Before raiding to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the then U.S. President George W. Bush reportedly threatened to bomb Pakistan "back to the stone age" after the September 11 attacks if the country did not cooperate with America's war on Afghanistan.
Back then, very few people in the world knew about a patch of land between Pakistan and Afghanistan called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which was previously treated by the British colonial rulers in India as a buffer state.
Still, many news followers just know that militants associated with global terrorist organisations like Al-Qaeda and Daesh are hiding here, but not all are aware that the law with which the government of Pakistan has ruled millions of people here is no less cruel than that of the Stone Age.
For start, just note that unlike rest of the country, the Constitution of Pakistan does not apply here!
The law of the land here is the Frontier Crimes Regulations (FCR) that categorically states that three basic rights namely the right to request a change to a conviction in any court, the right to legal representation and the right to present reasoned evidence are not applicable to the residents of FATA. It permits collective punishment of family or tribe members for crimes of individuals, and denies the locals many basic rights provided to the rest of Pakistanis elsewhere in the country.
Recently, the younger generation of Pashtuns from FATA have mobilized themselves to push the Islamabad government to repeal this law. The Fata Siyasi Ittehad; an alliance of Wazir, Afridi, Momand, Orakzai, Bajur and other tribes, and the Fata Student Organisation (FSO) are at the forefront of this campaign.
Young men and women from this part of the world have every right to live in a civilized environment. Justice, transparency and fair play on the part of the government in FATA, which has been deprived of many other basic rights and developments as well, will also help curtail the growth of extremist ideologies and deny