Unwritten law dictates Pashtuns must shelter those who seek help

ISLAMABAD - Giving shelter to one who asks is a centuries-old Pashtun tradition that may be why Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden lives in Afghanistan as a guest and is not on trial for the deaths of thousands in worldwide attacks.

Shelter is part of an unwritten code called Pashtunwali, or Pakhtunwali - the way of the Pashtuns - that people in this region are required to uphold even at the cost of their lives.

Its violators risk derision of their descendants for generations. Bin Laden is the prime United States suspect in last week's attacks in New York and Washington and is also wanted for several other anti-US attacks across the world. But Afghanistan's Taleban rulers, who are Pashtun, won't hand him over.

Pashtuns are the dominant ethnic community in Afghanistan as well as in the North West Frontier Province of neighbouring Pakistan.

Other pillars of the Pashtunwali code include hospitality, revenge and honour - the last being responsible for frequent honour killings of Pashtun women who marry outside the tribe without parental consent.

Under the code, Pashtuns must give protection to those who ask for it - even fugitive criminals - and give their lives to protect Pashtunwali.

Often criminals in Pakistan flee to the country's semi-autonomous Pashtun tribal area, bordering Afghanistan, to escape arrest.

Rahimullah Yousafzai, a Pakistani Pashtun journalist who has met Taleban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammad Omar several times, said he once asked him whether he followed Islam or Pashtunwali in sheltering bin Laden.

Omar replied that he followed Islam.

But Islamic scholars say Islam does not grant protection to those who commit a crime.

A chieftain in a Pakistani tribal area once gave sanctuary to a man accused of murdering the brother of the Frontier province's then military Governor, Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, in the 1980s.

The Governor sent a Frontier paramilitary force into the Mohmand tribal area to arrest the alleged killer. The tribal chieftain died fighting to protect his guest.

A veteran Pakistani Pashtun politician, Abdul Wali Khan, once said: "I am a Pashtun for 5000 years, I am a Muslim for 1400 years and I am a Pakistani for only 40 years."

Pakistan was created in 1947.

- REUTERS

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