News Desk |
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Chief Minister Mehmood Khan on Monday, 8th April announced that Levies and Khasadar forces will be merged into KP police, effective immediately. Speaking to the press, the Chief Minister said that 28,000 personnel Levies and Khasadar forces will be benefited from this.
The chief minister commended the countless sacrifices of these forces in the war against terrorism for the past 15 years and vowed that no one will be left unemployed. “Today is a historic day,” he said. “From today, all Levies and Khasadar personnel will be a part of the police. The Khasadar force will be given all sorts of training,” he added.
KP government spokesperson Ajmal Wazir said that the perks given to the KP Police would also be provided to the newly merged Khasadar and Levies personnel. They will be accommodated in the police on the basis of their ranks.
The government had also introduced Levies Force, a sort of regular policing system, in the erstwhile Fata to assist the political administrations in respective tribal agencies to deal with petty crimes.
Talking about the development work in the tribal areas, the chief minister said that a ten-year development plan for the area will be implemented according to the vision of Prime Minister Imran Khan. The provincial government had promulgated the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Levies Force (Transition) Ordinance, 2019, in merged districts in March for giving policing powers to the force.
It was assessed that after the merger of tribal areas with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and abolition of the Frontier Crimes Regulation, there was no justification for the continuation of Khasadari system. Chronologically, the British government had introduced the Khasadari system in former Waziristan Agency and gradually extended to other tribal agencies, where they (the British) did not have direct control. Khasadari was distributed among the clans and sub-tribes.
The colonial government conceived the system both as a solution to crimes in a region they had little ingress or influence in and as a means to placate tribal elders into taking on a de facto policing role instead of making trouble.
Read more: FATA-KP merger marks historic day for people of FATA
The government had also introduced Levies Force, a sort of regular policing system, in the erstwhile Fata to assist the political administrations in respective tribal agencies to deal with petty crimes. The Levies Force was regularized in the last government of Pakistan Peoples’ Party.