Daily Times

At least 15 people were killed and more than 70 injured when two Taliban suicide bombers attacked two churches in Lahore. Do we not consider this genocide? The militants are killing people in the name of Allah and telling people that anyone who kills a Christian will go straight to heaven. That is their message. They have burned churches, they have burned very old books and they have damaged crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary. They are occupying churches and converting them into mosques. They are the Taliban. The Taliban may destroy, in whole or in part, a national or ethnic group (genocide) but they may also destroy a group of people who share a political belief (politicide). Sometimes, the two are the same. When the majority of militant groups unite and pledge support to the Taliban, then politicide is also genocide.
Christians make up around two percent of Pakistan’s mainly Muslim population of 180 million. They have been stoned to death by mobs, targeted in militant attacks and brutalised by riots in recent years, often over allegations of blasphemy. This recent attack follows the devastating 2013 double suicide bombing in Peshawar that killed 82 people. That attack came months after more than 3,000 protesters burnt some 100 houses as they rampaged through another Christian neighbourhood, Joseph Colony, in Lahore, following blasphemy allegations against a Christian man. The killings of innocent Christians make me want to explore the evolution of the genocide paradigm in Pakistan.
The recent political histories of the Jews and Christians in Pakistan have clear parallels: the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany began with racist legislation (the Nuremberg laws), escalated to violence (Krystalnacht), forced mass immigration and ended in overt genocide. One can note the similarities between the racist doctrine of the Taliban and the Nuremberg laws. The intent of both was the exclusion of a specific people from society and government, exclusion being a recognised early indicator of future genocide. Human rights scholars frequently argue that there is no need to include intent among the necessary conditions that lead one to conclude that genocide is in the making. On the contrary, I think that it is important to look for evidence that allows us to infer intent precisely so that genocide can be distinguished from related phenomena. Moreover, early warning efforts depend on detecting signals of intent rather than waiting for information that widespread killings have taken place. How do we detect intent? Potential perpetrators are enemies of the state, militias authorised by the Taliban. Terrorists and groups linked to them often use hate propaganda and attack ethnic minorities.
The second point is that the victims belong to an identifiable ethnic, authoritatively defined religious group. In Nazi Germany, people who changed their religion from Judaism to Christianity were still identified and targeted for elimination as Jews. In Latin American politicides, friends and relatives of leftist activists were often killed even though they themselves were politically inactive. It is wrong to assume that most or all members of a group have to be eliminated before one can conclude that genocide occurred. It is enough to “take the life out of the group”, in other words, to eliminate or intend to eliminate so many people that the ethnic group ceases to function as a social or political entity. Thus, in politicides, perpetrators typically attempt to destroy the ability of opposition groups to challenge or resist the regime by targeting their potential supporters and, in genocides, the victimised groups are defined by the perpetrators primarily in terms of their communal characteristics. Again, this point is closely related to intent. It follows that, in principle, body counts do not enter the definition of what constitutes an episode. If the terrorists’ motive is to rid themselves of unwanted opposition by destroying a group and if policies with that intent are sustained over a substantial period of time, then a few hundred deaths constitute as much a genocide or politicide as the deaths of tens of thousands. For example, about 900 Iranian Baha’is were victims of genocide, as defined above, during the Khomeini regime.
The central thesis is that murderous ethnic cleansing, in its extreme forms, can become genocidal and is the dark side of democracy. The ideal of rule by the people itself tends to convert demos into ethnos, generating organic nationalism and encouraging the cleansing of minorities. The dark side of democracy will oppose ethnic diversity and it is up to the political leaders of this country to keep a close eye on how successfully Pakistan negotiates the problem of ethnic confrontation ranging from victimisation to extermination. Other worries are the danger zone, from which ethnic conflict may turn murderous. It is reached when two rival ethnic groups lay claim to religious sovereignty over the same territory and where both claims appear legitimate and realisable. Risk of going over the brink, into actual murderous cleansing, occurs where states are destabilised amid an unstable local geopolitical environment out of which crisis ‘radicals’ emerge calling for rough treatment of the other group. The radical’s mind-set reflects this instability. Murderous cleansing is not their initial intent but typically develops only after adaptation to failure and destabilisation has both collapsed. Pakistan fits well within the genocide thesis. The Taliban and the Christian ethnic minorities in Pakistan are two rival ethnic groups whose differences in religious ideologies have developed over decades. There is a difficult, destabilising war against terrorism in process and the Taliban claim to rule the territory is utterly unrealistic, unthinkable and delusional.
Ethnic and religious divisions are often identified as preconditions of civil conflict in general. Ethnic cleansing of religious minorities is an age-old human curse. Europe’s Jews suffered nine centuries of massacres, persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, expulsions and other torments before Hitler mobilised anti-Semitism on a grand scale in the Holocaust that killed six million. Similarly, an estimated one million Christian Armenians were exterminated by Muslim Turkey near the end of World War I. Later, Orthodox Serbia practiced ethnic cleansing against Muslim Bosnia and Kosovo. Numerous other examples are cited by historians. In this 21st century, when wars between nations have virtually vanished, it is depressing to realise that the horror of ethnic cleansing still occurs.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com