Up to one million displaced in northwest Pakistan

Tuesday, 28 Apr, 2009 | 07:24 PM PST |

Local residents flee from a troubled area in northwest Pakistan where the military has launched an operation against the Taliban. -AFP Photo

GENEVA: Up to one million people are displaced in northwestern Pakistan where militants are feeding on local discontent and strife, humanitarian and local officials from Pakistan warned on Tuesday.

Officials from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province appealed for international relief aid at an unprecedented meeting with relief agencies and donor countries in Geneva.

'We are hearing a lot of pledges and promises made from the international community to Pakistan, and many of them are for security, for the police and the army, but the civilians are not getting what they are supposed to,' said Sitara Ayaz, minister for social welfare and development in the province.

'In our province we need more support and help from the international community,' she said after the two-day meeting in Geneva.

The UN's World Food Programme is working on an estimate of about 600,000 people for food aid in the area, spokewoman Emilia Casella told AFP.

Local officials put the figure at closer to one million, with about 80 per cent of them housed with friends or relatives, sometimes five or six families to a home.

'It is a serious humanitarian situation of major magnitude,' warned Dennis McNamara, an adviser at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which organised the meeting.

'The registered UN figure for displaced civilians is over half a million. The NWFP relief commissioner says if we get registration completed it may be closer to a million in total.'

'It is a certainly a major displacement, one of the world's biggest if these figures are right,' added McNamara, a former senior UN refugee official.

A provincial minister said in Pakistan on Tuesday that around 30,000 people in the northwest have been displaced since the weekend by a military offensive to flush out Taliban militants.

Participants at the Geneva meeting said impoverished civilians were paying the price for the unrest and the humanitarian strife, and were easily wooed by militants such as the Taliban.

'They can easily be recruited, because they are bitter and they have suffered,' said one of the participants from North West Frontier Province.

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