Nothern Areas to reject another LFO

Northern Areas to reject another LFO

The News - Tuesday, October 23, 2007
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=76697

“Among the hundred and forty people who lost their lives in the carnage the other day in Karachi, eight (8) of them were villagers from Khaplu near the Siachan glacier in the Northern Areas, three (3) are still missing and thirty (30) people from the region received serious injuries and are undergoing treatment in various hospitals in Karachi. Surely, they would never die for another LFO?” The Legal Framework Order or the LFO has become a dreadful word in Pakistan. The term has been used and abused so many times to justify extra-constitutional actions that it has become synonymous with absence of legitimacy and presence of misrule. Not long ago a number of Supreme Court judges refused to take oath under the LFO, and those who took oath of their offices under the LFO were castigated by the civil society, well, until they washed their sins in the river of defiance and judicial activisms. President Musharraf on Saturday has reportedly consented to a new draft LFO for the federally administered Northern Areas. The previous LFO for the region was introduced by Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 1994. Northern Areas is the only administrative unit in the world today which is being run through LFOs for the last four decades. Before that it was ruled through another draconian instrument called Frontier Crime Regulations or FCR — a colonial linchpin still operative in the federally administered Tribal Areas but thankfully abolished in the Northern Areas by Z. A. Bhutto in 70s. The new LFO for the Northern Areas was under active consideration of the law ministry, the same ministry which prepared the famous reference against the Chief Justice of Pakistan, for six years. After six years of intense contemplation and manipulation it has spawned a recipe of ‘grass-root empowerment’, and the all purpose capsule prescribed is extension of Local Government Ordinance (LGO) to the Northern Areas.The LFO clearly falls short of the aspirations and expectations of the people. Local government system is not and has never been an issue in the Northern Areas. It already has a LG system under which district councils are functioning and municipal systems are operating. In fact, much of the community based development and governance concepts contained in the LGO were borrowed from the experience of NGO in the Northern Areas which have a strong participatory tradition. It’ is fine for people to have the system upgraded or replaced by the LGO, which in any case should have been done six years ago when it was introduced in the four provinces. What people of the Northern Areas have been demanding are fundamental political, constitutional and legal rights which are available, at least in theory, to people of all ethnic, religious and sexual orientation in the four provinces of Pakistan and the Azad Kashmir. Their demands are basic in nature. Those living in the Northern region of the country are seeking the right to vote in the national election, they are demanding the right to send public representatives to law making and decision making bodies in the centre where many critical decision about their future are being made. They want self government through an empowered provincial /regional government. The 1.5 million people have been demanding an independent judiciary, access to and jurisdiction of Pakistan’s higher courts. LFO does not and cannot cater to these fundamental rights. LFO by its essence is an extra-constitutional document. There is no mention of LFO in the constitution of Pakistan. There is no such provision in the constitution which allows the federation to impose LFO and deny people of a federating or non-federating unit their basic human and political rights. Why then the two ministries are insisting on LFO when they could do it in a legal way by a proper presidential ordinance or tabling a law in the parliament? The answer is simple; the the pig-headed bureaucrats and politicians running these ministries want to keep Northern Areas as their grazing pastures at any cost. On the surface, however, they wrap their arguments in the historical link between Northern Areas and the Kashmir. Northern Areas was indeed part of the former state of Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) but just as India and Pakistan was part of the British Raj for a certain period of time. It was result of an occupation. Kashmiris have never ruled Northern Areas; it was the Dogra Raja of Jammu who brought parts of the region under his sway that too well before the treaty of Amritsar was signed through which the Dogras purchased Kashmir valley from the British. And it is also true that it was the local people who fought their way out of the occupation in 1947 and decided to join Pakistan on their own sweet will, thereby, severing whatever symbolic relations they had with the princely state. But it was the then bureaucrats based in Karachi and some self-serving Kashmiri leaders who conspired to keep Northern Areas entangled with the Kashmir issue. They not only ignored the aspiration of the people of the region as manifested in the instrument of accession signed by local Rajas and Mirs and countersigned by Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself but went on to stage manage a controversial agreement (the Karachi agreement of 1949) between the leader of the Muslim Conference of Jammu and Kashmir and a minister without portfolio in the cabinet securing administrative rights in the Northern Areas which Pakistan already had, given by the local people. Sixty years have passed and plenty of water has gone down the Indus — which, by the way, has all its main tributary glaciers and rivers situated in the Northern Areas. Always a geo-strategic hinterland, each passing day Northern Areas is assuming greater importance. India with its growing influence is flexing muscles across the Siachan and in the Central Asia, the United States and the NATO’s presence in Afghanistan is a long term reality, hence Pakistan will have to firmly hold on to the coat tails of land connection with China passing through the Northern Areas. A disenfranchised and disenchanted people and continuation of LFO based illegitimate and immoral governance solution in a sensitive region amounts to playing in the hands of powers involved in the new great game. Delhi is the biggest beneficiary of the ambiguous policy.People of Northern Areas have already suffered a great deal on account of others; they do seem to have the forbearance to take on more. But it is for the sake of country’s own interest that the government must come up with a legitimate constitutional and legal instrument to define the status of the region before it gets too late. Northern Areas should either be integrated into the federation of Pakistan as the fifth province, even if it has to be subject to final resolution of Kashmir dispute or it should be allowed to develop an interim constitutional set up on the pattern of Azad Kashmir. The LFO is no solution. The writer is based in Islamabad and has a background in media, public policy and development. Email: ismail.skardu @gmail.com