Pots have a habit of calling kettles black. The Punjab police killing unarmed PAT workers in Model Town is just as egregious and criminal as US police killing a minimum of two unarmed black men every week. The US has no room to anoint itself as the champion of human rights when a significant portion of its population suffers under the “driving while black” and “flying while Muslim” syndromes. For more than a decade, Pakistanis have taken to murdering physicians or citizens if they are Ahmedi, Shia or Christian. Entire families have been gunned down or victims have been killed in front of their children. The murderers invariably ride away on their motorbikes and no one has been apprehended or charged with these murders. This is classic enabling behaviour. The state is to have tenderness and affection for each citizen; what of the one that does absolutely nothing about these episodes? He might as well have been holding the gun.
The PML-N government has been on the path of self-aggrandizement and minimal achievement in this round of governance and now it is badly besieged. The previous PPP government similarly did nothing; in fact, one of its own members, Governor Salmaan Taseer was gunned down by a fanatical bodyguard. The shameful elation of members of the lawyer community, the pro bono defence of the killer and showering him with rose petals is evidence of a society gone mad. Even more unspeakably heartbreaking is the murder of Ahmedi children a few weeks ago with no condemnation or action by the government.
Pakistan is young at 67 and democracy in Pakistan younger still. The US is 238 years old and has been blessed with democracy its entire life. Democracy is a noisy, evolutionary process. The slave trade, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment by the US Public Health Service on African-American men, and the continued harassment and murder of blacks in the US are a smear on its democracy and vaunted claims of pluralism, diversity and tolerance.
It is well established statistically that a young black male is a lot more likely to be pulled over by police than any other race. It is a shame that black families in the US train their children on how to behave if they are stopped by police: keep hands on the steering wheel, move only when instructed and address the police officer with “sir”. These families know that deeply entrenched racial hatred boils over within its police force and, instead of dealing with their sons the way the sons of white families are treated, they are liable to be recipients of that terrible knock on their door that bears the news of death.
According to the FBI’s most recent accounts of “justifiable homicide” between 2005 and 2012, a white officer used deadly force against a black person almost two times every week. Of those black persons killed, nearly one in every five was under 21 years of age. These are probably severe underestimates as they are based on reports by police departments and only 750 of the 17,000 law enforcement agencies participated. In 2007, a joint effort by ColorLines and the Chicago Reporter examined police shootings in the 10 largest cities in the US and in every city African-Americans comprised a disproportionately large percentage of those killed.
Nineteen-year-old African-American Renisha McBride was killed by Theodore Wafer, a white middle aged man, for simply knocking on his door at 4:30 am. He thought a home invasion was about to occur and, instead of calling the police, he chose to shoot her in the face. Wafer was found guilty of second-degree murder but Renisha is gone, as is the fate of so many Trayvon Martins and Renishas all over the country on an ongoing basis.
Whether a police officer pulls the trigger or the state simply looks away when citizens murder on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion, comes essentially to the same thing. Citizens are targeted in Pakistan because of their belief system and US citizens are killed in their own country because they are not white. The other commonality in the murder of innocents in the two countries is the easy availability of guns. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is the most powerful lobby in the US. The right to be armed is enshrined in the US constitution. Despite wholesale massacres like the Connecticut school shootings, US citizens want to hold onto their assault rifles for dear life. Presidential candidates and even elected presidents try to stay away from the gun control issue for fear of their popularity plummeting.
The influx of weapons into Pakistan after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, particularly the Kalashnikov, seems to have permanently changed society. Citizens have no protection from the police and there is an absence of due process. Armed bodyguards are as common as cars. Why would governments in recent memory care about the death wreaked by guns in Pakistan when political and governmental leaders travel with bulletproof vests, bulletproof cars and armed cars front, back and sideways?
The Association of Physicians of Pakistani Descent of North America (APPNA), in its annual convention last week, did an awesome job of focusing attention on the killing of minorities in Pakistan. Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia was the keynote speaker addressing a crowd of 3,000. Just the day before, Ferguson, Missouri, had been placed under curfew to control protestors after the police shooting of unarmed 18-year old Michael Brown. Addressing the issue of sectarian killing in Pakistan, Senator Kaine advised Pakistani-US physicians to take US pluralism, diversity and tolerance to Pakistan to help deal with the sectarian violence there. Really Senator? Care to look at your trigger-happy police force and the fires of racism in your own backyard?
Discussions of the killing of Michael Brown reveal how deeply embedded racial hatred is in US society. “He was six foot four inches”, “he had just robbed a store” are some inane statements. The fact that he was unarmed and had his hands raised saying, “My hands are up” makes no difference. Religious and sectarian hatred has putrefied Pakistan. People are friendly until they find out that the other person is Ahmedi, Shia or Christian, and then just because of that they deserve to die.
In both the US and Pakistan, generations have been bathed in racial or religious hatred. It seems the only controllable thing in this equation is the availability of guns. And funnily, if the government puts its mind to it, de-weaponisation is possible in Pakistan. Not so in the US, courtesy the NRA. With the fact that the US police guns down black youths on a regular basis, the prognosis in the US is a lot grimmer than it is in Pakistan, and makes the Missouri protestors’ placard, “Stop killing us”, even more poignant.
The writer specialises in addiction and family medicine. She may be contacted at [email protected]