Gains and losses of blockade
INTIKHAB AMIR
Updated 2014-03-03 07:43:32
THE court order to end blockade of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s supplies came as a blessing in disguise for the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf.
The Peshawar High Court declared the suspension of Nato supplies to and from Afghanistan illegal in its February 26 judgement. The party has since come up with its own noble reasons for accepting the verdict and deciding to wind up the protest camp from Peshawar’s Hayatabad Ring Road Toll Plaza set up on November 23, 2013.
“We honoured the court’s decision because PTI stands for rule of law,” says Dr Nadeem, the party’s vice president for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
He says PTI did not know that the mode it selected to protest against the US drone attacks was ‘illegal’ but not everyone is ready to accept this simple claim to innocence.
Dr Syed Hussain Shaheed Soherwordi, a lecturer of international relations at the University of Peshawar, believes all the PTI leadership needed to do was to hold in-house debate, to determine the legality of their protest camp before launching it.
“PTI’s road blockade was totally wrong. Pakistan has an agreement with the United States, and we are honour-bound to give passage to Nato supplies in accordance with the United Nations resolutions,” says Dr Soherwordi.
The blockade protest was launched with fanfare but since then it had lost steam. Initially, camps were set up at five places in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
After a month, camps were removed at four places. The Peshawar camp, too, had become a political embarrassment for PTI; the party’s leaders and workers had lost interest in it after the first couple of weeks.
The 97-day long road show was not without economic implications for the business community from Karachi to Torkham on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
The financial impact is difficult to quantify, but private businesses suffered losses as did daily wagers and the importers to Afghanistan shifted business from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to Balochistan.
“The losses for businessmen run into billions of rupees,” says Zia-ul-Haq Sarhadi, a customs clearance agent in Peshawar. He says 2,500 customs clearance agents at Karachi, 250 at Peshawar, and dozens of forwarding agents at Torkham remained without business for more than three months.
Besides, the bonded carriers transporting Nato containers to and from Afghanistan via Khyber Pakhtunkhwa also suffered.
All these groups were hit by the closure but none paid more heavily than PTI: The protest appears to have left the local businessmen with a bad impression about the party.
Peshawar’s leading steel manufacturer Nauman Wazir is more concerned about the impression the party has created among the businessmen than the financial impact of the Nato supplies’ suspension.
“The PTI’s decision to select Peshawar instead of Lahore or Karachi for the road blockade has not left many businessmen with positive feelings,” says Mr Wazir, a member of PTI’s professional forum.
The party’s vice president in the province, Dr Nadeem, says the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chapter of the party had decided to protest without taking political gains into consideration. “It was not about political gains, it was an act to preserve national dignity and territorial sovereignty,” he maintains.
Dr A.Z. Hilali, chairman of the political science department at the University of Peshawar, believes the party gained more than the damage its reputation suffered.
“PTI’s adherence to the PHC’s decision goes in its favour and it has also established that it is the only party in the country that has the ability to turn its words into action,” says Hilali.
Like Dr Nadeem he believes the party succeeded in giving a clear message to the people of Pakistan and the international community that drone attacks were illegal and those had to be stopped.
However, Dr Soherwordi does not think PTI, or any other political party in the country, has the ability to influence Washington’s drones policy.
For him, the party's losses from the protest are more than its gains. “PTI has gone a bit more to the right of centre, scaring away the centrists who are in a majority in Pakistan,” said Dr Soherwordi.