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Creeping Inquisition (Lahore Daily Op-Ed)
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Satish
May 1, 2012, 10:01:58 PM5/1/12
to
While Christians and Hindus live in Pakistan as third class citizens
and Ahmedis are treated as condemned criminals, there is now an open
season against Shi’as. Regarded as contemptible heretics, they are
being shot in various parts of the country like beasts.
5-2-2012
Daily Times, Lahore, Pakistan
A creeping inquisition
By Razi Azmi
An 80-year-old man, Iqbal Butt, who had been accused of blasphemy but
released from jail after being found ‘not guilty’, has been shot dead,
allegedly by the very mosque imam who had falsely accused him of
blasphemy. In Iran, Yusuf Naderkhani was recently sentenced to death
for converting from Islam to Christianity. A few years ago, in
Afghanistan, Abdur Rehman was sentenced to death for the same offence,
but was put on a plane to Germany under western pressure after being
declared ‘insane’. Indeed, in any Muslim country, a Muslim would have
to be completely insane to convert to another religion. Likewise,
anyone would be mad to commit blasphemy intentionally in a Muslim
country.
The Saudi constitution defines every Saudi citizen to be a Muslim and
Malaysia makes it compulsory for all ethnic Malays to be Muslims.
Muslim Malays can convert non-Muslims to Islam, but are forbidden to
convert to any other religion themselves. There was the comical case
of a Malaysian-Chinese woman who had converted to Islam in order to
marry a Muslim (a legal requirement), but when she wanted to revert to
Christianity after the breakdown of her marriage, she was prevented by
the court from doing so.
In Pakistan, one Rana Asif Mahmood is on the verge of being forced to
become an accidental Muslim, thanks to a clerical error, which must
stand, because correcting it will be sacrilegious. Mehmood swears that
he is a Christian and he was recently elected to the National Assembly
as such from a reserved minority seat. However, he may now lose his
seat because the National Registration Authority (NADRA) erroneously
registered him as a Muslim since he has a ‘Muslim name’ (like most
Pakistani Christians). And should he want to keep his parliamentary
seat by insisting that he is a Christian, Mehmood may be liable to
lose his neck, for that might invite the charge of apostasy.
Apparently, he cannot keep both his seat and his neck! The conundrum
is the result of NADRA rules that prohibit it from changing on its
records, anyone’s religion from Islam to any other, though it is fine
in the opposite direction.
In countries where they are in a minority, Muslims work ceaselessly to
convert followers of other faiths to Islam. They claim that a quarter
of the six million Muslims in the US are converts from other
religions. The number of Muslim converts in Britain is reported to
have passed 100,000. Allah be praised for this one-way traffic!
A spelling error (actually a misplaced dot) in an Urdu exam by a
Christian eighth-grader named Faryal recently provoked a public
reaction suggesting that a major conspiracy to shake the foundations
of the Islamic Republic had been crushed. Faryal and her family should
consider themselves lucky, for she was merely expelled from the school
and her mother, a nurse, transferred to another hospital in a nearby
town to placate the sensitivities of true believers. A Muslim doctor
in Hyderabad went to jail for throwing into a dustbin the business
card of a medical salesperson. He was accused of sacrilege because a
part of the salesperson’s name was ‘Muhammad’.
While Christians and Hindus live in Pakistan as third class citizens
and Ahmedis are treated as condemned criminals, there is now an open
season against Shi’as. Regarded as contemptible heretics, they are
being shot in various parts of the country like beasts.
