What is there left to say? What can anyone or I say that has not been said before, or is not obvious? Which words have not been used before to stop the killing fields of Pakistan’s armed forces? Our words, our emotions, our frustrations, our despair and our wretchedness seem not to matter — not to the establishment or to its tentacles of the security forces and agencies.
At first I saw the incomplete video. It was horrific and made my heart sink. Then came a flurry of the ‘fuller’ versions, with clearer dialogue, a longer beginning and a longer end. I died many deaths watching it. I tried turning away, but there was no escape.
My heart went out to Sarfaraz — the young unarmed boy who was gunned down in Karachi on June 8. I tried to imagine the terror he must have felt. The most heartbreaking moments were those of him asking his killers to take him to the hospital. No, I am sorry, the most searing were those of him sitting up and looking around him. His strength draining, he stopped screaming and he lay back down quietly — to bleed. He sat up again, with superhuman effort and, seeing his fate sealed, lay down for the last time, to accept it. All this while the Rangers personnel who had shot this unarmed boy stood around and watched. Just watched a terrified, wounded human being die.
I tried not to think about his mother watching and knowing all this but by this time uncontrolled tears were rolling down my face. Then, the deepest sorrow began to give way to red-hot anger. What language do these animals understand? Clearly, not that of words.
I can assure the heads of all the security forces and security agencies that I am not the only one who went through these emotions. Most Pakistanis, who saw the images of how mercilessly Sarfaraz Shah was killed, have gone through them. Imagine the force of anger and hatred of hundreds of millions of Pakistanis for the armed forces and security agencies of their country.
Clearly, the security apparatus did not learn from history. It did not learn from the fury or despair of the almost de-humanised militants, of the human bomb factories they created years ago — the jaishes, sipahs and lashkars that have now morphed into state enemies.
The generations of jihadis created by the military/security apparatus turned on their masters because of a sense of betrayal and fury of being hung out to dry. The jihadis were prepared, primed and lubricated to mess with India and Afghanistan, and then of course expediently taken off and thrown away. The depth of fury common Pakistanis now feel towards their security forces is not dissimilar to the militants’, though it arises from a very different set of reasons.
This is the age of the electronic media and the mounting evidence of state atrocities against its own citizens cannot be covered up, as it used to be. The emperor is naked and the people are not laughing.
And you know what? Pathetic denials of culpability, or lashing out at the victims of repression and terror, as witnessed by the laughable ISPR statement of June 9, will just not cut it anymore.
Indeed, are “some quarters, because of their perceptual biases, trying to deliberately run down the armed forces”? I do not think so. Somehow, I doubt the unanimous finger pointing at the country’s security agencies for killing-and-dumping of Baloch intellectuals and nationalists is a “perceptual bias”.
I also doubt it was a mere perception that it was the Rangers who killed Sarfaraz Shah. I doubt that those up in arms against this coldblooded murder were “trying to create divisions between important institutions of the country”.
And “all of us should take cognisance of this unfortunate event and put an end to it”? Oh, how very unfortunate — the public have caught on to what has been going on for the last several decades. The public actually read e-mails by Saleem Shahzad naming Pakistan’s ‘premier’ spy agency, the ISI, and not India’s RAW, as being responsible, in case something happened to him. How tragic. No foreign hand? Disaster. And the military now wants us to “put an end” to our resistance to oppression and murder. The only thing now I can say about the military high command is:
“Lucy in the sky with diamonds,
Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain,
Her rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies,
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers that grow so incredibly high,
Emperor, we are not laughing.”
The Military Inc. had better understand that its relationship with Pakistan and its citizens is what needs to be reassessed “within the larger ambit of bilateral relations” — not with the US.
The writer is a journalist and can be reached at [email protected]