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Some 2.4 million people have been displaced in a punishing military assault
against the Taliban in the northwestern districts of Lower Dir, Buner and Swat,
in the biggest exodus since Pakistan's 1947 partition from India.
‘We will take full care of displaced people, who have sacrificed for our
future,’ Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said while addressing a ceremony in
Islamabad.
He said the government had embarked on a ‘comprehensive’ policy for relief and
rehabilitation for the displaced persons.
‘We will not allow a handful of people to destabilise the country and derail
democracy,’ he said in reference to Taliban militants, adding that the nation
wanted an end to militancy.
Under US pressure, Pakistan launched an offensive last month to crush militants
in the northwest, which Washington said threatened the existence of the Muslim
country and posed the greatest terror threat to the West.
On Saturday Pakistan's military said it had won back control of the main town in
a key northwestern district from Taliban fighters in what would be a major
achievement in a month-long offensive.
The announcement came three days after the military vowed to wipe out the
Taliban from Mingora, the administrative and commercial hub of the mountainous
Swat valley -- a region torn apart by a two-year Taliban uprising.
The extremists' advance came despite a February deal with a pro-Taliban cleric
which put three million people in the northwest under sharia law in a bid to end
the two-year Taliban insurgency -- a deal which now lies in tatters.
The military says more than 1,200 militants and 80 soldiers have died in the
onslaught, launched in the districts of Lower Dir on April 26, Buner on April 28
and Swat on May 8, but those tolls cannot be confirmed independently.
There has been little official word on any civilian casualties during the
offensive. |
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