And now, where else but to the latest outrage and more: the killing of 24 innocent people, 21 Shia and three Sunnis who tried to protect them by not letting on who was Shia amid slogans of ‘Shia kafir’ and ‘Sipah-e-Sahaba Zindabad’; the arrest of an eleven-year-old Christian girl with Down Syndrome for blasphemy in the nation’s capital; and the kidnapping and stabbing to death of a Christian boy in Faisalabad whose body was then burnt by the perpetrators. My head hangs in shame.
Suo motu, My Lords?
P.S. Does it take rocket science to see where the killers of the Shia get their sustenance? The Sipah in its new incarnation is a leading member of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council. And, er, we know who is behind that!
Suo motu, My Lords?

Open letter to Their Lordships
By Kamran Shafi
Published: August 23, 2012

http://tribune.com.pk/story/425178/open-letter-to-their-lordships/

And this one too. There are hundreds of equally painful stories. So many stories, so few story writers. 🙁

This is how Sipah-e-Sahaba and Taliban slaughter Shia Muslims in Pakistan – by Aqib Kazmi

I watched them cutting his nose, ears, hands, legs and neck with great pleasure as if they were sacrificing cattle on Eid day.

In 2008, three days after my uncle took charge as the principal of Elementary College Jamrud, he informed my father about a warning letter sent by a local Taliban official. The letter warned my uncle that they would kill him unless he left Jamrud immediately. Not one to fear death and abandon his responsibilities, he stayed on. However, the warning was taken seriously and he duly informed the administration, including the political agents of Jamrud.

Now, let me tell you a little about my uncle. He was a peace-loving man, an author and an educationalist. He had served in the department of education for 32 years and was even the controller of many educational boards in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Having reached grade 20, he was willing to retire peacefully. Eighteen educational awards to his name are enough to show just how loyal he was to his job and how ardently he desired a better education system.

Two days after the warning letter was issued, my uncle was kidnapped while he was on his way to office with his official guards. The guards offered no resistance to the kidnappers and were spared.

An ocean of grief swept upon to my family. Every member was bent in prayer for his safe return, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room, such was our fear.

Initially, we were informed that he was taken to Orakzai Agency. The kidnappers called us soon enough and asked us to arrange as much money as we could and to wait for their next call. Thus, we frantically started to do so. The very next day, they called us again saying that they had got the money and my uncle had been sold to another group who had sectarian biases. After that, we waited for seven days.

Those seven days stretched on – the longest days of my life. My uncle’s wife was paralysed with grief and kept murmuring:

“He has never wronged anyone; I am not going to believe in God’s justice if anything happens to him.”

We eventually received a call from Khyber Agency. A boy’s voice on the other end of the line informed us that my uncle’s body had been found in a water drainage pipe – his dead body.

Relatives rushed to the scene, but all we found was mangled body parts; we found a head with no nose and no ears, a body with no legs or hands. We also recovered a CD, but no other remains of his body were found.

My uncle did not deserve to die this brutal death.

ASWJ-Taliban terrorists kidnapped and brutally slaughtered these Shia Muslims of Kurram Agency in June 2008
A few days later, I watched the CD against my better judgement. In the last few moments of his life, I saw my uncle begging to be allowed to pray one last time. I saw the kidnappers laughing and saying “you are an infidel”; I saw them cutting his nose, ears, hands, legs and neck with great pleasure, as if they were sacrificing cattle on Eid day.

My uncle died a tragic death. Now, grief has surpassed me and all that is left in me is shame.

I feel shame because Pakistan left a person to die – a person who had never compromised on his duty, a person who worked 32 years to educate its people. I am ashamed of authorities who paid no attention at all to my uncle’s plight; I am ashamed of my protectors who pocket more than 70% of our budget in the name of protecting us. If someone cannot protect me inside my own country, how can they protect me from external threats?

More than 1,500 cases of kidnapping for ransom have been registered in FATA during the last four years and not a single guilty person has been arrested. Millions of rupees have been looted from innocent people and hundreds of CDs have been sent to their families.

Who should I blame?

Things will only get worse if the authorities don’t take any action. There are currently three security forces working in FATA i.e. the levies, the Army, and the Frontier Corps. Still, they have failed to catch any kidnappers.

Bringing peace to this area will not be easy, but we must take concrete steps to make it a possibility.

Source: Express Tribune

http://pakistanblogzine.wordpress.com/2012/03/04/this-is-how-sipah-e-sahaba-and-taliban-slaughter-shia-muslims-in-pakistan-by-aqib-kazmi/

Tanvir Ahmed Khan’s analysis:

Six factors stand out when one seeks to define the context of present-day sectarian violence (in which Shiites are by far the most suffered victims) in Pakistan. One, several political parties — not just the religious ones — turned their back on the tradition of democracy on which the founding fathers wanted to base Pakistan’s polity. Realising that they would not be able to capture power in Pakistan by the electoral process, they nurtured constituencies of followers fired by parochial passions of ethnicity and sectarianism. Two, there has been an instrumental use of religion to gain legitimacy for illegal seizures of power and for the liberation of Afghanistan from the Soviet Union and Kashmir from India for decades; it reached a high point with General Ziaul Haq. Three, the Afghanistan model spawned the organisation of armed militias wedded to the use of force to attain political ends in domestic politics as well. Four, the same model also provided a tested route to financial support from within the country and from foreign sources. Fifth, the foreign funding shrunk the religious reference to narrower and narrower ‘ideologies’; the fragmentation of the Sunni reference into a number of sub-sects employing varying degrees of radicalism and violence is a case in point. Tragically for Pakistan, patronage was available from internal and external sources in each and every case. This process weakened the democratic forces as well as bonafide religious parties engaged like their counterparts elsewhere in the Islamic world in synthesising Islamic precepts and values with the demands of the contemporary world. Sixth, the special focus on educational institutions by the darker religious movements made huge dents in the liberal academic tradition that Pakistan began with. It is not just a matter of religious madrassas that are demonised by the liberal elite indiscriminately. The animus has spread to the so called ‘secular’ academia as well.

