GENEVA, April 28, 2009 (AFP) - Up to one million people are displaced in northwestern Pakistan where militants are feeding on local discontent and strife, local officials and humanitarian workers warned on Tuesday.
Officials from Pakistan's North West Frontier Province appealed for international relief aid at an unprecedented meeting with relief agencies and donor countries in Geneva.
"We are hearing a lot of pledges and promises made from the international community to Pakistan, and many of them are for security, for the police and the army, but the civilians are not getting what they are supposed to," said Sitara Ayaz, minister for social welfare and development in the province.
"In our province we need more support and help from the international community," she said after the two-day meeting in Geneva.
The UN's World Food Programme is working on an estimate of about 600,000 displaced who need food aid in the area, spokeswoman Emilia Casella told AFP.
Local officials put the figure at closer to one million, with about 80 percent of them housed with friends or relatives -- sometimes five or six families to a home.
"It is a serious humanitarian situation of major magnitude," warned Dennis McNamara, an adviser at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, which organised the meeting.
"The registered UN figure for displaced civilians is over half a million. The NWFP relief commissioner says if we get registration completed it may be closer to a million in total.
"It is a certainly a major displacement, one of the world's biggest if these figures are right," added McNamara, a former senior UN refugee official.
A provincial minister said in Pakistan on Tuesday that around 30,000 people in the northwest have been displaced since the weekend by a military offensive to flush out Taliban militants.
Participants at the Geneva meeting said impoverished civilians were paying the price for the unrest and the humanitarian strife, and were easily wooed by militants.
"They can easily be recruited, because they are bitter and they have suffered," said one of the participants from North West Frontier Province.
The big five UN aid agencies and the international Red Cross have also been trying to guarantee security for their staff in parts of the northwest.
"When there's a kidnapping, it sets back the whole process," McNamara pointed out.
"If you go into a conflict area you have to talk with the guys with the guns whoever they might be, and labelling them as governments like to do doesn't help that," he added.
The meeting, which also included Pakistani diplomats, agreed that the agencies needed such dialogue with militants, but it had to be "transparent and structured" and with the "full knowledge, support and agreement of the government," the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue said in a statement.
International donors last month pledged more than five billion dollars to stabilise Pakistan.
US President Barack Obama has put Pakistan at the heart of the fight against Al-Qaeda and unveiled a sweeping new strategy to turn around the Afghan war and defeat Islamist militants on both sides of the porous border.
But a military surge raises concern among the northwestern Pakistanis who feel caught in "a war that is not ours," said Ayaz.
In February, Pakistan's government agreed that Islamic sharia law could be enforced in the northwestern district of Swat, in a deal with militants aimed at ending two years of rebellion.
Mussarat Bibi Ahmadzeb, who comes from the northwestern district, said the introduction of Sharia largely arose from the perceived failure of the "new system" that took over traditional rule 40 years ago.
"The main thing is that people are jobless. And when you don't have work, in order to gain money, any terrorist can come and... This is something I want to shout out to the world: please help us by providing work."
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