No one is safe, absolutely no one. Half of the thousand or so persons
now in jail on blasphemy charges are Sunni Muslims. We seem but a few
steps away from instituting something resembling the 15th century
Spanish Inquisition. Here is one description randomly taken from the
internet: “The accused woman lay naked on an escalera, a ladder tipped
so that her head was lower than her feet. The torturer had stretched
her out to her full length and bound her tightly. Iron prongs held her
jaws open. Her nostrils were stopped, allowing breathing only through
her mouth. She struggled, but her bounds permitted little movement,
and days of relentless questioning had left her exhausted. Three other
men stood over the woman in the torture chamber. A doctor observed her
reactions and assessed her general condition. The mandates of the 15th
century Spanish Inquisition required the presence of a physician to
monitor the health of the accused. The purpose of torture would be
nullified if the accused was physically unable to hear and understand
the proceedings. A confession, if it came, had to be a pure act, not
the half-conscious ramblings of a mortally wounded sinner. A clerk sat
at a crude wooden table, poised to write down the particulars of the
session. Witnesses had previously testified that on several successive
Saturdays, smoke did not emerge from the woman’s chimney, a strong
indication that she was secretly a practising Jew. During questioning,
the woman had insisted that although she was born a Jew, she was now a
converse, a convert to Catholicism. But the telltale signs indicated
that she was in fact a heretic, a practising Jew pretending to be a
Catholic and secretly subverting the Catholic faith.”
Pakistanis — Christians, Hindus, Ahmedis, Shi’as, even Sunnis — should
thank Allah that they live in 21st century Pakistan and not in 15th
century Spain. But that is small consolation for the families of those
killed for their faith or lack of it; or those who languish in jails,
accused of blasphemy or apostasy; or those who live in fear, because
of their religious beliefs.
Iqbal Butt’s fate is absolutely insignificant in a country where the
governor of the largest province can be shot dead by his own bodyguard
for merely suggesting that the blasphemy laws need to be revised and
where the federal minister for minority affairs is murdered merely for
speaking out for his fellow-Christians.
Call it a fundamentalist Frankenstein, the religious juggernaut, or
what you will, but two things are beyond doubt. Firstly, it is now out
of control. Secondly, citizens of the Islamic Republic are merely
reaping what they collectively sowed decades ago by making it the
business of the state to enforce, protect and promote religion.
http://dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\05\02\story_2-5-2012_pg3_5
"الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيم╠☼╣Ǚ∑§â€Ð:"
May 2, 2012, 12:21:30 PM5/2/12
to
On May 2, 3:01 am, Satish <sk.c...@gmail.com> wrote:
> While Christians and Hindus live in Pakistan as third class citizens
> and Ahmedis are treated as condemned criminals, there is now an open
> season against Shi’as. Regarded as contemptible heretics, they are
> being shot in various parts of the country like beasts.
>
> 5-2-2012
Let us see where the "fault lines" exist, for the benefit of a few:
> While Christians and Hindus live in Pakistan as third class citizens
> and Ahmedis are treated as condemned criminals, there is now an open
> season against Shi’as. Regarded as contemptible heretics, they are
> being shot in various parts of the country like beasts.
>
> 5-2-2012
Arab VS Persian
Sunni VS Shia
Hindi VS Paki (re: Kashmeer)
Catholic VS Protestant
Christianity VS Islam
Capitalism VS Communism
British Jewish Bankers are and have been too clever for their own good
"الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيم╠☼╣Ǚ∑§â€Ð:"
May 2, 2012, 12:36:20 PM5/2/12
to
On May 2, 5:21 pm, "الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيم╠☼╣Ǚ∑§â€Ð:"
I worry about Pakis being culled by the Whites and some of them blame
IRAN??!
not too clever, but a bit too sharp, r u a Mossad branch of ISI?
As I always say; some people are too sharp; I warn them that, like
Rupert Murdoch, they will always get their comeuppance by "cutting"
themselves!. Especially when God has allowed them to rise as high as
they possibly can. It makes
IRAN??!
not too clever, but a bit too sharp, r u a Mossad branch of ISI?
As I always say; some people are too sharp; I warn them that, like
Rupert Murdoch, they will always get their comeuppance by "cutting"
themselves!. Especially when God has allowed them to rise as high as
they possibly can. It makes
Satish
May 4, 2012, 12:25:41 AM5/4/12
to
On May 2, 9:36 am, "الصِّرَاطَ الْمُسْتَقِيم╠☼╣Ǚ∑§â€Ð:"
“Genocide is any act that puts the very existence of a group in
jeopardy” — Professor Henry Huttenbach.
