Pakistani girls' schools in radicals' sights

As militancy surges in Pakistan's remote tribal areas, girls' schools have become targets. Despite the threats, girls' enrollment has continued to rise. Part 3 of three.

from the May 31, 2007 edition

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Entrenched tribal, religious, and economic imperatives in conservative areas regard the schooling of girls as either improper, since girls should not venture outside the purview of the family home, or unnecessary, since girls are often needed for work.

As a result, Pakistan has one of the highest rates of female illiteracy in South Asia, at about 60 percent, and the lowest rate of primary school enrollment for girls, at somewhere between 42 and 48 percent. Those shortcomings are particularly pronounced in the NWFP, which, as of 2004, had the lowest ratio of female enrollment of any province in Pakistan, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG). In areas like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the government's presence has historically been weakest, only 1 percent of women and girls are literate.

The issue has become even more of a battleground in recent years, as resurgent Islamic extremism bumps heads with the government's recent efforts to expand girls' education. In 2002, the NWFP provincial government allocated 70 percent of its entire education development budget to girls' schools and created more than 300 primary and middle schools for girls in the NWFP between 2002 and 2005, according to government figures. Local authorities also gave parents small stipends and free clothing to encourage them to enroll their girls.

It is these new schools that extremists like Maulana Fazlullah, a powerful preacher in Swat valley, tend to target. For months, using a pirated radio channel, Mr. Fazlullah had warned locals against sending their girls to school, calling it un-Islamic and a violation of purdah, the religiously mandated confinement of women away from public scrutiny.

"A woman has been asked to remain behind the four walls of the house. Men have been given preference by God," Fazlullah explains in an interview on the banks of the Swat River, where he is building a madrassah, or religious school. In a recent peace treaty signed with the government, Fazlullah agreed to stop preaching against girls' education in return for keeping his illegal radio station.

Others have delivered the same message through force. In March, police in Orakzai agency, part of FATA, defused a bomb planted on the grounds of a girls' school, and other schools in the NWFP, including the provincial capital of Peshawar, have received written threats saying girls and female teachers should wear full veils or face dire consequences. Many worry that the violence is spreading.

'"Everywhere these girls are going, the teachers are threatened," says Fazilla Gulrez, the manager of communications for the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (SPARC) in Islamabad.

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