Erstellt am: 10. 5. 2013 - 16:19 Uhr

Saving the Swat Valley

Pakistan is going to the polls, but what will really help people of Swat is local engagement, not national politics

Pakistan's Swat Valley is a region which has been in the news for different reasons in recent months and years.

Last year in October, the schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head at point blank range by the Taliban for promoting girls' right to an education as she was travelling on a school bus. She is now living in Britain, where she was flown for medical treatment and has recovered sufficiently to return to school.

The Swat Valley has also been the scene of intense fighting between the Pakistani army and the Taliban. In 2009 the military carried out a major offensive against suspected Taliban strongholds. A million people were displace from their homes. Many, but not all, were to later return.

In 2010 Pakistan's northwest was ravaged by the worst floods in the country' history. The disaster wiped out whole villages and some 2 million people were forced to flee their homes.

Reality Check had the chance to hear first hand about this part of Pakistan from Madeleine Geibel, an Austrian who spent several weeks there. She told Joanna Bostock how it came about:

MG: In 2009, the Taliban had taken over the area and there were bombings by the army, and there was a huge refugee crisis. I was studying in England at the time, and I met a girl who comes from the Swat Valley, Zhara, and we became really good friends. Her mum, Zebu Jelani, comes from Swat, too, and she set up this Swat Relief Initiative. So through my friend I saw the process of setting up a relief action which started off just collecting funds and medicines and bringing them to the people, and gradually grew into a capacity building initiative.

Swat Relief Initiative

JB: Is it specifically for women?

MG: Yes, it is for women. First it was health care for refugees and internally displaced people who were coming back to Swat, but then Zebu rallied doctors together and they set up little medical stations and she then decided to train nurses from the area, and this gave women an occupation as well. The nurses go to households and mainly help pregnant women and children under 5 and monitor them because things like diarrhea, very easily treatable things, are the biggest cause of death for children. From then on, it kept building – they built little community health centres where the nurses meet and have training.
Then Zebu started working with other people who were interested in education – Malala’s dad, for example. It’s a very small group of activists who know each other very well.

Swat Relief Initiative

JB: So very broadly speaking it’s about supporting women, helping women get access to health and education.

MG: Exactly. It started with health, then came education, now there’s a lot of capacity building in the villages building civil societies. Zebu finds politically active people in the villages and sets up councils for education just to try and self-motivate the villages because it’s very hard to do it from below. Everyone I met who is an activist is actually from a wealthy family which is obviously not the best ground for change.

JB: When you speak to people, do you get an impression of what it was like before the Taliban had such a strong control over that area?

MG: Yes – I spoke a lot to Zebu. She told me one event that really stuck in her mind was when she went swimming with her daughters (she came back every summer, she lives in the USA) and people started throwing stones at them and screaming that they should get out of the water. This was a big shock for her, because she had been able to swim in this river all through her childhood, and she realized things are getting more conservative.

JB So if you’re working in a very rural, conservative area, and you’re talking about health, and women’s health, which often means reproductive health, is that something that is difficult to do?

MG: Yes, very difficult because people are not willing to accept the idea at first. Often the answer would be “If Allah wants to give me another child, I will have another child” so to bring about the idea of family planning, which is hugely important, people just don’t get the idea. But then there are women who can’t have any more children, who don’t want any more children; there is a lot of poverty involved as well. So what I saw with the initiative is that a lot of women were open to it, but a lot of people came just because they got medicines – they wanted to have something. It’s an educational thing as well. You can give vaccines if they need it, but it’s not about handouts. There are so many NGOs and there is so much to be done because there were the floods, and the Taliban invasion, but what needs to be done is capacity building, and that takes longer, and that takes local people to take action.

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