Human Rights Violations During Government Operations

I lost my sense when I reached the door of my house and saw and heard the crying of my close neighbors and relatives—as if hell fell on me.

– A 25-year-old man who lost several family members when two shells fired by security forces hit his house during the battle of Loi Sam, Bajaur Agency (FATA), summer 2008

As the Taliban and other insurgent groups have increased control over large areas in northwestern Pakistan, their advance has led to widespread and systematic human rights abuses. In response, the Pakistani government and its international backers—notably the United States—have sent a clear and unmistakable message: The government's objective is NOT to protect the rights of the civilians who are most affected by insurgents' human rights abuses. Rather, government policy is guided purely by military and counterterrorism objectives, with often fatal consequences for civilians.

Click image to enlarge Copyright: Amnesty International - A Frontier Corps soldier stands guard as school girls fleeing the fighting between government forces and the Taliban in Lower Dir, North West Frontier Province, reach Timergara. April 27, 2009

Pakistani military operations in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) severely affected civilian life and often violate both human rights law and international humanitarian law (IHL). IHL—also known as the law of armed conflict—governs the protection of civilians and others not actively participating in a conflict and regulates the means and methods of warfare. It binds all parties in armed conflicts, including non-state armed groups.

Following are a few examples of violations committed by Pakistani military forces and government agents. For more details, please explore our interactive maps.

Attacks Against Civilians and Civilian Infrastructure

The Pakistani government's response to the rise of insurgents in the NWFP's Malakand Division (mainly in the Lower Dir, Buner, and Swat valley) and in the Tribal Areas fluctuates between launching often indiscriminate and disproportionate military operations that harm mainly civilians and abandoning Pakistani citizens to abusive militant groups.

Security forces deployed in government operations often fail to differentiate between civilians and militants and use disproportionate force, causing civilian deaths and injuries and destroying civilian property. Such disregard for civilian life and civilian infrastructure, such as homes and schools, is common throughout the region.

Lower Dir Offensive (NWFP), Spring 2009

The district hospital in Timergara, Lower Dir, confirmed a total of 13 civilians killed during fighting in late April 2009. At least 38 houses were completely destroyed in Timergara, and dozens were damaged. Civilians reported that security forces had warned them to evacuate their villages during the operations, and locals reported the use of helicopter gunships and heavy artillery.

Several villages in the Maidan subdistrict seem to have been targeted by government artillery and helicopter gunships after Taliban fighters fired on security forces from residential areas. Eyewitnesses reported at least 10 houses completely destroyed and another 40–50 damaged. Those who witnessed the fighting reported that bodies were left lying in the streets and in the fields because people were too afraid to move them.

The Taliban have shown no greater concern than government forces for the well-being of the residents of Lower Dir. To the contrary, the Taliban have used civilian areas as combat zones despite knowing the military will respond with indiscriminate long-distance shelling and aerial bombardment.

Swat (NWFP), 2008–2009

Between 2007 and early 2009, a local armed group ideologically affiliated with Afghanistan's Taliban movement managed to take effective control of nearly 80 percent of the Swat valley territory, once a tourist destination only 100 miles from Islamabad. By early 2009, up to 15,000 government troops had been deployed in Swat to seek insurgents.

While the Pakistani Taliban repeatedly disregard the lives and rights of the people of the Swat valley, Pakistani military forces—who have used helicopter gunships and heavy artillery in their operations, often indiscriminately—also violate the human rights and disregard the safety of the people they are supposedly trying to protect. Fear of government military operations, rather than of the Taliban, has been cited by tens of thousands of people who have fled the area.

According to official estimates, more than 1,200 people were killed and an estimated 200,000–500,000 were displaced from the Swat valley in 2008 as a result of fighting.

Collective Punishment

International human rights and humanitarian law prohibit collective punishment, which is broadly understood to encompass official sanctions and harassment of any sort against persons for actions for which they do not bear individual criminal responsibility.

South Waziristan (FATA), Fall 2009

South Waziristan is the largest of the seven tribal areas (known as agencies) in FATA, with an estimated population of 450,000 people, most of whom belong to either the Mehsud or Wazir tribes. The population of the Mehsud tribe is thought to be about 300,000.

In the aftermath of a major military offensive in fall 2009, the Pakistani military refused to allow Mehsud members to use major roads. Some tribe members were known to be senior leaders in the Pakistani Taliban, but if Mehsud tribespeople, including women and children, were punished on the roads as they fled simply because they belong to the tribe, the military's actions may have amounted to collective punishment, which is absolutely prohibited under international law.