19-4-2012
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012%5C04%5C19%5Cstory_19-4-2012_pg3_2
Shia genocide: nameless crime, faceless victims — I
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
maz...@me.com
When Winston Churchill in his August 24, 1941 speech described the
extermination of the Jews and Jewish Bolshevists by the Nazis in the
occupied Soviet territories, his vivid depiction of the “methodical,
merciless butchery” was quite accurate. Still, even the eloquent
Churchill had no specific term for the atrocities going on and had to
conclude, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” It would
be over a year before the Jewish lawyer Professor Raphael Lemkin
coined the word genocide for the crimes against humanity that
Churchill was alluding to.
The Shias of Pakistan, along with scores of other vulnerable groups,
have been under an unrelenting systematic assault since the height of
the Pak-Saudi-US jihad against the erstwhile Soviet Union. But over
the last several years the methodical, merciless butchery has reached
a point that is gruesome even by Pakistani standards of viciousness
and yet the slaughter of the Shias in Quetta, Kurram, Gilgit-
Baltistan, Karachi and Peshawar has remained a nameless crime. It is a
media norm to use euphemisms and sanitised phraseology to describe the
mass murder of a beleaguered community.
But not identifying the crime is not the only thing happening. There
is a systematic effort by the mainstream media to obfuscate the
religious — and in some cases ethnic — identity of the victims. In a
recent Twitter exchange with a young Hazara boy, a top Pakistani
television anchor wrote, “Hazaras should not call them Shias; they are
Pakistani Muslims and their blood is equal to all the other Pakistanis
[sic].” It appears to be a pretty benign comment unless one considers
the implications of reporting a nameless crime, now with nameless and
faceless victims.
However, before I proceed further, let there be no doubt that those
massacred recently in Quetta used to identify themselves as Shia
Muslims and belonged to the ethnic Hazara community. Their names are:
Ms Bakht Jamal, Zafar, Alam Khan, Ghulam Sakhi, Hafizullah, Nazir
Hussain, Mubarak Shah (Spini Road attack March 29, 2012), Ejaz Hussain
and Ali Asghar (Kirani Road attack April 2, 2012), Qurban Ali,
Muhammad Zia, Muhammad Hussain, Shabir, Nadir Ali, Saeed Ahmad (Prince
Road attack April 9, 2012); Muhammad and Ms. Fatima (Sattar Road and
Kasi Road respectively, April 13, 2012), Abdullah, Juma Ali, Muhammad
Ali, Syed Asghar Shah, Eid Muhammad (Brewery Road April 14, 2012), and
Suleiman Ali (Kawari Road April 16, 2012). This list is neither
exhaustive nor includes the injured.
This same anchor in a subsequent tweet laid the blame for the massacre
of the Hazara Shias on the presumed enemies of the Iran-Pakistan gas
pipeline. So now one does not know the crime, the victim or the
perpetrator — without which little, if any, meaningful remedial,
preventive or punitive intervention can take place. What Professor
Roger Smith et al had written about the genocide-denying scholars is
also apt for such media obfuscation: “Where scholars (in the present
case the media) deny genocide in the face of decisive evidence that it
has occurred, they contribute to a false consciousness that can have
most dire reverberations. Their message in effect is: murderers did
not really murder; victims were not really killed; mass murder
requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored,
glossed over ... (they) contribute to the deadly psychohistorical
dynamic in which unopposed genocide begets new genocides.”
Why does the media not identify the victims — and the perpetrators —
for who they are? The answer is not simple and has its roots in the
media persons being poorly informed, fearful of the perpetrators, or
downright complicit. Many well-meaning people are genuinely unaware of
who some of the victims are. A leading editor, in an otherwise
balanced editorial, had called the victims of the Quetta violence as
‘Hazarajat’, a term for the traditional geographic homeland in
Afghanistan of the Hazara tribes but never used for the people. Also
most Pakistanis have had little or no direct interaction with the
small closely-knit Hazara community of Quetta and find them to be some
sort of curiosity. But the foregoing remark by the anchorperson is
also ominous in that it dispenses with any acknowledgment of diversity
and upholds boilerplate conformity that the Pakistani state has been
perpetuating almost since its inception.
