‘Be careful! Why are you going? Can’t you avoid it? I still see on the TV and read that everything is not normal in Swat!’ a friend sent a message on BBM when he learnt I was going to Swat. Similar messages were in-boxed to me and other journalists who were taken on a four-day trip to the valley to see for ourselves and then report what we saw and whether it was safe to be put back on the radar of the hospitality industry.

But we were not the only ones to have braved the trip. There were quite a few who had ventured to Swat. In Miandam, a family from Lahore was already there. “My husband was very unsure but I had been calling various hotels and asking them to tell me the situation here,” said the young wife. “I’m glad we came. It’s beautiful and serene…just the way I remembered,” she said.

She couldn’t have put it better. The beautiful alpine valley with its mesmerizing sunsets and sunrises was tranquil, peaceful and at its best (with peach and pears orchards).

Once known as Udhyana or the City of Gardens, the beautiful valley of Swat is 150 km northeast of Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. With a population of 1.8 million it was best known to archeologists, historians and travel writers and tourists for the treasure trove of the Gandharan civilization, many an archaeological site, the seven emerald green lakes and trout fishing. It had earned the title ‘Switzerland of the East’ by many western travelers.

Today, many still remember it as a hotbed for the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an extremist group. Bomb blasts, mortar shelling and dead bodies displayed at crossings to drum fear into the people of Swat were a daily fare for them.

From 2006-07 peace eluded the place till finally battle lines were drawn between the insurgents and the security forces. Almost 800,000 people fled their homes as the army pounded the place in a bid to weed out the insurgents.

Today it’s a place almost as normal as any other valley in the north of Pakistan. Yet the scars remain. – Text and photos by Zofeen T. Ebrahim

Read the accompanying feature ‘Inch by inch, Swat returns to normality’ at https://www.dawn.com/2011/08/12/inch-by-inch-swat-returns-to-normality.html