Author: Murtaza Razvi
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: June 2, 2011
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/where-nobody-is-safe-and-nobody-talks/798253/0
Free for all" and "killing fields" are the clichés that
best describe Pakistan today. From a former prime minister to a sitting governor
and a cabinet minister; from ordinary citizens to journalists to the police
and the armed forces, no one is safe here anymore. This is a country at war
with itself - and nobody's talking about it, because an all-enveloping cloud
of denial is suspended over its skies and refuses to go away. Those who dare
talk pay with their lives, like journalist Saleem Shahzad did on Monday.
He was made a horrible example of: abducted,
tortured to death and then dumped in a canal to be discovered a day later
at a head works downstream. The whole affair remains curiously suspicious
indeed. Even the efficiency with which the Punjab police moved to find, identify,
process and return the body to his heirs is suspect. Accusations of a more
serious nature have since been flying in all directions: such-and-such intelligence
or security agency killed him; the ISI is the global favourite in such matters
of late, so the consensus falls on the obvious rogues who are believed to
have infiltrated the ranks of the formidable spy agency - though religious
extremists cannot be ruled out as the perpetrators, either acting on their
own or at the behest of the agencies.
The prime minister, like a responsible head
of a democratic government, has ordered an inquiry into the gruesome murder
of a journalist who had a reputation for courageous reporting, for knowing
his subject - terrorism and its military nexus - all too well, routinely ruffling
many feathers. He rubbed shoulders with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Toiba,
the Jamaat ud-Dawa and such like insiders; and the ISI had warned him of the
danger posed to his life only last year.
What more now is the official enquiry going
to reveal? It's all there for anyone to see, in black and white, for the colours
here have long gone missing; even spilled blood turns black by the time all
is said and done. In a country where government-commissioned Scotland Yard
and UN inquiry teams were shunned arrogantly by sitting civil-military officials
in the matter of questioning to get to the murderer of Benazir Bhutto, Saleem
Shahzad is a mere statistic. Last year, 11 Pakistani journalists were killed
in the line of duty. This year again we wait for December for Reporters Without
Borders to tell us whether we've improved on last year's figure.
So who are the killers that carry out such
cold-blooded assassinations? There's a long list of the accused: political
parties, ethnic nationalists and insurgents, foreign and home-grown militants,
criminals, the gung-ho amongst the security and intelligence apparatus and
ordinary citizens acting on their own to win a place in Paradise (like Governor
Salman Taseer's killer). The killing of four Chechens in cold blood by the
security agencies in Quetta two weeks ago in broad daylight, with TV cameras
capturing the two unarmed men and two women - who showed no signs of resistance
and were willing to court arrest - are scenes right out of Wild West flicks.
While the Supreme Court has taken suo motu notice of the shooting, you could
be certain that no heads would roll. Killing fields, indeed.
And even when you are caught killing red-handed,
like the CIA spy Raymond Davis was, the family of the victim is often cajoled
into accepting blood money to let the killer walk free, under a very controversial
Islamic law. It would be unfair to say that only the likes of Raymond Davis
get away under such circumstances. For every Davis caught in years, scores
of Pakistanis walk away with murder virtually every day, due to the patent
injustice that controversial Islamic laws have unleashed. As for the judiciary
which presides over such laws, consider the example of Justice Khalil ur-Rahman
Ramday of the Supreme Court - the chief justice's handpicked favourite, whose
tenure he got extended last year. In a remarkable statement challenging the
attorney general on the recently-passed 18th Amendment to the constitution,
he asked a hypothetical question with words to this effect: If tomorrow parliament
passes a law declaring our legal system secular, do you expect us to accept
that too? What a country, and what a sense of constitutionalism!
The minorities and women are in double jeopardy.
A whole set of controversial Islamic laws threatens their very existence.
In many cases their testimony is one-half of that of an adult male Muslim,
and you need only two adult male Muslims to proceed against a blasphemy accused.
One wrong step by a woman or a minority citizen and they've had it. Intolerance
to changing the status quo has reached alarming levels. Where threats don't
work to silence a whistleblower, abductions and killings do the job.
Little did Jinnah know when he declared before
the constituent assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947: "In this state
of Pakistan, you are free to go to your mosques, your temples and places of
worship... religion shall have nothing to do with the business of the state..."
Since then, so much has gone wrong with his Pakistan that nothing short of
a Gandhi can fix it. Our tragedy is that we were not built to raise Gandhis.
- The writer is an editor with 'Dawn', Karachi
