Daily Times

Sir: You may have studied about it in our social study books as the ninth-largest city in Pakistan is Quetta; it was a capital, and capital are revered. But no one ever talked about Quetta outside of textbooks.

Two years ago, a tragic attack at Police Training Academy in Quetta, in this outrageous attack 61 were killed, and injured more than 120.

The dead bodies were piled up, young men in the prime of their youth, young men that fall in the same age bracket as our brother and sons, our husbands and finances, our friends and loved ones. The dead bodies piled up and we didn’t pause. Our lives went on, the way our lives have always gone on as Quetta bleeds.

Our newsfeeds didn’t go very black, our conversations didn’t change so much, our plans weren’t disrupted at all. The dead piled up in Quetta — youngmen who were training to protect others, their bodies shrouded in multi-coloured blankets, a pair of naked feet poking out from underneath the fabric here, a hint of garment visible there; young men who were training to protect other lying still and cold on the ground outside a hospital, oblivious to the stares of those ground them and our lives went on. When terrorists struck the APS School in Peshawar, we came to gather.

We came to gather from Karachi to Delhi, from London to New York, because the sufferings of children known no boundaries. Because killing the young sudden knife tearing open the heart of the world. Now the dead bodies of young adults pile up in Quetta, men the age of our brothers and sons and lovers and friends, and we go on with our lives like nothing has changed. In August, an entire generation of lawyers was killed in Quetta-every single senior practicing lawyers and barrister died in a terrorist attack at a hospital, on August 8, 2016. And we went on with our lives as if it wasn’t our problem, not so much, not really. What drives this apathy? What drives our inability to realise the magnitudes of these horrors? What drives our continued silence on Quetta? On Balochistan?

Will never talk about Quetta outside of textbooks? Will we never talk about Balochistan? Can we talk about Dera Bugti, which houses four major gas fields, but is itself deprived of gas? Can we talk about Sui, whose people are shivering in the cold, despite providing natural gas to the entire country? Can we talk about Alamdar Road, where Hazara families sat in the open air alongside the decaying bodies of their children and sibling, their parents and partners, unable to lower their loved ones into the ground, forced to suffer the brutality of displaying their dead to the world, in the hopes of media coverage of their plight? Can we talk about last night, when 61 young cadets training to be protectors, lost their lives to a terrorist attack? Can we talk about Balochistan and Quetta?

NAVEED ABBAS MAITLO

Khairpur Mirs

Published in Daily Times, December 30^th 2018.