Monster’s Ball rip 
June 17, 2009
By Dr Rubina Mumtaz
Displacement is an inadequate, meaningless word when it is used to describe the trauma of being wrenched from your home and forcibly dislocated to a far flung place not of your choice.
Imagine an ordinary day in your life. Food is warm on the table, the children are out playing and you’ve send your other half or your teenage son to get bread from the bakery. Suddenly the shrill explosions of bombs landing in your backyard break the tranquility. The panic, the chaos, the screaming, the children outside; are they alive or not, people running helter-skelter. In an instant, life becomes all about survival, the very lives and safety of your loved ones. What do you pick up from your abode as you make the panic-induced on-spot decision to run for your life? Your clothes? Your money? Your identity papers/credit cards? Or do you just grab the hands of your loved ones and run? This is what happened to over 2 million people. They fled for their lives with nothing on them except the clothes on their backs.
Hence the words ‘inadequate and meaningless’ to describe displacement. The internally displaced people (IDP) are people like you and me, who had perfectly good lives till the Taliban decided to invade this tranquil scenic mountains of Swat in Northern Pakistan. The Taliban did not come overnight. They slowly insidiously infiltrated into the area, preaching about Islam, missionary in their approach to impose the Islamic Sharia (Islamic law) that assured peace, quick justice, law and order plus the promise of heaven hereafter. They recruited the bright eyed youth with immediate lucrative economic and power-based returns. The government of Pakistan initially turned a blind eye; it began to acknowledge the Taliban only when the metastasis of their networks reached into neighboring districts of Malakand. Read the rest of this entry »