PESHAWAR (Manend news) Awami National Party (ANP) central president Senator Aimal Wali Khan has said that terrorism is not the product of any particular province but a consequence of state policies.
He called for an end to what he described as double standard in dealing with militancy. “We have no objection to Punjab being safe today. Our objection is to the double standard of the state and the elite in dealing with terrorism,” he said in a statement issued here on Monday.
Aimal Wali said that people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan also deserved to live in peace like the people of Punjab and Islamabad. He said that the policies that pushed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan into the grip of terrorism were formulated without consulting the people of those provinces.
“The people of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been paying the heaviest price for the same terrorism for the past five decades,” he said, questioning as to who established, nurtured and trained militant organisations and used them for strategic interests.
He said when such policies were being pursued ANP leaders including Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Khan Abdul Wali Khan had warned that the fire in Afghanistan would eventually spread to Pakistan. “Instead of listening to them, they were labelled traitors, anti-state elements, infidels and Russian agents,” he said.
The ANP leader said that his party objected to the tendency to equate Pakistan with Punjab. He recalled when ANP was at the forefront of the fight against terrorism, the incumbent prime minister, who was then also ruling Punjab, had appealed to militants not to carry out attacks in Punjab, saying that “yours and our stance is the same”.
He alleged that the state had failed to learn from the past. He said that Khyber Pakhtunkhwa was still being sacrificed for the interests of ‘the throne of Islamabad’.
He reiterated his party’s demand for establishment of an independent and autonomous ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ to investigate the country’s history from 1947 onwards.
He called for accountability of all those, who had violated the Constitution and law, facilitated foreign wars in return for dollars and pushed the country into conflict for vested interests.