the presence of law-enforcement agencies’ personnel, he said.
The land mafia was occupying graveyards and vacant property of people in the urban areas and the provincial government was not acting on such issues, he said.
Moreover, kidnapping of citizens for ransom was a routine in the settled areas and the government was not taking strict measures to protect the law-abiding people, he said.
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