Tribal women blamed for inducing fear among children: Research

PESHAWAR, Oct 10: A University of Peshawar researcher on Monday blamed women from Khyber Agency, especially in Bara tehsil, for inducing fear among their children to teach them discipline.

“Mothers tell them to go to sleep otherwise dreaded militant commander Mangal Bagh will show up and take them away,” said Ruqayya Gul, who works with children from restive tribal areas now living in Jalozai camp, on Monday.

Talking to Dawn here on the World Mental Health Day, the researcher said fear was common among the internally displaced children from Bara, and Mohmand and Bajaur agencies.

“Most of these children fear that they`ll be suspected as militants. They can`t discriminate between the Taliban and army and show fear and passiveness,” Ms Ruqayya said, adding that children from restive tribal areas have memories of their destroyed homes and gun battles.

She also said the news about bomb blasts and adults talking in front of them about fighting in their areas flashed back violent scenes into their minds and they relapsed into the old state.

The researcher recommended recreational activities for children inside IDP camps so that they could remain busy making fun away from the terrorism related news.

Meanwhile, Dr. Irum Irshaad, provincial president of Pakistan Association of Clinical Psychologists and associate professor at Psychology Department of University of Peshawar, said over the last 10 years, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was on the rise among the people, especially women and children, in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa areas adjacent to conflict-hit tribal areas.

She told Dawn on Monday that data of patients with PTSD in the province had yet not been collected but research at Jalozai Camp for internally displaced persons and her patients showed that the disorder was on the rise.

Dr Irum said terrorism and insecurity had a negative bearing on the minds of the people, especially women and children.

“Women face gender discrimination when it comes to treatment for psychological problems,” she said, adding that more men had enrolled for treatment at her private clinic in Hayatabad than women.

She said women were generally considered to be `just acting ill` in the gender-biased society ignoring treatment for serious mental illnesses, adding that economic pressure and displacement due to conflict was coming out in the form of behavioural changes.

“Economic burden and breaking up of joint family system are common causes of psychological problems,” Dr Irum said, adding that increase in intolerance in society was an outcome of such problems.

According to her, local families, which have accommodated displaced relatives from Waziristan, Bajaur, Swat and other restive areas, have shown behavioural changes.

“Hospitality, which is considered a value in Pakhtun society, is stretched with the people feeling stressed due to economic burden and insecurity,” she said.

Dr Irum said provincial government should invest in improving mental health facilities and rehabilitation centres in the province since such facilities were almost equal to none.

“One mental Hospital that is adjacent to Peshawar Prison is in such a condition that one remains depressed for days after visiting it,” she said, adding that observance of human rights and tolerance can help attend to psychological problems.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/11/tribal-women-blamed-for-inducing-fear-among-children.html

Can Sindh change? By Meer M. Parihar

THE article ‘Will Sindh change?’, written by Zubeida Mustafa and published in this space several weeks ago, raises the question of changing the power structure in Sindh.

Her assumptions are based on her interaction with some social activists working in rural Sindh’s education sector. In her article, she concludes that “change is inevitable because the process of awakening cannot be reversed”. I wonder, though, whether the average citizen of Sindh is up to it.

Education plays a pivotal role in creating awareness. Are the province’s ruling elites committed to educating the masses? A report recently published by this paper said that though there are over 40,000 primary schools in the province, only 10,000 are operative. Teachers are posted to almost all the schools but classes seldom take place. The status of girls’ education is poor, even more so in the rural areas: more than 90 per cent of female teachers are from the towns, and most of them visit rural schools occasionally, merely to update the attendance registers. The situation in secondary schools and higher-
education institutions is equally shocking.

The poor state of the education sector should be considered against the backdrop of the movement in the late 1960s concerning Sindh’s provincial status, led by the educated middle class. The awakening of the province’s middle class was perceived as posing a threat to the status quo. Reactionary forces colluded with the province’s feudal class to crush the rise of leadership from the middle class. Since then, active workers of student organisations and middle-class political groups have been targeted and there are reports of torture, disappearances and extra-judicial killings. Sindh’s ruling elites have not just kept the people deprived of education, they have also failed to take concrete measures towards human-resource development that could help people find work in sectors other than agriculture that is already saturated and can no longer withstand the
pressure of unchecked population growth. Many consider government jobs as a source of livelihood but although thousands
of people are appointed in these posts every year, most appointments are made without taking merit into consideration.

Indeed, many argue that most of these posts are not actually required but are created to afford opportunities to the ruling elites to strengthen and expand their vote banks.

This is the only province where direct recruitment to lucrative posts, bypassing rules introduced in the early 1970s, has not stopped. From time to time, the Sindh Public Service Commission (SPSC) is assigned this task but is reported to manipulate examination results to declare candidates that have failed as having passed. (An inquiry into such fraud is pending with the Sindh anti-corruption establishment.)

The process of erosion of the civil bureaucracy’s authority which started in the 1970s has reached such a pass that in the Sarfraz Shah murder case, the acting chief secretary admitted the administration’s failure before the Supreme Court. The administration of districts — the basic unit of governance in the province — is being handled by the ruling elites through a handpicked bureaucracy. Nothing moves without a nod from the local feudal lord. The helplessness of local government functionaries was witnessed in the aftermath of last year’s floods. There were even allegations that powerful landlords diverted the waters to save their own holdings, at the cost of the safety of millions of other people. Meanwhile, their role in the denial of water to small and tail-ender farmers is an old story.

Sindh’s rural economy is controlled by these elites. The majority of the farmers pledge their crops to obtain fertiliser, seeds, pesticides etc at exorbitant prices: the interest rates range between five to 15 per cent a month. The real beneficiaries of the boom in agriculture are not the tillers but the middlemen and their backers.

A province that has fertile soil and is rich in fuel and mineral deposits has a rural poverty graph that continues to rise. It has become a safe haven for the sale of spurious medicines and pesticides, and adulterated farm inputs and food items. The use of narcotics is growing, and the people are stalked by disease and despair.

A World Bank report states that “The deepest and most pervasive poverty in the country is in rural areas, and it is worse in the areas that have been considered ‘feudal’ such as Sindh”. In this province the landholdings of the feudal families have multiplied instead of having decreased. The conditions that prevail in lower Sindh’s rural areas are such that, as has been said before, it seems the clock stopped ticking here centuries ago.

Given this situation, is it possible that change will come? The educated middle class has either joined the elite in robbing the people or become disillusioned. The urban middle class, which historically spurs on the struggle for change, has mainly chosen to share power with the feudal elite. The masses, meanwhile, are caught in a vicious cycle of poverty. This has been so methodically engineered that rural society has reverted to tribalism, where the killing of women under the pretext of karo kari is justified as a tribal custom.

In order to perpetuate its own authority, the ruling elites have systematically undermined institutions, propped up status quo-friendly individuals and selected groups, institutionalised corruption and tacitly engaged the communities in ethnic tribal warfare.

According to social activist Tasneem Siddiqui, the fundamental elements for change are “effective social organisation, passion for change and the perseverance of ordinary people”. All these are lacking in Sindh. Can one still hope for change?

The writer is a social activist.

Source: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/11/can-sindh-change.html