The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as ‘only’
Muslim. There are schools upon schools of Islamic jurisprudence that
have significant doctrinal differences. Setting some sort of benchmark
to qualify for the state’s protection spells disaster for the groups
that are numerically and logistically handicapped. More importantly,
the Islamisation of Pakistan and indoctrination of the armed forces
under General Ziaul Haq has made Wahhabism and its certain variants as
the de facto state creed. The inherent problem in using religion as
the pivot of the national polity is that the adherents of the myriad
interpretations of religion compete with each other and with everyone
else — by armed means eventually — to assure that their model
prevails. While the Shiite and others were only outnumbered before,
after the Wahhabist militants became the veritable arm of the
Pakistani security establishment, they were outgunned too. When the
Pakistani state consummated its compact with the jihadists, neither
party signed a ‘for external use only’ clause. By virtually sharing
the right to use violence with the non-state actors, the Pakistani
state empowered them to define — and enforce — what the good
‘Pakistani Muslim’ should be.
Before discussing the role of deep state-supported militants in
silencing the media, activists and politicians, it is pertinent to
mention another deflection tactic used by genocide deniers, i.e. the
use of terms like sectarian warfare. When the former French president
Francois Mitterrand was asked about the genocide in Rwanda, his
infamous response was, “Genocide or genocides? I don’t know what one
should say!” Mitterrand was effectively laying the groundwork for
defending the French-supported Hutus through ‘double genocide theory’,
implying that violence was mutual. Similar false narratives that
allege Iranian support for the Shias and present the Shias’ genocide
in Pakistan as a proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia are rife.
The false narratives notwithstanding, we are not in the presence of an
unnamed crime. As this newspaper of record wrote in its April 16, 2012
editorial: “Quetta in particular has become the theatre of this
sectarian genocide.” The genocide of the Shias has put their very
existence in jeopardy throughout Pakistan.
*****************
26-4-2012
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012%5C04%5C26%5Cstory_26-4-2012_pg3_2
Shia genocide: nameless crime, faceless victims — I
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
maz...@me.com
“When people’s lives are at risk from persecution, there is a strong
moral obligation to do what is reasonably possible to help. It is not
enough to seal up the windows against the smell”-- Jonathan Glover.
But as far as the Shia genocide goes, sealing up the windows is
precisely what seems to be happening in Pakistan. The media, mullahs,
most politicians and, most importantly, the military, are all
complicit in this conspiracy of silence. The activists, on the other
hand, remain weak, under threat and consumed by semantics to
highlight, forcefully and meaningfully, the systematic extermination
of the Shia. The ordinary Pakistani’s apathy is reminiscent of the
second part of Glover’s quote: “The world would be a terrible place if
the whole truth about this aspect of us was what Norman Geras had
called ‘the contract of mutual indifference’: we leave other people in
peril un-rescued and believe that others will do the same to us.”
The overarching reasons for the complicity, silence, indifference and
thus inaction are the fear of the perpetrators and a desire to seek
their political favour. Shortly after the recent spate of killings of
the Shia Hazara community, there was a large political rally in that
city by the up and coming party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI).
To the utter dismay of the Quetta Shia community, the leader of the
PTI, Imran Khan, failed to condemn from the podium the persecution of
the Shia. Khan, instead, quietly showed up at the Hazara Shia
Imambargah in Nichari, Quetta, to offer routine condolences.
