Fragile peace at girls' school Malala built in Pakistan


Shangla (Pakistan) (AFP)

Dozens of girls in grey-and-white uniforms trooped into a building beneath a pine-covered ridge in Pakistan's mountainous Shangla district Friday for classes at the school built with Malala Yousafzai's Nobel Prize money.

The Khpal Kor Model School, three storeys tall and with a computer lab, playground and library, is a symbol of the change that Malala has helped bring to a deeply conservative region where she was once one among many girls struggling to receive an education.

But with many parents afraid to speak to the media for fears the building would be targeted by militants, it is also a sign of how far Pakistan has to go in its long battle with extremism, even in a region that it regularly touts as a security success story.

"We don't want this school to be publicised because if it happens, militants will target it," one parent said on condition of anonymity.

Opened just over two weeks ago, the building hosts 183 students, most between the ages of five and 12. Thirty-eight of them are orphans.


Some, said principal Sajid Shah, are transported by the school -- an initiative paid for, along with the books, uniforms, tuition for the orphans and poorer students, teachers' salaries and the building itself, by the Malala Fund.


- Target -

The school is built on the outskirts of Shahpur, a town in Malala's home district of Shangla -- part of the region known as Swat, the scenic valley once infested by the Pakistani Taliban.

In 2007, the militants took control, waging a campaign of beheadings, other violence and attacks on girls' schools before the army deployed 30,000 troops in 2009, declaring it secure by July that year.

Since then Pakistani and at times US officials have held up Swat -- recently designated a safe tourism destination once more -- as a success story in the country's fight against Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.


By then she and her family had moved to Mingora, the main town in neighbouring Swat district -- also part of the Swat region -- and it was there that gunmen stopped her school bus on October 9, 2012, asked for her by name, and shot her in the head.



Security there has improved "significantly", analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai said Friday, but rare attacks -- such as one that killed 11 soldiers in Swat on February 18 -- show the danger is not yet over years on.

"They (the militants) still have their facilitators and sleeper cells there," Yusufzai told AFP.


However his family had opposed his decision to send her there, he said, "fearing it may be targeted".

- 'Malalas everywhere' -



"I am grateful to Malala for her invaluable efforts to promote education, a task our leaders failed to accomplish," Shangla shopkeeper Farman Ullah said after dropping his three daughters at the school.

"We have just one Malala today but after a decade or so, we will have Malalas everywhere."



"Not taking her to her hometown means they are not confident," he said, referring to the government and military establishment.

"If the government can't provide her security, then what does it mean?"