Daily Times

This Tuesday, June 16, marked the six-month anniversary of the Army Public School (APS) attack in Peshawar, which claimed the lives of 145 people, 132 of them schoolchildren between eight to 18 years of age. Civil society members came out on Tuesday in front of the Parliament House in Islamabad, as they have every month since the attack took place, to remember the victims and to protest the fact that none of the perpetrators had yet been apprehended. The protestors commended Operation Zarb-e-Azb for helping fight terrorism in the country and praised the soldiers who sacrificed their lives in battle, but they criticised the inadequate and improper implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) to combat terrorism, which was launched after the APS attack. The resolve of these people who come out every month on the date of the attack to not forget the innocent children who lost their lives because of terrorism is highly laudable. Although thousands of Pakistanis have fallen victim to terrorism in the past and such attacks continue to happen, the APS massacre was an incident that aggrieved the entire nation and the government took several new measures to fight terrorism.

The military courts to try civilian terrorists were set up after the 21st amendment to the Constitution of Pakistan was passed. These military courts were introduced for two years to ensure speedy trials for the terrorists. The moratorium on the death penalty was also lifted for cases of religiously motivated terrorism but was later expanded to apply to all the convicts that had accumulated on death row over the years of the ban on capital punishment. The reinstatement of the death penalty has been widely criticised by civil society, both local and international humanitarian organisations, the European Union and the United Nations. Despite all these measures however, none of the perpetrators of the APS attack have been caught and over a hundred people convicted for cases not related to terrorism have been executed. Therefore, NAP has not been properly implemented and it is time for the government to listen to the voices of the people and ensure NAP is made more effective. *