With its name on the Pakistan government’s watch list, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, linked with the banned Lashkar-e-Toiba militant group, has yet not only been active in providing quake relief in Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, but several international relief organisations have closely worked with it.Various relief organisations, including the Red Cross, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the World Food Programme, the UN Organisation for Refugees and the Sikh welfare organisation Khalsa Aid have been working with the Jamaat in PoK’s quake-hit areas, Pakistani daily Nawai Waqt reported on Wednesday. These agencies were ‘‘very impressed’’ with the Jamaat’s ‘‘strong, well-linked and organised’’ network, and have provided ‘‘huge amounts of goods’’ to it, the report said.The Jamat-ud-Dawa was floated by its founder Hafeez Sayed in the aftermath of the September 11 US attacks, when he was under pressure to dissolve the Markaz Dawa, the Lashkar-e-Toiba’s parent outfit. While the Pakistan government banned the Lashkar, the Jamat-ud-Dawa was put on an Interior Ministry watch list.President Pervez Musharraf, in a recent interview to CNN, had said that no banned outfit would be permitted to carry out relief work, but that there were no curbs imposed on those on the watch list. On Wednesday, however, the British paper The Financial Times carried an interview with Musharraf in which he acknowledged that while groups such as the Jamaat had stepped into an administrative vacuum in relief work, he would make sure that they did not draw people towards extremism.