After the army bombed their town, one Mehsud man and his family joined a group that eventually numbered about 20 men, 15 children, and 17 women—in total, five families traveling on donkeys with their luggage—to try to reach relatives in another part of the country. In an interview with Amnesty International, the man recalled the group's fear of the army's restrictions:

The army does not allow any Mehsud to come to the road and use it … When we left our homes, we took some food which we used the first two days, and after that we had nothing at all and whatever was left we gave to the children; we only drank some tea and water. We had to spend the nights under the open sky. As we were not allowed to use the road we had to walk in the mountains … we lost our way twice.

When we reached Murtuza area, we hired a pickup and wanted to go by road as the women and kids were very tired, and it was very difficult for them to walk anymore. But when we reached near Korr there was an army check post where we were stopped by the army soldiers. They asked us why we were on the road and said that Mehsuds are not allowed on the road. They made us walk back and away from the road; they also abused the driver, who was not a Mehsud but was from the Marwat tribe. He was first beaten by the soldiers, and then they told him not to drive anyone from Mehsud tribe.

Failure to Provide Adequate Humanitarian Assistance

The Pakistan army's major offensive in northwestern Pakistan during April 2009 resulted in the displacement of over 2 million people, the largest displacement crisis in Pakistan's history. Nearly 90 percent of the people who fled did not have access to organized camps and lived instead in overcrowded conditions in host communities, existing slums and abandoned buildings. In many cases, three or four families shared one residence, greatly straining host communities' ability to provide sufficient food and clean water.

Conditions were particularly difficult for displaced people who sought shelter in other provinces. Amnesty International has documented some two dozen cases in which displaced Pashtuns were told they could not rent property, access health care or place their children in school without security clearance—a difficult dilemma, because many of the displaced had lost their documentation when they fled. This problem has been particularly acute for women and women-led households because many women in areas under Taliban control were barred from receiving national identity documents.

South Waziristan (FATA), Fall and Winter 2009

Between 90,000 and 150,000 residents of South Waziristan fled the area following the launch of a long-range artillery and aerial bombardment in the region in July 2009. In advance of a major military offensive launched in the fall, the government failed to provide sufficient health facilities, food, drinkable water and shelter for the displaced. The government also failed to prepare adequate camps where fleeing civilians could find shelter in an emergency and limited its response to preparing six facilities for registering internally displaced people.

International humanitarian law requires authorities to ensure that all civilians, regardless of ethnic group or background, have access to adequate food, water, health care and shelter during military operations like the South Waziristan offensive and during subsequent mass displacements of civilians.

For more details on this crisis, please see our section on displacement in northwestern Pakistan.

Other Concerns

Possible Extrajudicial Executions
Swat (NWFP), Summer 2009

Amnesty International has received credible information about 164 people who were killed, often shot at close distance, in the aftermath of the Pakistani military's takeover of the Swat valley from Taliban-affiliated insurgents. Many area residents blame the army for the deaths, but AI's research indicates that some resulted from the Taliban engaging in reprisals and others from local and tribal conflicts playing out in an environment of ongoing chaos and insecurity.

Crisis of "Disappearances"

Enforced disappearance is defined in Article 2 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Acts of enforced disappearance violate several provisions of Pakistan's constitution, including freedom from arbitrary detention, the right to judicial overview of detentions and the prohibition of torture.

Nonetheless, since Pakistan became a key ally in the U.S.-led "war on terror" in late 2001, hundreds if not thousands of people, both Pakistani and foreign nationals, have been subjected to enforced disappearances within Pakistan. Victims have been kidnapped, held in secret locations outside any judicial or legal system, and often subjected to torture or ill-treatment. The clandestine nature of these arrests and detentions makes it impossible to know exactly how many people have been subjected to enforced disappearance in the last eight years. When the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) filed a petition in Pakistan's supreme court in February 2007 on behalf of disappeared people, it submitted its own list of 148 missing persons, including 10 from NWFP. By mid-2007, HRCP's list had grown to 198.

On November 16, 2009, the Supreme Court of Pakistan resumed hearings on disappearances cases that had been interrupted when former President Musharraf declared a state of emergency on November 3, 2007. According to Defence of Human Rights, a Pakistani organization that campaigns on behalf of the relatives of the disappeared, out of 416 enforced disappearances cases filed in the supreme court since 2005, 195 remain pending since November 2007. Defence for Human Rights lists several cases of enforced disappearances from NWFP on its website.

The Case of Atiq-ur Rehman

Atiq-ur Rehman, a 29-year-old scientist and officer of Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission, was apprehended in Abbotabad, North-West Frontier Province, on June 25, 2004. The police refused to register the family's complaint that Reham had been disappeared, arguing that he was in the custody of an intelligence agency. In June 2006, Defence of Human Rights submitted his case to the supreme court, but during the hearings in 2007, state representatives denied holding him or having any knowledge of his whereabouts. His fate and whereabouts remain unknown.

For detailed information on enforced disappearances in Pakistan, please see our 2008 report Denying the Undeniable: Enforced Disappearances in Pakistan (pdf).