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| Islamic Paki’s Mess With Girls Heads |
| 2004-02-27 |
| EFL One night last week a group of radical Islamists stole into the remote Darel valley and blew up the three-room schoolhouse and tried to burn down four other schools in the area. "I was given a warning by the mullahs and the mujahideen, ’Today we destroy your school. Tomorrow we will destroy your home,’ " said Abdul Gafar, 27, the school’s teacher. No one was injured in the attack but it was the first of its kind in Pakistan. Over the course of the next five days four more primary schools were blown up or set alight, two in the nearby town of Chilas. Four of the damaged schools were for girls and five were for boys. All of them were funded by the World Bank and run by a Pakistani non-governmental organisation called the Social Action Programme.The message of the attacks was clear: the education of girls and foreign-funded schools would not be tolerated. For either boys or girls! Allah forbid they thing or learn something outside the Koran. Saeed Ahmed Khan, the area’s senior official, said: "It is a place where the law cannot be easily enforced. Religious extremist groups are reacting because they oppose women being educated and have lost ground since these schools opened. Admission to religious schools has dropped." Finally, a good sign. My persumption is that all parents love their children, girls and boys alike, and, given the chance would send their children to the best schools possible...hence destroy all schools but the madrassas. The Darel valley is hidden among the vast ramparts of the Hindu Kush in Pakistan’s Northern Areas.It was where the frontiers of the British Indian, Czarist Russian and Imperial Chinese empires met in the 19th century. In colonial times the residence of the Assistant Political Agent at Chilas was known as "the Journey’s End", as the British officer posted there had to travel for months by sea, road, horse-back and eventually on foot to reach his outpost.The valley is accessible only through a narrow, dark defile through which the government has recently blasted a rudimentary track. I know I should have edited this out also...but it is such a nice visual description, I just had to leave it in...lol Today police block outsiders from visiting for reasons of "law and order". It is the "Valley of the Beards" as almost all men wear full, mullah-style whiskers and carry weapons."The Kalashnikov culture is strong there. They will be looking for reprisals for the men who have been arrested destroying the schools," said the Chilas district commissioner, Qimat Jan. Last year the Chilas offices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) were attacked and damaged. The year before the UNDP offices in Darel and the neighbouring valley of Tangir were burnt down. Home to 36,000 people, the area is a fecund trove of walnut and apricot trees and green patches of wheat. Darel is divided : a majority want to educate their sons and daughters and embrace outside help while a minority oppose progress and "kafir" (infidel) ways. But the minority has guns and the "Will to Murder their Neighbors." Guess which side wins. "They want to send us back to the past and stop progress. They say the schools are brainwashing the people and warn that outsiders will take over the valley," said Mr Gafar."One of my brothers is a mullah and he is the school’s biggest supporter. "It is only a handful of mullahs and mujahideen who oppose it. They issued threats while it was being built and we asked for a watchman but there were no funds." "Women going to pray at 5am saw smoke billowing from the school house and everyone got up and doused the flames with buckets of water," said Riaz Ahmed, a school teacher. Think what this sight, their school burning in the distance, must do inside a young girl’s head. Will she ever forget this lesson? Is another generation of Pakistani children already being lost? |
| Posted by:Traveller |
| #1 It is only a handful of mullahs and mujahideen who oppose it. In Moslem societies a few bullies decide everything. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-2-27 8:53:33 AM |