Daily Times

I was almost all set with a puff piece about how ecstatic our Prime Minister (PM) looks as he drags around a reluctant and most put upon looking Chief of Army Staff (COAS) to meet important foreign leaders. But then events caught up.
The massacre of unarmed, normal people going around doing normal things just because they belong to a particular sect among the Muslims is as heartrending as it is reprehensible. It almost seems that the perpetrators of this latest crime committed by an entirely warped set of ‘believers’ are ‘slightly’ misinformed. Clearly, their handlers wanted to make a statement of sorts about the Yemeni civil war. A definite attempt is being made to paint the Yemeni civil war into a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shias. The Houthis, most of whom belong to the Zaidis, would technically be called fiver Shias, if at all. Perhaps the sectarian murderers got confused between the fivers and the sixers and decided to attack the sixer Ismaili Muslims believing that they were the same as the fiver Zaidis.
I refuse to call these killers terrorists. They are just thuggish murderers. Terrorism was once upon a time almost a noble calling. It was once said, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” In the last century, the leaders of terrorist Jewish organisations, who wanted the British to leave Palestine, went on to become the leaders of independent Israel. Leaders of almost all anti-colonial movements were labelled terrorists by the colonial masters but the likes of Ben Bella in Algeria, Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya and Sukarno in Indonesia went on to lead their countries after the colonial masters were forced to leave. Even in this century a case can be made for how the Taliban types, fighting the occupying US army in Afghanistan, were as much freedom fighters as their predecessors who fought against Russian occupation.
Whether you agree with them or are against them, terrorists historically represented a political point of view. But I am not able to understand what the organisation once known as the Sipah-e-Sahaba (SSP) has to do with politics. It, along with all its subsequent iterations, has only one purpose and that is to kill Shias. Even though terrorism in general seems to be decreasing after the army started its campaign against the Pakistani Taliban, sectarian attacks are continuing. Clearly, the organisations behind such attacks realise that going against the army or against the majority sects in the country is not worth it. Attacking members of minorities is, however, relatively low risk for many reasons, first being that such attacks do not create too much political noise and, second, many within the majority population as well as within the political establishment are somewhat sympathetic to the sectarian point of view.
Whatever the sectarian outfit that cannot be named goes around doing, the killing of members of the Ismaili community makes no sense. The Ismailis are a small minority, they are entirely peaceful and have no communal political aspirations, and as such they pose no threat to anybody. The question then is why this sudden targeting of the Ismailis? The killing of Shias has been going on for decades so it seems a bit hard to believe that the sectarian killers suddenly realised the Ismailis are also Shias. It could be, as I have mentioned above, that the killers are confused between the Yemeni Zaidis and the Ismailis, and therefore went after the wrong group for the wrong reason. Or perhaps killing ordinary Shias is no longer as newsworthy as it used to be. Clearly, sectarian killers need to keep killing to maintain their expertise in such matters and killing regular Shias is becoming counterproductive since the Shia organisations are now retaliating. Whatever the reason behind this attack, the murderers responsible for these 40 plus deaths are unlikely to be apprehended. In the past, the killers of Shias and other minorities have rarely been caught even though everybody knows who these people are.
It is easy to call sectarian violence a law and order problem. It is that but it is also a social and religious problem. As Pakistan has become Islamised, sectarianism has also become more established. Interestingly, a majority of ordinary Pakistanis do not support any sectarian group that indulges in violence but, within the political parties and the ruling elite, there is cynical support for sectarianism. As far as the cadres that go around killing people are concerned, clearly these people are being trained, supported, paid and protected. All this cannot be done without the knowledge of the authorities concerned. And, no, these sectarian killers are not Taliban types that find sanctuary in the badlands of the west but, rather, they find sanctuary in the heart of Punjab and in our big cities. And no, these killers are not members of some foreign secret agency.
The important question is whether we, as Pakistanis, are condemned to suffer sectarian violence even if political terrorism is controlled. Religious sectarianism will always exist as it has in the past. What can definitely change is the violence sectarian differences breed. We cannot push the clock back to a time when Pakistan was truly a multicultural society where different religious groups coexisted in relative harmony. We can, however, try to push Pakistan forward to become a place where laws are enforced and murderers are apprehended, tried in courts of law and then convicted. We can identify groups that are involved in sectarian violence and, instead of letting them change their names to avoid legal consequences, actually go after their support systems both within the country as well as from ‘like-minded’ foreign sources. But, before we can enforce the law, we in Pakistan need a law enforcement system that is capable of doing that. If we want the army to enforce the law then the army will also want to run the country. It is a tough choice indeed.

The author is a former editor of the Journal of Association of Pakistani descent Physicians
of North America (APPNA)