Peshawar   -  While the erstwhile FATA region has remained in the headlines for militant attacks in the past, the region remains volatile even after the almost-end of militancy because now land disputes are claiming lives in various merged districts after the merger of FATA region in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. 

A major issue in the tribal districts is that people do not have land records, the main source of conflicts in the merged districts nowadays. 

Abdul Qudus Wazir, a resident of South Waziristan, told this correspondent by phone that Dotani and Wazir tribes in the district had taken positions in bunkers over a dispute on the ownership of Spin area in the tribal district.

He said several lives had been lost to the land dispute. “In fact, the land dispute in South Waziristan can be resolved if the government makes public ‘misal’, which is ownership of the land from the times of the British rule,” he added.

Deputy Commissioner North Waziristan district, Shahid Ali Khan, told The Nation that the major problem in tribal districts was that there had been no land settlement and land record existed. He said that after the KP-FATA merger, all land cases had now to be dealt by courts, which had a procedure while there had been no settlement of lands in the tribal districts as there were no land records. 

“Previously they used to hold jirgas to resolve land and other disputes. But now we have both jirgas and courts. Sometimes a party approaches a court during negotiations when it feels that the Jirga decision is not going to be in its favour, thus delaying the process,” he added. He said another reason behind land disputes were the facts that previously people were afraid of arrest under the FCR law but now with the extension of courts to their areas, they could easily get bail through court in case of arrests. 

However, he also said that the land dispute point to the restoration of peace in the tribal districts as previously they were stuck in militancy but now they were thinking about their lands.

To a query about ‘misals’, he said that it could resolve a land dispute but that in some cases, two parties in a land dispute had two different misals.

According to a lawyer Farhad Afridi, the FATA reforms included the formation of a board for the purpose of land settlement issues, but the land settlement body could not be set up so far, that was why land disputes had become the order of the day in the tribal districts. 

“Under the FATA set-up in the past, such issues  were decided by jirgas in traditional ways. But with the FATA-KP merger, the laws that have been extended to tribal districts require records and evidence to decide these cases. But the problem is that now we do not have records of lands. In the erstwhile FATA set-up, people did not use stamp papers but they would orally transfer lands through witnesses,” he added. 

He claimed that even tribes raise lashkars sometimes and fight one another and such lashkars create an environment of fear and terror in an area. 

He also said that the civil judge allocated for Bara tehsil of Khyber district alone had more than 1000 cases to decide. 

Another lawyer said that after the merger, the government had decided to set up a judicial complex in Jamrud tehsil of Khyber district but so far the plan could not materialise as currently they have rented offices in Peshawar. 

He said there were tehsil courts in various areas of Khyber district, but there were no offices for lawyers in those premises, creating a problem of commute for them.