According to reports, Western relief agencies, including those run by
the United Nations and the United States government, have complained of
“perceptible harassment by ‘Jihadi elements’ working in the quake
hit-areas in Azad Kashmir and the NWFP”. There are some 20,000 workers
belonging to religious and jihadi NGOs carrying out relief activities
there, led by the most notorious “renamed” Lashkar-e-Tayba. A statement
to this effect was made by Hansjoerg Strohmeyer, chief of the Office of
the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, UN, at an Asia
Society function in New York recently. The UN official was worried about
the safety of Western relief workers at the hands of workers from
religious organisations. The report further indicates that if foreign
relief agencies faced actual violence, they might pack up and leave.

This was preceded by a statement by the US ambassador to Pakistan, Ryan
C Crocker, calling upon the government to monitor and, if necessary,
stop some jihadi organisations from continuing with their relief work.
From the Pakistani side there have been reassurances only. It has been
stated that Pakistan’s “biggest relief agency working in the area, the
army, has made it absolutely clear to all the religious NGOs that any
political attempt to muddy the waters in Azad Kashmir, let alone provoke
violence, by the religious groups would lead to swift reprisals from the
state”. It has also been conceded in official circles that “any violence
in the relief areas would be cataclysmic for Pakistan in so many ways
and will not be tolerated”. A pledge has been given that no foreign
agency would be harassed by the jihadis. The truth is that the first
complaint about harassment has already been made, although perhaps not
directly to the government of Pakistan.

Needless to say, the religious NGOs led by Lashkar-e-Tayba (now Jamaat
ud Da’wa) deny that there is any tension between them and the
foreigners. (Anyone who reads the almost daily poison being spewed by
the leaders of some of these organisations about President Pervez
Musharraf being “a slave of the United States” will find it difficult to
believe this.) Sources in the religious groups do admit that there is
some presence of workers from several banned organisations like Hizb ul
Mujahideen and others in the area. Al Badr - known to be the richest
among the militias - is there in strength in the NWFP part of the
calamity-hit area. This outfit was for a long time under the wing of our
intelligence agencies after being weaned away from the Jamaat-e-Islami
and has been allowed a lot of influence in the Mansehra region. There is
Hizb ul Mujahideen, too, which used to be an adjunct of the same
religious party once upon a time. But the one big jihadi organisation
that the army has allowed into the field remains the Jamaat ud Da’wa
with 3,000 workers running 12 tent cities and four field hospitals
mainly in AJK.

The Jamaat-e-Islami has its own outfit in the field, too, under the name
of Al Khidmet Foundation, deploying 12,000 workers. It denies any
friction with Western agencies, although it has had a dangerous
confrontation with the relief groups run by the MQM in the AJK area, a
kind of extension of the battle that the two groups fought earlier in
Karachi. The aggression of the accused party is hardly concealed. A
spokesman of Al Khidmet has said that the Western-UN reaction to its
presence in the field was a sign of a “mean mentality” - hardly a thing
to say to foreigners who have come far afield to help us. The spokesman
made it clear that if an effort is made to remove Al Khidmet from the
area “we will strongly resist” it.

Pakistan’s bad image is getting in the way once again. That the jihadis
are “waiting in the wings” has become clear to everyone in the world.
Their ability to operate freely in the affected regions has emerged as
bad PR at a time when Pakistan needed the image of a helpless victim.
(Perhaps it was not possible in the first place to restrain the jihadi
outfits in areas where they had been allowed a free run for many years.)
But we could be approaching a point where bad PR might turn some of the
donors away. Indeed, many in Pakistan’s opposition circles are already
predicting that the Western world will not deliver on its pledges to
give money to Pakistan’s quake disaster. Is it possible that the delay
in the fulfilment of these pledges could be attributed to the jihadis
enhancing their image at the cost of the image of the country? It goes
without saying that should the Foreign Office start receiving
expressions of polite reservation from the West, it would be hard put to
play on the front foot.

Ominously, Barbara Stocking, the executive director of Oxfam, has said
in Islamabad that “thousands of people are helpless in mountainous
regions and the international community has still not responded with
urgently needed resources”. Given this “go-slow”, Islamabad has to guard
against some of the stereotypical reactions against “foreigners” noted
in calamity-hit areas elsewhere in the Third World. Some of it has
surfaced in Indonesia in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and
has definitely hampered relief and reconstruction. Unable to repress
fear and loathing of the “foreigner” winning the gratitude of the local
population, the Jakarta government has ordered away the NGOs from Banda
Aceh and its intelligence agencies, representing a paranoid pathology,
have played their role in arousing this reaction. Unlike Indonesia
Pakistan has still to receive the funds on the basis of which it has
announced its ambitious reconstruction plan. Therefore something must be
done urgently to prevent the religious and jihadi elements (around
20,000) from coming face to face with the Western NGOs that they have
been taught in the past to hate. *