US drone strikes have caused an outrage in Pakistan where thousands of young impressionable Pakistanis have taken to the streets. Until last week, the demonstrators had disrupted Nato supplies travelling through Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to register their protest.

With political gains and expediencies involved, Pakistan’s foremost politicians have publicly canvassed the drone strikes as a violation of national sovereignty and honour. Public opinion has been diverted from the more organic and distressing issue of internal human rights abuses against Pakistan’s ethnic and religious minorities to the populist and emotional one of drone strikes.

While civilian casualties, as a result of these external strikes, are a reality, it is important for the people of Pakistan to also protest and denounce abuses that are a result of internal Pakistani policies and are well within the control of the state. However, political manipulation and lack of national awareness and public empathy have so far ensured that these abuses continue unchecked.

The masses of Pakistan are ideally placed to influence and pressure the government into stopping these human rights abuses against the country’s ethnic and religious minorities. Raising their voices against the four major issues highlighted below will safeguard their national unity, security and welfare.

1) The fundamental rights of tribal Pashtuns

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) usually see the front page of Pakistani newspapers when Pakistanis are angry about US drones. But little do most Pakistanis know that Fata is home to over three million Pashtuns, deprived of legal and political rights and faced with enormous economic problems.

Fata is governed by the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) – a 19th-century law that the British devised as an instrument of subjugation and to establish the writ of the colonial authority.

Despite some changes made to the law in 2011 on a piece of paper, FCR in practice continues, over a hundred years later, to deny the people of Fata basic justice. The law has famously denied tribal people three basic rights — “appeal, wakeel, daleel” (the right to appeal their detention; the right to an attorney; and the right to present evidence).

It has been used to collectively punish families and tribes for the crimes of individuals. It has also allowed a federally appointed executive to exercise all executive as well as judicial powers, serving as the final arbiter of justice in cases, even including those where he is the accused.

Likewise, many of the political rights enjoyed by Pakistanis continue to be denied to those living in the tribal areas. While the tribal people have the right to vote, they do not have the right to elect their own administrative heads, known as political agents.

Political agents, who are widely considered corrupt, are appointed by the federal government and not accountable to the tribal people. Moreover, Fata has no provincial assembly. Federally, Fata has elected representatives in the parliament, but those representatives have no say in the administration of Fata because no act of parliament applies to Fata.

On top of denying these fundamental human rights to the tribal people, Pakistan has invested little to no resources in Fata. The area remains one of the poorest and least developed parts of the country. The people of Fata lag far behind much of the rest of Pakistan in infrastructure, education, healthcare and other basic services.

2) The rights and lives of the Baloch

Hundreds of brutally tortured and mutilated bodies of young students, political activists, doctors, lawyers, and teachers turn up every few weeks in different corners of Balochistan.

Their eyes scooped out, genitals bearing marks of electric prods, limbs broken, parts of their bodies drilled and their faces lacerated beyond recognition. Yet, their tormentors still want them to be recognised and the whole town to witness the burial, so they very carefully leave a note with their names in the pockets of their blood drenched shirts.

This is the end that many young Baloch men meet in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest and most resource-rich province that provides billions in revenues to the state. There are hundreds of people still missing, allegedly picked up by intelligence agencies and the military’s Frontier Corps (FC).

Their families move from one city to another, knocking on the doors of the judiciary, observing hunger strikes, holding sit-ins and demonstrations outside press clubs and covering hundreds of miles on foot to register their protest. Their aim is to seek an answer from the state on one simple question: “Where are the young and bright men of our families?”

The reasons for their abduction, torture and murder range anywhere from demanding a fair share in the resources extracted from their land to speaking against ongoing human rights abuses.

According to the Human Rights Watch, there is undisputed evidence that point towards the involvement of the Frontier Corps, Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence in these murders and abductions. The helpless locals have nothing more left to say except that their “lives are now clouded in darkness. Asking for our rights is akin to a death wish.”

3) Stand up against the internal support for Taliban

It is widely accepted by the international community that Pakistan helped create and then later supported the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is likewise largely undisputed that certain segments of the Pakistani security forces to this day continue to support the Afghan Taliban. Most of the Taliban today have taken refuge inside Pakistan, near the Afghan border.

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