outside an old man was selling popcorn. He was a Pashtun like us, and when my father asked if he was from Islamabad he replied, ‘Do you think Islamabad can ever belong to us Pashtuns?’ He said he came from Mohmand, one of the tribal areas, but had to flee because of a military operation. I saw tears in my parents’ eyes.
Lots of buildings were surrounded by concrete blocks, and there were checkpoints for incoming vehicles to guard against suicide bombs. When our bus hit a pothole on the way back my brother Khushal, who had been asleep, jerked awake. ‘Was that a bomb blast?’ he asked. This was the fear that filled our daily lives. Any small disturbance or noise could be a bomb or gunfire.
On our short trips we forgot our troubles in Swat. But we returned to the threats and danger as we entered our valley once again. Even so, Swat was our home and we were not ready to leave it.
Back in Mingora the first thing I saw when I opened my wardrobe was my uniform, school bag and geometry set. I felt so sad. The visit to Islamabad had been a lovely break, but this was my reality now.
14
A Funny Kind of Peace
WHEN MY BROTHERS’ schools reopened after the winter break, Khushal said he would rather stay at home like me. I was cross. ‘You don’t realise how lucky you are!’ I told him. It felt strange to have no school. We didn’t even have a television set as someone had stolen ours while we were in Islamabad, using my father’s ‘getaway’ ladder to get inside.
Someone gave me a copy of
What I didn’t know was that Hai Kakar was holding secret talks with Fazlullah and his commanders. He had got to know them in interviews, and was urging them to rethink their ban on girls’ education.
‘Listen, Maulana,’ he told Fazlullah. ‘You killed people, you slaughtered people, you beheaded people, you destroyed schools and still there was no protest in Pakistan. But when you banned girls’ education people spoke out. Even the Pakistan media, which has been so soft on you till now, is outraged.’
The pressure from the whole country worked, and Fazlullah agreed to lift the ban for girls up to ten years old – Year 4. I was in Year 5 and some of us pretended we were younger than we were. We started going to school again, dressed in ordinary clothes and hiding our books under our shawls. It was risky but it was the only ambition I had back then. We were lucky too that Madam Maryam was brave and resisted the pressure to stop working. She had known my father since she was ten and they trusted each other completely – she used to signal to him to wind up when he spoke for too long, which was often!
‘The secret school is our silent protest,’ she told us.
I didn’t write anything about it in my diary. If they had caught us they would have flogged or even slaughtered us as they had Shabana. Some people are afraid of ghosts, some of spiders or snakes – in those days we were afraid of our fellow human beings.
On the way to school I sometimes saw the Taliban with their caps and long dirty hair. Most of the time they hid their faces. They were awkward, horrible-looking. The streets of Mingora were very empty as a third of the inhabitants had left the valley. My father said you couldn’t really blame people for leaving as the government had no power. There were now 12,000 army troops in the region – four times as many as their estimates of the Taliban – along with tanks, helicopters and sophisticated weapons. Yet seventy per cent of Swat was under Taliban control.
About a week after we had returned to school, on 16 February 2009, we were woken one night by the sound of gunfire. Our people traditionally fire rifles in celebration of births and weddings but even that had stopped during the conflict. So at first we thought we were in danger. Then we heard the news. The gunfire was in celebration. A peace deal had been struck between the Taliban and the provincial government, which was now under the control of the ANP, not the mullahs. The government had agreed to impose sharia law throughout Swat and in return the militants would stop fighting. The Taliban agreed to a ten-day truce and, as a peace gesture, released a Chinese telephone engineer who they had kidnapped six months before.
We were happy too – my father and I had often spoken in favour of a peace deal – but we questioned how it would work. People hoped that the Taliban would settle down, go back to their homes and live as peaceful citizens. They convinced themselves that the
And it was hard to believe it was all over! More than a thousand ordinary people and police had been killed. Women had been kept in purdah, schools and bridges had been blown up, businesses had closed. We had suffered barbaric public courts and violent justice and had lived in a constant state of fear. And now it was all to stop.
At breakfast I suggested to my brothers that we should talk of peace now and not of war. As ever, they ignored me and carried on with their war games. Khushal had a toy helicopter and Atal a pistol made of paper, and one would shout, ‘Fire!’ and the other, ‘Take position.’ I didn’t care. I went and looked at my uniform, happy that I would soon be able to wear it openly. A message came from our headmistress that exams would take place in the first week of March. It was time to get back to my books.
Our excitement did not last long. Just two days later I was on the roof of the Taj Mahal Hotel giving an interview about the peace deal to a well-known reporter called Hamid Mir when we got the news that another TV reporter we knew had been killed. His name was Musa Khan Khel, and he had often interviewed my father. That day he had been covering a peace march led by Sufi Mohammad. It wasn’t really a march but a cavalcade of cars. Afterwards Musa Khan’s body was found nearby. He had been shot several times and his throat partly slit. He was twenty-eight years old.
My mother was so upset when we told her that she went to bed in tears. She was worried that violence had returned to the valley so soon after the peace deal. Was the deal merely an illusion? she wondered.
A few days later, on 22 February, a ‘permanent ceasefire’ was announced by Deputy Commissioner Syed Javid at the Swat Press Club in Mingora. He appealed to all Swatis to return. The Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan then confirmed they had agreed an indefinite ceasefire. President Zardari would sign the peace deal into law. The government also agreed to pay compensation to the families of victims.
Everyone in Swat was jubilant, but I felt the happiest because it meant school would reopen properly. The Taliban said girls could go to school after the peace agreement but they should be veiled and covered. We said OK, if that’s what you want, as long as we can live our lives.
Not everyone was happy about the deal. Our American allies were furious. ‘I think the Pakistan government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists,’ said Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State. The Americans were worried the deal meant surrender. The Pakistani newspaper
But none of those people had to live here. We needed peace whoever brought it. In our case it happened to be a white-bearded militant called Sufi Mohammad. He made a ‘peace camp’ in Dir and sat there in our famous mosque, Tabligh Markaz, like the master of our land. He was the guarantor that the Taliban would lay down their arms and there would be peace in the valley. People visited him to pay homage and kiss his hand because they were tired of war and suicide bombings.
In March I stopped writing my blog as Hai Kakar thought there was not much more to say. But to our horror things didn’t change much. If anything the Taliban became even more barbaric. They were now state-sanctioned terrorists. We were disillusioned and disappointed. The peace deal was merely a mirage. One night the Taliban held what we call a flag march near our street and patrolled the roads with guns and sticks as if they were the army.