As a responsible state, Pakistan should have remained loyal to the ideal of a Muslim civil state that had gathered people of all persuasions under its flag. They had transcended all past and present schisms to embrace a distinct nationhood. The essence of Pakistan lay in it being inclusive. A close study of the rise of militant organisations, including the unabashedly sectarian ones such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, demonstrates that they were able to gain strength largely because successive governments leveraged that strength into their own political designs. When they became a Frankenstein they were banned, though not much was done to prevent their protean existence. Nor did the state ever implement an effective policy to cut off external financing for the new incarnations of the same brand of radicalism. In time, the main instruments by which it could have curbed extremist organisations became dysfunctional as seen in frequent failures to carry out prosecutions to a point where the courts could hand down unambiguous judgments.
In fact, it is a bizarre facet of Pakistan’s history that foreign actors — be they terrorists invoking some perverted version of Islamism or Western intelligence establishments creating rival lobbies — are able to act with impunity and without any significant resistance from the state of Pakistan. This is an important factor in the growing polarisation in society.

It is naive to argue that law-enforcement agencies can eliminate the scourge of sectarianism by themselves. This kind of violence stems from years of evil indoctrination and is sustained by intricate organisation. The battle for the hearts and souls of our people will have to be won in several theatres. But success will not come until the state radically alters its view of the very existence of groups that are using force to recreate Pakistan, not so much in the image of Islam, but that of criminalised cults built around highly bigoted figures. Only the other day, the new president of France made the following observation during a ceremony connected to the sufferings of the Jewish people in France during the Nazi occupation: “All ideologies of exclusion, all forms of intolerance, all fanaticism, all xenophobia that seek to develop the mentality of hatred will find their way blocked by the Republic.” So, the state has to do much more than chase sectarian killers with poorly equipped and easily out-gunned police. It has to upgrade the apparatus of the state manifold but no less importantly, it has to make a solemn pledge to the people that it will, as Francois Hollande put it, block all channels that spread the poison that is now destroying our society. The first step in the war against extremism and violence is for the Republic of Pakistan to overcome its own ambivalence.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/425699/sectarian-schism-and-state-policy/

—–

Ayaz Amir’s analysis:

North Waziristan extremism has ideological sympathisers, sleeper cells and a support network, a mosque support network, running from one end of Pakistan to the other. And it is thriving in an atmosphere of radicalisation marked by such incidents as the killing of Shias in Quetta, the murder of Shias in Kohistan.

When the misuse of mosque loudspeakers becomes a national pastime, and the spewing of hatred against different sects an everyday occurrence; when a poor Christian girl such as Aasia Bibi in Sheikhupura is held on a blasphemy charge, setting off a train of events leading ultimately to the murder of governor Salmaan Taseer at the hands of one of his guards, and the guard is hailed as a hero of the faith, and lawyers shower him with rose petals when he appears before a magistrate; when someone in Bahawalpur is held on a blasphemy charge and after being sprung from police lockup is set on fire by an enraged mob; when another poor Christian girl is held on a blasphemy charge near Islamabad; and the Muslim community, which should be moved to outrage at such outrages, chooses to remain silent and do nothing; and when, in a comic interlude, the highest security agencies use clerical windbags to whip up the froth of a false nationalism; then be not surprised if religious radicalisation keeps receiving shots in the arm, and extremism as an ideological force turns into a more poisonous brew.

When the next bunch of Shias is murdered we read it as a newspaper item and shrug our shoulders and carry on as usual. And the call to prayers is sounded and it makes not the slightest difference to our collective conduct.

The kingdom of dread which religious extremism has created is much wider than the geographic confines of North Waziristan. Has America done this to us? Is America the sole agent of our misfortunes? Or, painful thought, did we sow the dragon’s teeth ourselves? And if that was the past, are we not watering the spreading plant even now?

The task at hand, it should be clear at this stage, is much larger than the necessity of any single military operation. Pakistan’s face has been distorted and it is that which must be set right if we are serious about rescuing what we like to call Iqbal and Jinnah’s Pakistan. Our minds have become twisted and a part of them are numb, incapable of feeling and thought, and that is why we choose to keep silent when our hearts should be brimming with outrage.

If we want to emerge from the shadows, into the dustbin of history must be cast the shibboleths and attitudes of our eminently forgettable past. This war now upon us can be won only if the first order of business is the liberation and emancipation of the Pakistani mind.

http://www.thenews.com.pk/Todays-News-9-128017-The-scope-and-tapestry-of-religious-extremism

——

Kamran Shafi’s analysis:

And now, where else but to the latest outrage and more: the killing of 24 innocent people, 21 Shia and three Sunnis who tried to protect them by not letting on who was Shia amid slogans of ‘Shia kafir’ and ‘Sipah-e-Sahaba Zindabad’; the arrest of an eleven-year-old Christian girl with Down Syndrome for blasphemy in the nation’s capital; and the kidnapping and stabbing to death of a Christian boy in Faisalabad whose body was then burnt by the perpetrators. My head hangs in shame.
Suo motu, My Lords?
P.S. Does it take rocket science to see where the killers of the Shia get their sustenance? The Sipah in its new incarnation is a leading member of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council. And, er, we know who is behind that!
Suo motu, My Lords?

http://tribune.com.pk/story/425178/open-letter-to-their-lordships/