View from Pakistan: Half-measures can’t end extremism

Karachi: New years in Pakistan now arrive with the memories of massacres past. So it is with this one, when the commemorations of two assassinations that took place four years ago remind the country of the wounds that fester but do not heal. On January 4, 2011, Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was gunned down by Mumtaz Qadri, a guard who was part of the Elite Force that had been assigned to the governor’s security. It subsequently came to light that his motive for the killing had been Taseer’s vocal opposition to the blasphemy laws.

In the stunned aftermath of the brazen killing there were more shocks. During the three-day mourning period announced by then Prime Minister Iftikhar Gilani, the Jamaat-i-Ahle Sunnat Pakistan issued a statement saying, “No Muslim should attend the funeral or even try to pray for Salmaan Taseer or even express any kind of regret or sympathy over the incident”. The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan joined them by saying that anyone praying for the slain governor would also be guilty of blasphemy.

Siding with a murderer was not just an extremist project; when Qadri was produced in court, law-yers showered him with rose petals. A mere two months after the governor’s killing, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minister for minorities, and the only non-Muslim in the Cabinet, was gunned down. Mumtaz Qadri, the killer of Salmaan Taseer, is still alive and well in Adiala jail in Rawalpindi. A few months ago, he was implicated in having orchestrated an attack on a man convicted of blasphemy and another on trial for the same offence.

A few days ago, a vigil was held for the assassinated governor at Liberty Chowk in Lahore, where members of civil society gathered to mark his death and that of so many others who have died at the hands of extremists in the country. A group of nine to 10 men wielding batons showed up at the scene and began to attack the participants. Even as the country’s politicians seem to be clamouring to condemn extremism and lining up to justify the need for the establishment of military courts to try and convict terror suspects, there were few condemnations of the attack on the vigil. Nor have there been calls for finding out how and why Qadri continues to hold sway in prison.

The government’s inability to connect the dots between the unsolved assassinations of the past and the hopeful constitutional amendments of the future signals precisely why the latter is likely to fail in accomplishing its objectives. While military courts are being hugged and kissed as the solution to the problem of proliferating terror, existing iterations of extremism — the criminal, the vigilante, the imprisoned but unpunished and the legal — have yet to make their way into the public debate.

It is believed, perhaps, that leaving the more controversial issues — such as the ones that led to the killings of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti — to the side while the more recent and viscerally troubling Peshawar carnage is kept front and centre, will allow for the development of a national consensus against terror.
It is precisely in this assumption that the problem lies. If certain parts and components of extremism are dealt with and others are left untouched to appease the very forces that have unabashedly fomented terror in the country, then the half-measures of the present will be just as useless and ineffective as the inaction of the past.

It is clear that Pakistan’s current civilian set-up believes that passing the buck to the military, disavowing their own responsibility for convicting terrorists, is a good political game that will prevent them from putting their own lives on the line. All of that is well and good, and clearly understood by the watching and waiting public. What remains unclear, however, is what will happen to existing laws that have become instruments of terror and to the unpunished killers of forgotten assassinations.

By arrangement with Dawn