Reactivism: why nothing gets fixed
We blame the politicians and the army, but we don’t blame ourselves for not demanding accountability and hard change
The writer is a postdoctoral researcher in the UK, working on cybersecurity, next-generation voting systems and virtual currencies
Mayssun Sukarieh, scholar and currently lecturer at King’s College London, writing for the Middle East Research and Information Project back in 2007 warned of a new trend: Palestinians housed in Lebanon’s refugee camps were growing increasingly weary at the world’s mounting fixation on humanitarian aid. In frustration, some refugees went so far as to mount a ‘relief-strike’. “We don’t need your boxes [of aid],” they told people. “We want our right of return.”
Apparently, not only are well-intentioned aid efforts often redundant and unnecessary, complicating daily life in the camps, but much more importantly, the Palestinians say that today’s exclusionary humanitarian mentality distracts from the core issues.
It was not like this in the old days, the Palestinians say. Up until the ‘90s, activism on their behalf was very cognisant of their essential identity, their right to their homeland and the glorious history of their struggle for liberation. But then somewhere along the line, the noble and celebrated Palestinian cause became all about “counting the pallets distributed from the aid warehouse”. The perception of heroic freedom fighters was replaced with a dehumanising image of perpetual refugees, helpless and needy, akin to “pets in need of portions of food everyday”.
How did this happen, this reduction of complex issues to one dimension, this focus on human suffering to the exclusion of all other concerns? Sukarieh has one answer: “These days, activism is led by depoliticised NGOs whose tactics and message are dictated by the neo-liberal language of humanitarian intervention [emphasis added].”
We witness this pattern in the current international debate around refugees. Their refugee status, their deprivation and victimhood has become their implicit identity now, and it fundamentally limits the discourse. No major Western politician talks about political solutions, of redress or return. There is no admission of complicity or guilt in creating this problem in the first place. Instead, everyone’s debating refugee quotas, aid budgets, fences and integration programmes. The refugees’ own problems hardly ever make it into mainstream media unless they conform to this popular narrative.
After the Charsadda attack, it should be obvious enough by now that a similar mentality dominates in Pakistan as well. Every time there is a national tragedy, a natural calamity like an earthquake or a flood, or some human rights violation or terrorist incident, we are collectively wracked by an overwhelming tidal wave of dark seething emotion. We fixate on the human costs, the suffering and the horror.
What is painfully missing in this equation is an activism geared towards human dignity, compassion and social justice. We don’t intellectualise our anger, we don’t ask hard, searching questions. There is little concept of a long-term, intelligent and systematic engagement with core issues. Instead, we mourn for the victims in a grand, collective, highly emotional catharsis, mediated by Facebook and Twitter. Then we are quick to move on to the next tragedy that comes along. Obviously nothing really gets fixed.
Sukarieh dubs this mindset ‘reactivism’, a counterfeit activism, where we are “perennially reacting to crises and never addressing their roots”.
A vivid demonstration of how counterproductive this stance is may be gauged from the recent anniversary of the Army Public School tragedy, at an event organised by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government, where parents of the murdered children mounted a highly charged protest against provincial and federal officials.
Why would they protest? The entire nation is already sympathetic to their cause. We know they suffer an incalculable loss and we honour their children as martyrs. But they are very bitter. They don’t want plots of land, they don’t want compensation. One year on, they only want truth. They want justice. They want accountability.
And the real shocker here — as Asad Rahim Khan wrote eloquently in these very pages — is that we have yet to even get a proper, objective and unambiguous account of what actually happened on December 16, 2014. We don’t really know anything for certain. How many attackers were there? Were they foreign or local? Who were these people? How did they get past multiple checkpoints? Where did the funding come from? Why are media reports and press statements so conflicting? Why have no heads rolled for the failures of the intelligence agencies? Where are the reforms? Why are we, the people, not raising a storm about this? Why are we not clamouring for a public inquiry?
