Religion, land, conflict and terrorism

An interesting reportage is available at France24 (http://www.france24.com/en/20170210-video-revisited-pakistan-swat-valley-taliban-former-glory): it is about the Swat Valley in Pakistan. This valley, located in the northern part of Pakistan was “captured” by Taliban in 2007 and, following a military operation in 2009, was retaken by Pakistan.

What attracted my attention was the strategy deployed by Taliban: details can be found in this article (http://www.alterinfo.net/Revolution-dans-la-Vallee-du-Swat-les-talibans-exploitent-le-fosse-entre-classes-sociales-au-Pakistan_a31973.html). The essence is the following: 4 dozens of big landlords controlled almost the entire power (and land) in the valley. Landless and sharecroppers were organized by Taliban and became their “troupes de choc” against local power elite, in exchange of a promise of a better future.

This worked well because the sufferings of peasants were extremely high, against the judicial system that was very slow in resolving the many land disputes and against the big landowners.

Finally, Taliban won, but in fact, this did not really meant a big change for peasants.

The military intervention allowed the government to retake the control of the valley and thus million IDPs have started coming back.

One can imagine that, being the root causes of the conflict known, the government would have undertaken some land reforms to please the landless and sharecroppers. Not at all. What IDPs have found is an increase presence of military forces that, in the name of security, are increasing their footprint everywhere. A housing colony is being built on land that pertained to local farmers and the compensation that is being offered is nominal. The seeds for more future conflicts have been sown.

A similar mix of religion, military, a bit of nationalism and land, constitutes the basic ingredients of what is happening in Rakhine State in Myanmar with the Rohingya minority. More info here: http://minorityrights.org/minorities/muslims-and-rohingya/

Just a quote from the article:  “Confiscation of land has also continued throughout the last few years, especially farmland in certain areas targeted for new villages and Buddhist settlers in northern Rakhine. Though not as extensive as in the 1990s since Burma attracted a great deal of attention from the International Labour Organization, the confiscations are at times given the appearance of ‘consent’ through torture, with continued reports in 2006 of Rohingya landowners being tortured by soldiers into signing over their farmland to Buddhist settlers.

These continued land confiscations, combined with the cumulative effects of the discriminatory restrictions on movement, employment, educational access and even food, have led to extreme hardship, increased poverty and even malnutrition among Rohingya populations.”

I’m more and more convinced that when looking below the surface of the many religious-based conflicts today, we will discover that in many cases the underlying root causes is again the control of natural resources.