ISLAMABAD, Jan 16: A broad spectrum of the country's civil society has denounced the Swat Taliban's violent acts targeting girls schools and women's freedoms as “unIslamic, barbaric and inhuman”.

“We remind Mullah Fazlullah and his Taliban that the first word in the Holy Quran is Iqra and it is not confined to men only. A Hadith too enjoins upon all Muslims, regardless of their gender, to seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave,” said a joint statement issued by organisations of human rights activists, lawyers, teachers and concerned citizens here on Friday.

It said that by blowing up girls schools, and barring women from market places, the Swat Taliban deprived thousands of female teachers and male shopkeepers of their livelihoods.

“We strongly condemn and protest against Mullah Fazlullah forcing factory owners in Swat to sack all their women workers, who were the sole breadearner in the family,”

The organisations expressed outrage at the Taliban brutally killing a young woman and dragging her body to make a public spectacle and at the traders’ submission to Taliban's order to ban women from a cloth market in Mingora.

“There is total absence of law and order, police, courts and district administration. We condemn the ‘instant justice and punishment’ that the Taliban deliver.

“We strongly protest against the professed helplessness, criminal silence and indifference of the Pakhtunkhwa ANP Government and the federal PPP Government. We condemn the total absence of the writ of the State, despite prolonged and ongoing military operations against extremist militancy in Swat and FATA. We also condemn these operations for their negative results, due to he Government and military's appeasement policy and a lack of political will and resolve,” the statement said.

The civil society organisations also denounced religio-political parties for their “deafening silence” over the atrocities being committed in the name of Islam.

They said that loss of life and livelihoods in Swat have reached gigantic proportions but neither the military nor the Taliban permit electronic media coverage.

“There is thus an eerie silence on the killing fields of Swat, and the ruling ANP Government of the so-called secular, progressive party of Bacha Khan is enacting Shariah laws and declaring that once Shariah is enforced in Swat, as it has been in the rest of Malakand, there will be peace and tranquillity.”