Contrarily, the PTI President, Javed Hashmi proudly claims to have
christened the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC) — a conglomerate of
assorted jihadist and religio-political groups including the
reincarnation of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The PTI’s vice-
president Chaudhry Ijaz is seen unabashedly rubbing shoulders on the
DPC stage with the SSP, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Jamat-ud-Dawa
leaders. Similarly, Imran Khan loudly praises the Musharraf crony,
General (retired) Ali Jan Orakzai, whom the Kurram Shia consider the
architect of their persecution. The PTI consorting with jihadis and
issuing meek condolences has everything to do with its quest for
electoral gains in Punjab where the India-oriented jihadist groups are
the virtual kingmakers now.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has played an equally dubious
and dirty role in its tacit support of the Punjabi militant groups. In
the PML-N’s case, a doctrinal transformation of its leadership due to
influence from and/or to appease its Saudi mentors, an increasing
recognition of jihadist power in Punjab and quite significantly, the
fear factor played a role in the party’s change of heart from hunting
down the militants to its leaders actually paying tribute at the tombs
of SSP’s terrorist leaders. Ironically, the SSP/LeJ terrorist late
Riaz Basra had once not only masterminded a bomb attack on Nawaz
Sharif, then the prime minister of Pakistan, in January 1999, but also
came within arm’s length of him.
Owen Bennett Jones chronicles in his book, “Riaz Basra showed his
contempt for the police’s capabilities when he turned up at one of
Nawaz Sharif’s political surgeries (khuli kacheri). Having slipped in
with the petitioners who wanted to see the prime minister, Basra
positioned himself directly behind Nawaz Sharif and got one of his
accomplices to take a picture. Three days later, the staff at the PM
house received a print of the photograph. The faces of Sharif and
Basra, within a few feet of each other, had been circled and
underneath there was an inscription — it’s that easy.” Interestingly,
the Punjab government, on the orders of the Punjab High Court, had
been giving Basra’s then-imprisoned successor Malik Ishaq’s family a
monthly stipend! Little wonder then that Ishaq has been thumbing his
nose at the law enforcement agencies for years now, including at the
DPC rallies.
The fear instilled in the media, human rights activists and the
politicians is however not just because of the ruthlessness of the
Punjabi Taliban, a la SSP, LeJ and LeT, et al. There is an acute
awareness, especially in the political class, that these groups have
been given the most favoured jihadist status by the Pakistani security
establishment. Just like the Jalaluddin Haqqani terror network on the
western frontier, the India-oriented, Punjab-based jihadists receive a
kid-glove treatment from the deep state operatives, complete with
protection or rescue from police custody and operational freedom.
The Iran connection and nonsense peddled about the imaginary tit-for-
tat sectarian warfare are red herrings to divert focus from the
compact between the Pakistani military establishment and its jihadist
proxies used as lynchpins of the Pakistani foreign policy agenda. The
seeds of this symbiosis were sown right at the inception of Pakistan,
with each subsequent military regime continuing to do its part in
grooming the relationship. The adoption of Islam-based national
ideology under Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq’s wholesale Islamisation, Pervez
Musharraf’s duplicitous policy of using jihadists while milking the
west for ‘enlightened moderation’, and ultimately General Kayani’s
overt India-centricity has provided the Islamist terrorists a
continuity of patronage to the extent that now the tail may be wagging
the dog.
The Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn had written, “The
imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers
stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.” The
Pakistani brass had made a conscious decision to not just deploy
ideology but religious ideology to further its domestic and foreign
policy agenda, and along the way, chose a particularly virulent strain
of exclusivist religious extremism whose thirst would hardly be
quenched by Shia blood. To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, Pakistanis
perhaps view the sectarian cleansing and genocide as direct threats to
their furniture. They are oblivious that the exclusivist ideologies
like Takfir or Nazism never stop at one victim group — or stop on
their own.
In the face of public indifference, lack of political will and the
state might protecting the perpetrators, honest witnessing and
reporting takes on an unprecedented importance and urgency. Had the
Jewish people thrown into gas chambers been identified merely as
Germans or Poles, the world conscience might have never been awakened.
It is therefore imperative that the Shia victims are identified and
named accurately. And equally important is to name the perpetrators,
when possible. When mass media misrepresents or obscures information
about these atrocities, it becomes incumbent upon the human rights
activists to report that neither the crime is nameless nor the victims
faceless — it is a Shia genocide. They should be the last ones to seal
up the windows.
“Genocide is any act that puts the very existence of a group in
jeopardy” — Professor Henry Huttenbach.
