As they trickle back, some two million who fled do not know what they face, writes Mary Fitzgerald, Foreign Affairs Correspondent, in Mardan
BEHIND THE filthy blanket that Gul Naz has pinned across the doorway for some privacy, she and her three sisters fuss over their children in the classroom that has served as the family’s home for more than two months.
In one corner lie the sisters’ few belongings. In another, a collection of cooking pots lean against the wall.
Here, in this small fetid room, Gul gave birth to her son Idris just two weeks after she and her family fled their homes in northwest Pakistan’s Swat valley as the army began its offensive against local Taliban.
Idris looks sickly. His pale, sweaty face lolls to one side as Gul Naz gently rocks him in her arms and, in a soft voice, admits she is almost ill herself with worry.
The weeks-old baby has diarrhoea, and she is afraid his condition will deteriorate. All she wants is to return home to the fresh mountain air of Swat.
“Our life is very hard here,” she says. “Local people have been helpful. They have given us food and they have brought Idris to the hospital for treatment. But we have no idea when we can return to Swat, as the army has not yet cleared our area.”
Gul Naz was no supporter of the black-turbaned militants who swaggered through the tiny hamlet she called home.
“They blew up schools and the homes of people they said were spies. They forced us women to wear burqas and told us to stay at home.
“They whipped my brother because they accused him of using charas [hashish],” she recalls.
“Their influence was not deep in our community. They imposed themselves on us. Their ideas were very extreme – too extreme for Swat. And it is because of the Taliban that the army was brought in.”
Some streets away, in a residential compound located down a rutted alleyway, Absari and her four young children also talk wistfully of the day they will be able to return home to Buner, a district that borders Swat.
The ongoing military operation began after hundreds of Swat-based Taliban slipped into Buner in early April, bringing them within 100km (60 miles) of the capital, Islamabad.
Absari, whose husband works in Malaysia, gathered up her children and fled to Mardan.
They found refuge with the family of Saeed Mohammed Osman, one of thousands in Mardan and other towns in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) who have opened up their homes to the displaced of Swat and Buner.
“The plight of these people is proof of how bad the Taliban are for this country,” says Saeed, an elderly man with a long beard and pristine white prayer cap. “Their way is not a good way.” Asked how he thinks the government should deal with the challenge posed by the Taliban, his reply is unequivocal: “Kill them all.”
Saeed shrugs off the challenge of having five more mouths to feed. “They were in danger, it was the least we could do.”
His wife, Haro, interjects: “We are doing this for Allah. These people need our help.”
More than two million fled their homes during what Pakistani officials refer to as Operation Rah-e-Rast (Righteous Path) – a displacement the United Nations has described as the most dramatic since the Rwandan genocide in 1994.
Most, like Absari and Gul Naz, were able to find shelter with host families or in schools and other buildings, making this, in many ways, an invisible humanitarian crisis.
Several camps set up to accommodate the remainder of the displaced are now being shut down as people slowly trickle back to Swat and Buner following assurances from the government that their villages and towns have been cleared and are now safe from airstrikes and shelling.
Last week, the UN said that, so far, about 600,000 have made the journey home.
“At the moment, there is quite a slow but steady return,” says Dorothy Blane, Concern’s country director for Pakistan. “People are being helped to leave the camps. The government is quite keen to empty the camps first, ahead of the monsoon.”
Blane points out that the return of the displaced is just the first step in what promises to be a daunting reconstruction and recovery effort – one that will have to address not just the destruction wrought by three months of fighting, but also underlying socioeconomic and governmental dynamics that contributed to the Taliban gaining such a foothold in the first place.
“This will be quite a tough nut for the government to crack,” she predicts.
The Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) warned last month that unless relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts in the NWFP are urgently improved, the army’s offensive against the Taliban risks making the militants the ultimate winners.
The ICG’s report said conditions could deteriorate further if the government does not act swiftly to revive the agricultural, horticultural and tourism sectors that formed the region’s economic backbone in the past.
The stories that spill forth from those who languish in the remaining camps dotted around the southern reaches of the NWFP suggest that the challenges faced by the government post-offensive will be formidable.
There is anger and resentment as the displaced recall mothers, husbands, children and siblings killed by army bombing raids.
Khalida, a diminutive woman whose thin face betrays the trauma of the past months, says 13 of her family died in an airstrike. She describes the Taliban as good people – “They worked according to the rules of the Koran” – but insists none of her dead relatives were involved.
At the same camp, Habib Rahmani laments his wife and three children, all of whom were killed when the army bombed a mosque close to their house in Swat.
He says he despised the Taliban – “No one liked them, but everyone was afraid of them” – but wonders what kind of future is in store for his remaining family. “My house is gone. There is nothing left for us anywhere in the area,” he says ruefully. “What are we supposed to do now?”