They were still patrolling the Cheena Bazaar. One day my mother went shopping with my cousin as she was getting married and wanted to buy things for her wedding. A
We also heard that Taliban had attacked a shopkeeper because an unaccompanied woman was looking at the lipsticks in his beauty shop. ‘There is a banner in the market saying women are not allowed to be in your shop unaccompanied by a male relative and you have defied us,’ they said. He was badly beaten and nobody helped him.
One day I saw my father and his friends watching a video on his phone. It was a shocking scene. A teenage girl wearing a black burqa and red trousers was lying face down on the ground being flogged in broad daylight by a bearded man in a black turban. ‘Please stop it!’ she begged in Pashto in between screams and whimpers as each blow was delivered. ‘In the name of Allah, I am dying!’
You could hear the Taliban shouting, ‘Hold her down. Hold her hands down.’ At one point during the flogging her burqa slips and they stop for a moment to adjust it then carry on beating her. They hit her thirty-four times. A crowd had gathered but did nothing. One of the woman’s relatives even volunteered to help hold her down.
A few days later the video was everywhere. A woman film-maker in Islamabad got hold of it and it was shown on Pakistan TV over and over, and then round the world. People were rightly outraged, but this reaction seemed odd to us as it showed they had no idea of the awful things going on in our valley. I wished their outrage extended to the Taliban’s banning of girls’ education. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani called for an inquiry and made a statement saying the flogging of the girl was against the teachings of Islam. ‘Islam teaches us to treat women politely,’ he said.
Some people even claimed the video was fake. Others said that the flogging had taken place in January, before the peace deal, and had been released now to sabotage it. But Muslim Khan confirmed it was genuine. ‘She came out of her house with a man who was not her husband so we had to punish her,’ he said. ‘Some boundaries cannot be crossed.’
Around the same time in early April another well-known journalist called Zahid Hussain came to Swat. He went to visit the DC at his official residence and found him hosting what appeared to be a celebration of the Taliban takeover. There were several senior Taliban commanders with armed escorts including Muslim Khan and even Faqir Mohammad, the leader of the militants in Bajaur, who were in the middle of a bloody fight with the army. Faqir had a $200,000 bounty on his head yet there he was sitting in a government official’s house having dinner. We also heard that an army brigadier went to prayers led by Fazlullah.
‘There cannot be two swords in one sheath,’ said one of my father’s friends. ‘There cannot be two kings in one land. Who is in charge here – the government or Fazlullah?’
But we still believed in peace. Everyone was looking forward to a big outdoor public meeting on 20 April when Sufi Mohammad would address the people of Swat.
We were all at home that morning. My father and brothers were standing outside when a group of teenage Taliban went past playing victory songs on their mobiles. ‘Oh look at them,
It was a perfect spring day. Everyone was excited because they hoped Sufi Mohammad would proclaim peace and victory and ask the Taliban to lay down their arms. My father didn’t attend the gathering. He watched it from the roof of Sarosh Academy, the school run by his friend Ahmad Shah where he and other activists often gathered in the evenings. The roof overlooked the stage so some media had set up their cameras there.
There was a huge crowd – between 30,000 and 40,000 people – wearing turbans and singing Taliban and jihadi songs. ‘It was complete Talibanisation humming,’ said my father. Liberal progressives like him did not enjoy the singing and chanting. They thought it was toxic, especially at times like this.
Sufi Mohammad was sitting on the stage with a long queue of people waiting to pay homage. The meeting started with recitations from the Chapter of Victory – a
Then it was Sufi Mohammad’s turn. He was not a good speaker. He was very old and seemed in poor health and rambled on for forty-five minutes. He said totally unexpected things as if he had someone else’s tongue in his mouth. He described Pakistan’s courts as un-Islamic and said, ‘I consider Western democracy a system imposed on us by the infidels. Islam does not allow democracy or elections.’
Sufi Mohammad said nothing about education. He didn’t tell the Taliban to lay down their arms and leave the
We were shocked. It was like when you pour water onto a blazing fire – the flames are suddenly extinguished. People were bitterly disappointed and started abusing him. ‘What did that devil say?’ people asked. ‘He’s not for peace; he wants more killing.’ My mother put it best. ‘He had the chance to be the hero of history but didn’t take it,’ she said. Our mood on the way home was the exact opposite of what we had felt on the way to the meeting.
That night my father spoke on Geo TV and told Kamran Khan that people had had high hopes but were disappointed. Sufi Mohammad didn’t do what he should have done. He was supposed to seal the peace deal with a speech calling for reconciliation and an end to violence.
People had different conspiracy theories about what had happened. Some said Sufi Mohammad had gone mad. Others said he had been ordered to deliver this speech and been warned, ‘If you don’t, there are four or five suicide bombers who will blast you and everyone there.’ People said he had looked uneasy on stage before he spoke. They muttered about hidden hands and unseen forces.
My father was again busy speaking at seminars on our troubles with the Taliban. At one the information minister for our province said Talibanisation was the result of our country’s policy of training militants and sending them to Afghanistan, first to fight the Russians, then to fight the Americans. ‘If we had not put guns in the hands of madrasa students at the behest of foreign powers we would not be facing this bloodbath in the tribal areas and Swat,’ he said.
It soon became clear that the Americans had been right in their assessment of the deal. The Taliban believed the Pakistani government had given in and they could do what they liked. They streamed into Buner, the next district to the south-east of Swat and only sixty-five miles from Islamabad. People in Buner had always resisted the Taliban but they were ordered by the local authorities not to fight. As the militants arrived with their RPGs and guns, the police abandoned their posts, saying the Taliban had ‘superior weapons’, and people fled. The Taliban set up
Just as they had in Swat, they burned TV sets, pictures, DVDs and tapes. They even took control of the famous shrine of a Sufi saint, Pir Baba, which was a pilgrimage site. People would visit to pray for spiritual guidance, cures for their ailments and even happy marriages for their children. But now it was locked and bolted.
People in the lower districts of Pakistan became very worried as the Taliban moved towards the capital. Everyone seemed to have seen the video of the girl in the black burqa being flogged and were asking, ‘Is this what we want in Pakistan?’ Militants had killed Benazir, blown up the country’s best-known hotel, killed thousands of people in suicide bombings and beheadings and destroyed hundreds of schools. What more would it take for the army and government to resist them?
In Washington the government of President Obama had just announced it was sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan to turn round the war against the Taliban. But now they seemed to be more alarmed about Pakistan than Afghanistan. Not because of girls like me and my school but because our country has more than 200 nuclear
