The blood on our hands

Three attacks on schoolchildren which define the failure of our policies

My generation born under the hammer of General Ziaul Haq’s dictatorship has borne witness to the great self-inflicted destruction undertaken in the name of Afghan jihad. December 16, 2014 would stay, at least for a few years, in our national conscious and perhaps conscience and then vanish for good like so many other tragedies before. Those children and other innocents have paid the ultimate price for mistakes committed by others in the name of “strategic depth”, “Islamic brotherhood” and “greater national interest” and most importantly our Afghan policy.

The Army Public School carnage should not be forgotten. Unfortunately for a nation which keeps hacking away at its future even before it blossoms, APS is not the only incident in which children have brutally been killed.



PHOTO: FILE

Today my heart bleeds when I recall December 16 but in remembering these innocents, my memory takes me down the vista of years. It takes me back 30 years to 1986 where I find myself sitting in my school classroom.

There was a boy who used to sit next to me, Ijaz Khan. One day Ijaz was in a great rush; his brother wanted to meet him, he said. Ijaz left and came back in tears.

“There was a blast in a school in our village in Garhi Qamardin. My brother is missing,” he hurriedly told us and left. Later, we discovered his brother was unharmed but other children were not so fortunate.

I still remember those bloodied schoolbags and pairs of shoes in the PTV kharbarnama footage at night. A truck laden with explosives had been parked just outside the school and the resultant blast left dozens dead and injured.

Later police claimed the truck bomb was meant to be detonated at the historic Attock Bridge. The school was targeted “just by mistake”— a twisted attempt to calm people down.

There was an Afghan refugee camp just outside the school and the blame eventually came to rest on the refugees.

Fast forward another eight years to February 1994 and I am in another a place of learning—this time a lecture hall in university. “What about this operation, eh?” said one of my enthusiastic classmates. He wasn’t talking about a surgical operation but a Special Services Group (SSG) operation which resulted in the safe release of hostages from Afghan militants.

 



PHOTO: FILE

A school bus with 55 children and their teachers had been hijacked by three Afghan militants from Warsak Road in Peshawar. The terrorists managed to move the vehicle to Islamabad where they took their hostages inside the Afghan Embassy compound.

Knowing they held the cards and people’s hearts in their slippery grasp, the terrorists demanded $5 million and an airlift to Afghanistan. Those children were more than fortunate – they were rescued by SSG commandos in an operation inside the embassy which left all three terrorists dead.

In reaction, the Pakistani embassy in Kabul was torched by an angry mob. What was and has been set in motion as a reaction to our ‘gaining strategic depth’ resulted in havoc in our very own backyard. With nowhere to retreat and regroup with a population of 182 million naked and exposed to many enemy fronts.

I don’t have to think too hard to recall more tragedies when our interests along borders have exploded in the very heart of our cities.

It is September, 2011. My memories find me covering a terrorist attack. A private school’s van was ambushed by militants on Kohat Road near Mattani. Five children died as did the driver, and at least 30 others were injured.

The bus was heading towards Kala Khel, Khyber Agency when it was attacked by militants because residents of Kala Khel had raised a lashkar against them on directives from the government. Kala Khel was a vital route between Frontier Region Peshawar and Frontier Region Kohat and was important for the movement of militants.

Unlike the rest of the horror stories I have stored away in my head, APS doesn’t need to be conjured from the vaults of erroneous human memory – a year was not nearly enough for it to fade, weaken or to dull the pain. It surpassed all other attacks in its scope. We know all too well about it; the details of APS are literally the writing on the wall.

In my lifetime I have seen history repeating itself thrice. Government Primary School Garhi Qamardin attacked at the peak of Afghan War; a school bus of dreams hijacked by Afghan Mujahedeen born from our blood and long after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the resurrection of the father of the son, the birth of the Taliban after the war on terror. And so we entered another era of bloodshed and destruction, as yet unparalleled in its reach and intensity.

So on this December 16, let us remember all those children who were killed by terrorists. The “off-air” deaths because they were hearses of the poor. From Garhi Qamardin to APS, let’s hope the blood of innocent children forces us to see the gravity of the situation.