“Terrorism emerges from blind hatred of an Other, and that in turn is the product of three factors: fear, rage and incomprehension. Fear of what the Other might do to you, rage at what you believe the Other has done to you, and incomprehension about who or what the Other really is — these three elements fuse together in igniting the deadly combination that kills and destroys people whose only sin is that they feel none of these things themselves — Dr Shashi Tharoor.
That surreal moment when words become stilted, topics seem commonplace, the attempt to put coherence into thoughts half-hearted, and the one persistent feeling is that of futility. Why type hundreds of words in a vain endeavour to decipher sense in the chaos around one when even truth uttered aloud is met with nothing but ennui, and horror of horrors, apathy? Why write when the mess around one congeals into that mass of ugliness where even the pristine white distorts into the blackest of black. What is the point of being wide awake past-sehri to discern why things are not what they should be when the answer is as clear as the bright July morning sun? Pakistan. My Pakistan. And I shake my head. The love, undying, eternal love for one’s homeland, and the ever-growing feeling of gloom when the homeland is zigzagging, steadily, into an abyss of…nothingness. Man-made. All the way. Made in Pakistan. In surplus.
On the second day, two soldiers were killed in a shoot-out with militants in the Kurrum Agency.
The nameless, faceless soldiers will not get any tags of martyrs, and the bullets rage on.
On the third day, the Lashkar-e-Islami — the second word of whose name is so ironical looking at the curriculum vitae of the group that the less said the better — beheaded a man from the group of the 60-person jirga sent by the PML-N candidate for NA-46, Sohail Afridi. The body was found by a roadside on the fourth day in Droadda area of Bara tehsil, an unsubtle message to the government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan: you wrong us, we won’t talk; we have too many guns and machetes and too few to kill. Thus, we kill who we can. Do what you can. And our guess is it will be: nada. Until we kill again.
On the 10th day, six soldiers — who will remain unnamed because guess what, no one cares: a soldier is just an ordinary person and an ordinary human being lives incognito, lives and dies an incognito life — were bombed into pieces as their vehicle went near a quiet device by the road. This was North Waziristan’s capital Miranshah. And guess what, what happens in FATA remains in FATA. It barely, nay, never concerns the rest of Pakistan.
On the 15th day, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) bombed the Residency in Ziarat.
On the 16th day, there was a bus from the Bahadur Khan Women’s University, Quetta. It was full of laughing female teenagers studying to be as substantial to the workforce as the boys in their regressive region. One unassuming woman entered the full-of-life bus, looked around blankly, and without further ado, blew herself to bits, killing 14 of the teenagers, the bus a dead pile of slivers of human flesh and burnt pieces of metal. The bloodlust was still unsatiated. A group that very un-ironically calls itself Lashkar of Jhangvi attacked a hospital full of sick children, elderly, dying women and boys, scared girls and nervous men. You are the jihadists of a militia, there are no rules of engagement in your battles, your jihad is against your fellow countrymen, and the arms with which you spray the people in the hospital, in cold nonchalance, creating hell on earth, make you smugly secure you have a one-way ticket to paradise.
On the 23rd day, three Ukrainians, two Slovakians, two Chinese, one Lithuanian, one Nepalese, one Chinese-American, one American and their Pakistani guide were stopped, robbed, and shot in cold blood in Gilgit near the base camp of Nanga Parbat, one of the world’s highest peaks, in one of the most ‘dangerous countries of the world’: Pakistan. The motive: Americans bomb militants hiding in FATA who kill their fellow Pakistanis and many Afghan, NATO and American soldiers in Afghanistan, ergo it is their moral duty to seek vengeance. The identity of the victims is irrelevant. They will kill who they want, where they can. Thus spoke Ehsanullah Ehsan of the in-your-face-but-catch-me-if-can-Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The man seems to have all media houses on his speed dial, but his skill to remain off the radar is worthy of the vanishing prowess of Houdini. Slow clap, law-enforcement agencies of Pakistan.
On the 30th day, the terror-ravaged but very resilient cities of Quetta and Peshawar saw an orgy of death once again. 40 died. More than 100 were wounded. In Quetta, the victims…yes, believe it or not…were the very peaceful Shi’ite Hazaras. Again. More tombstones dampened the already over-crowded graveyards, and the militants, the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, roamed the streets as if it was just another day.
Places sacred to different sects, most prominently, to the ‘minority’ Shia, which happens to be a very substantial part of the population of Pakistan (according to Vali Nasr, the leading American expert on the Middle East, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, it is 30 million). Three were killed in an Imambargah in Bilal Colony, Karachi, and 11 were injured. Their crime: their faith.
A mosque in Garngi Payan village, Mathra, Peshawar, saw one worshipper of Allah bombed to death. His crime: faith. The outcome: falling victim to the cannibalistic side of human beings. The explanation? Only Allah knows.
As 31 were blown to pieces and 65 hurt in Abu Talib imambargah, Hazara Town, Quetta, the news reports revealed them to be mostly Hazaras. The nation RIP’ed in silence, the government offered condolences, and of course, ordered an inquiry. Dozens of families destroyed, all in a made-in-Pakistan bomb blast.
In 30 days 616 were killed. More than 535 injured. The number kept pace with the number of the previous month. There was no let up. Bombs — remote-detonated, hidden in plain sight and human — were used. Automatic guns made gaping holes in unarmed bodies. Limbs, and even heads, were severed. The killed became statistics in a country already burdened under too many coffins, too many freshly-dug graves, too many tsk-tsk’ing citizens, media and politicians. The unarmed killed included 33 women and six children.
The month was June. Of 2013.
As more than 1,000 families paid the price for, incredulously, just being the citizens of an apparently lawless Pakistan where the armed is the one who reigns supreme, life went on for the ones in power. It is the Pakistan where the accountability is next to nil; where the law-enforcement agencies are ill-trained, ill-equipped, overburdened, overworked; where the courts are busy with trivia; where the lawyers are paid to participate in protests; where the judges are terrorised into releasing the arrested terrorists; and where the powerful political entities pay homage to the violence-inciting, hatred-promoting religious groups whose very allegiance to Islam is the desecration of the very underpinning of the religion whose Messenger, Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), was the biggest champion of compassion, forgiveness and fairness.
The killed will remain unknown. Their deaths will not have any FIRs turn into serious investigations, suo-motu’ed into arrests of the ‘unknown’ enemy, trialed in courts and culminate in sentencing. The Lashkars, the Sipahs, the Taliban and the others will bomb as and when they see a group of Pakistanis ‘ordinary’ enough to be killed. There will be breaking news. TV anchors will lambast the government. The opposition will attack the government. The government will attack the former government. Twitter will have bursts of outrage. Inquires will be announced. And then…silence. Chilling, soul-numbing, gut-wrenching silence. Until the next blast. Until the next pile of burnt, mutilated bodies of Pakistanis, aka statistics of terrorism. Until the next group namaz-e-janaza.
And I sit here past the fajr azaan of the 14th of Ramzan, the ayat I read on the fourth sehri echo through my very tired, uncomprehending mind:
“If anyone slew a person it would be as if he slew the whole people and if anyone saved a life it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people” — The Quran: V:32.
Who are we: the former or the latter?
The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times. She tweets at @MehrTarar and can be reached at [email protected]