19-4-2012
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012%5C04%5C19%5Cstory_19-4-2012_pg3_2
Shia genocide: nameless crime, faceless victims — I
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
maz...@me.com
When Winston Churchill in his August 24, 1941 speech described the
extermination of the Jews and Jewish Bolshevists by the Nazis in the
occupied Soviet territories, his vivid depiction of the “methodical,
merciless butchery” was quite accurate. Still, even the eloquent
Churchill had no specific term for the atrocities going on and had to
conclude, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” It would
be over a year before the Jewish lawyer Professor Raphael Lemkin
coined the word genocide for the crimes against humanity that
Churchill was alluding to.
The Shias of Pakistan, along with scores of other vulnerable groups,
have been under an unrelenting systematic assault since the height of
the Pak-Saudi-US jihad against the erstwhile Soviet Union. But over
the last several years the methodical, merciless butchery has reached
a point that is gruesome even by Pakistani standards of viciousness
and yet the slaughter of the Shias in Quetta, Kurram, Gilgit-
Baltistan, Karachi and Peshawar has remained a nameless crime. It is a
media norm to use euphemisms and sanitised phraseology to describe the
mass murder of a beleaguered community.
But not identifying the crime is not the only thing happening. There
is a systematic effort by the mainstream media to obfuscate the
religious — and in some cases ethnic — identity of the victims. In a
recent Twitter exchange with a young Hazara boy, a top Pakistani
television anchor wrote, “Hazaras should not call them Shias; they are
Pakistani Muslims and their blood is equal to all the other Pakistanis
[sic].” It appears to be a pretty benign comment unless one considers
the implications of reporting a nameless crime, now with nameless and
faceless victims.
However, before I proceed further, let there be no doubt that those
massacred recently in Quetta used to identify themselves as Shia
Muslims and belonged to the ethnic Hazara community. Their names are:
Ms Bakht Jamal, Zafar, Alam Khan, Ghulam Sakhi, Hafizullah, Nazir
Hussain, Mubarak Shah (Spini Road attack March 29, 2012), Ejaz Hussain
and Ali Asghar (Kirani Road attack April 2, 2012), Qurban Ali,
Muhammad Zia, Muhammad Hussain, Shabir, Nadir Ali, Saeed Ahmad (Prince
Road attack April 9, 2012); Muhammad and Ms. Fatima (Sattar Road and
Kasi Road respectively, April 13, 2012), Abdullah, Juma Ali, Muhammad
Ali, Syed Asghar Shah, Eid Muhammad (Brewery Road April 14, 2012), and
Suleiman Ali (Kawari Road April 16, 2012). This list is neither
exhaustive nor includes the injured.
This same anchor in a subsequent tweet laid the blame for the massacre
of the Hazara Shias on the presumed enemies of the Iran-Pakistan gas
pipeline. So now one does not know the crime, the victim or the
perpetrator — without which little, if any, meaningful remedial,
preventive or punitive intervention can take place. What Professor
Roger Smith et al had written about the genocide-denying scholars is
also apt for such media obfuscation: “Where scholars (in the present
case the media) deny genocide in the face of decisive evidence that it
has occurred, they contribute to a false consciousness that can have
most dire reverberations. Their message in effect is: murderers did
not really murder; victims were not really killed; mass murder
requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored,
glossed over ... (they) contribute to the deadly psychohistorical
dynamic in which unopposed genocide begets new genocides.”
Why does the media not identify the victims — and the perpetrators —
for who they are? The answer is not simple and has its roots in the
media persons being poorly informed, fearful of the perpetrators, or
downright complicit. Many well-meaning people are genuinely unaware of
who some of the victims are. A leading editor, in an otherwise
balanced editorial, had called the victims of the Quetta violence as
‘Hazarajat’, a term for the traditional geographic homeland in
Afghanistan of the Hazara tribes but never used for the people. Also
most Pakistanis have had little or no direct interaction with the
small closely-knit Hazara community of Quetta and find them to be some
sort of curiosity. But the foregoing remark by the anchorperson is
also ominous in that it dispenses with any acknowledgment of diversity
and upholds boilerplate conformity that the Pakistani state has been
perpetuating almost since its inception.
The fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as ‘only’
Muslim. There are schools upon schools of Islamic jurisprudence that
have significant doctrinal differences. Setting some sort of benchmark
to qualify for the state’s protection spells disaster for the groups
that are numerically and logistically handicapped. More importantly,
the Islamisation of Pakistan and indoctrination of the armed forces
under General Ziaul Haq has made Wahhabism and its certain variants as
the de facto state creed. The inherent problem in using religion as
the pivot of the national polity is that the adherents of the myriad
interpretations of religion compete with each other and with everyone
else — by armed means eventually — to assure that their model
prevails. While the Shiite and others were only outnumbered before,
after the Wahhabist militants became the veritable arm of the
Pakistani security establishment, they were outgunned too. When the
Pakistani state consummated its compact with the jihadists, neither
party signed a ‘for external use only’ clause. By virtually sharing
the right to use violence with the non-state actors, the Pakistani
state empowered them to define — and enforce — what the good
‘Pakistani Muslim’ should be.
Before discussing the role of deep state-supported militants in
silencing the media, activists and politicians, it is pertinent to
mention another deflection tactic used by genocide deniers, i.e. the
use of terms like sectarian warfare. When the former French president
Francois Mitterrand was asked about the genocide in Rwanda, his
infamous response was, “Genocide or genocides? I don’t know what one
should say!” Mitterrand was effectively laying the groundwork for
defending the French-supported Hutus through ‘double genocide theory’,
implying that violence was mutual. Similar false narratives that
allege Iranian support for the Shias and present the Shias’ genocide
in Pakistan as a proxy battle between Iran and Saudi Arabia are rife.
The false narratives notwithstanding, we are not in the presence of an
unnamed crime. As this newspaper of record wrote in its April 16, 2012
editorial: “Quetta in particular has become the theatre of this
sectarian genocide.” The genocide of the Shias has put their very
existence in jeopardy throughout Pakistan.
*****************
26-4-2012
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012%5C04%5C26%5Cstory_26-4-2012_pg3_2
Shia genocide: nameless crime, faceless victims — I
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
maz...@me.com
“When people’s lives are at risk from persecution, there is a strong
moral obligation to do what is reasonably possible to help. It is not
enough to seal up the windows against the smell”-- Jonathan Glover.
But as far as the Shia genocide goes, sealing up the windows is
precisely what seems to be happening in Pakistan. The media, mullahs,
most politicians and, most importantly, the military, are all
complicit in this conspiracy of silence. The activists, on the other
hand, remain weak, under threat and consumed by semantics to
highlight, forcefully and meaningfully, the systematic extermination
of the Shia. The ordinary Pakistani’s apathy is reminiscent of the
second part of Glover’s quote: “The world would be a terrible place if
the whole truth about this aspect of us was what Norman Geras had
called ‘the contract of mutual indifference’: we leave other people in
peril un-rescued and believe that others will do the same to us.”
The overarching reasons for the complicity, silence, indifference and
thus inaction are the fear of the perpetrators and a desire to seek
their political favour. Shortly after the recent spate of killings of
the Shia Hazara community, there was a large political rally in that
city by the up and coming party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI).
To the utter dismay of the Quetta Shia community, the leader of the
PTI, Imran Khan, failed to condemn from the podium the persecution of
the Shia. Khan, instead, quietly showed up at the Hazara Shia
Imambargah in Nichari, Quetta, to offer routine condolences.
Contrarily, the PTI President, Javed Hashmi proudly claims to have
christened the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC) — a conglomerate of
assorted jihadist and religio-political groups including the
reincarnation of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The PTI’s vice-
president Chaudhry Ijaz is seen unabashedly rubbing shoulders on the
DPC stage with the SSP, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) and Jamat-ud-Dawa
leaders. Similarly, Imran Khan loudly praises the Musharraf crony,
General (retired) Ali Jan Orakzai, whom the Kurram Shia consider the
architect of their persecution. The PTI consorting with jihadis and
issuing meek condolences has everything to do with its quest for
electoral gains in Punjab where the India-oriented jihadist groups are
the virtual kingmakers now.
The Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has played an equally dubious
and dirty role in its tacit support of the Punjabi militant groups. In
the PML-N’s case, a doctrinal transformation of its leadership due to
influence from and/or to appease its Saudi mentors, an increasing
recognition of jihadist power in Punjab and quite significantly, the
fear factor played a role in the party’s change of heart from hunting
down the militants to its leaders actually paying tribute at the tombs
of SSP’s terrorist leaders. Ironically, the SSP/LeJ terrorist late
Riaz Basra had once not only masterminded a bomb attack on Nawaz
Sharif, then the prime minister of Pakistan, in January 1999, but also
came within arm’s length of him.
Owen Bennett Jones chronicles in his book, “Riaz Basra showed his
contempt for the police’s capabilities when he turned up at one of
Nawaz Sharif’s political surgeries (khuli kacheri). Having slipped in
with the petitioners who wanted to see the prime minister, Basra
positioned himself directly behind Nawaz Sharif and got one of his
accomplices to take a picture. Three days later, the staff at the PM
house received a print of the photograph. The faces of Sharif and
Basra, within a few feet of each other, had been circled and
underneath there was an inscription — it’s that easy.” Interestingly,
the Punjab government, on the orders of the Punjab High Court, had
been giving Basra’s then-imprisoned successor Malik Ishaq’s family a
monthly stipend! Little wonder then that Ishaq has been thumbing his
nose at the law enforcement agencies for years now, including at the
DPC rallies.
The fear instilled in the media, human rights activists and the
politicians is however not just because of the ruthlessness of the
Punjabi Taliban, a la SSP, LeJ and LeT, et al. There is an acute
awareness, especially in the political class, that these groups have
been given the most favoured jihadist status by the Pakistani security
establishment. Just like the Jalaluddin Haqqani terror network on the
western frontier, the India-oriented, Punjab-based jihadists receive a
kid-glove treatment from the deep state operatives, complete with
protection or rescue from police custody and operational freedom.
The Iran connection and nonsense peddled about the imaginary tit-for-
tat sectarian warfare are red herrings to divert focus from the
compact between the Pakistani military establishment and its jihadist
proxies used as lynchpins of the Pakistani foreign policy agenda. The
seeds of this symbiosis were sown right at the inception of Pakistan,
with each subsequent military regime continuing to do its part in
grooming the relationship. The adoption of Islam-based national
ideology under Yahya Khan, Ziaul Haq’s wholesale Islamisation, Pervez
Musharraf’s duplicitous policy of using jihadists while milking the
west for ‘enlightened moderation’, and ultimately General Kayani’s
overt India-centricity has provided the Islamist terrorists a
continuity of patronage to the extent that now the tail may be wagging
the dog.
The Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn had written, “The
imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers
stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.” The
Pakistani brass had made a conscious decision to not just deploy
ideology but religious ideology to further its domestic and foreign
policy agenda, and along the way, chose a particularly virulent strain
of exclusivist religious extremism whose thirst would hardly be
quenched by Shia blood. To paraphrase Arundhati Roy, Pakistanis
perhaps view the sectarian cleansing and genocide as direct threats to
their furniture. They are oblivious that the exclusivist ideologies
like Takfir or Nazism never stop at one victim group — or stop on
their own.
In the face of public indifference, lack of political will and the
state might protecting the perpetrators, honest witnessing and
reporting takes on an unprecedented importance and urgency. Had the
Jewish people thrown into gas chambers been identified merely as
Germans or Poles, the world conscience might have never been awakened.
It is therefore imperative that the Shia victims are identified and
named accurately. And equally important is to name the perpetrators,
when possible. When mass media misrepresents or obscures information
about these atrocities, it becomes incumbent upon the human rights
activists to report that neither the crime is nameless nor the victims
faceless — it is a Shia genocide. They should be the last ones to seal
up the windows.
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