Instead, we are in reactivism mode: we diligently change our display images on Facebook and craft emotional tweets. We blame the politicians, we blame the army, we blame foreign actors, but we never ever really blame ourselves for not demanding accountability and hard change, for our superficial activism, and our utter lack of civic engagement. Our entire conversation fixates on the horror, the suffering and the sacrifices; it is the discourse of victimhood.
The fatal cost of our position is that it actively perpetuates the status quo. This lack of focus and persistence on our part is why politicians get away with symbolic gestures and empty speeches. This suits them wonderfully well too. It is immensely difficult to reshape political realities, to fix structural injustices in society, a lot of feathers get ruffled and vested interests tend not to like it. It’s so much easier instead to give handouts. It makes for great photoshoots.
After all, politicians needn’t tackle structural problems like feudalism and mass poverty when they can simply use taxpayer money to launch the Benazir Income Support Programme instead. They need not initiate embarrassing inquiries and intelligence reforms when they can simply get away with glorifying the APS victims, erecting schools in their names and giving handouts to their families. They needn’t reform Pakistan’s crippled education system, one textbook at a time, when it’s so much easier to pay accolades to Malala Yousafzai instead.
And eventually these problems just fade into our mental background and become the new normal. The Charsadda attacks are horrifying, no doubt, but they’re certainly not surprising. We still don’t know the full story of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Almost a decade of democracy and missing persons are still missing and the practice of illegal detention continues. The judicial inquiry revealed that our electoral system is horribly broken but there are still no meaningful reforms in sight. Nothing gets fixed.
As long as we persist in reactivism mode, it is a sure guarantee that the APS parents will resurface at the next anniversary or at some public forum with the same inconvenient complaints. And it will be like it is with the Palestinians, that perpetual cycle of suffering, hype and silence: “We are forgotten until we are in the news” to quote Abu Hisham, a 70-year-old from the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, “And remembered just as people in need, not as people with a cause.”
Published in The Express Tribune, January 28th, 2016.
Apparently, not only are well-intentioned aid efforts often redundant and unnecessary, complicating daily life in the camps, but much more importantly, the Palestinians say that today’s exclusionary humanitarian mentality distracts from the core issues.
It was not like this in the old days, the Palestinians say. Up until the ‘90s, activism on their behalf was very cognisant of their essential identity, their right to their homeland and the glorious history of their struggle for liberation. But then somewhere along the line, the noble and celebrated Palestinian cause became all about “counting the pallets distributed from the aid warehouse”. The perception of heroic freedom fighters was replaced with a dehumanising image of perpetual refugees, helpless and needy, akin to “pets in need of portions of food everyday”.
How did this happen, this reduction of complex issues to one dimension, this focus on human suffering to the exclusion of all other concerns? Sukarieh has one answer: “These days, activism is led by depoliticised NGOs whose tactics and message are dictated by the neo-liberal language of humanitarian intervention [emphasis added].”
We witness this pattern in the current international debate around refugees. Their refugee status, their deprivation and victimhood has become their implicit identity now, and it fundamentally limits the discourse. No major Western politician talks about political solutions, of redress or return. There is no admission of complicity or guilt in creating this problem in the first place. Instead, everyone’s debating refugee quotas, aid budgets, fences and integration programmes. The refugees’ own problems hardly ever make it into mainstream media unless they conform to this popular narrative.
After the Charsadda attack, it should be obvious enough by now that a similar mentality dominates in Pakistan as well. Every time there is a national tragedy, a natural calamity like an earthquake or a flood, or some human rights violation or terrorist incident, we are collectively wracked by an overwhelming tidal wave of dark seething emotion. We fixate on the human costs, the suffering and the horror.
What is painfully missing in this equation is an activism geared towards human dignity, compassion and social justice. We don’t intellectualise our anger, we don’t ask hard, searching questions. There is little concept of a long-term, intelligent and systematic engagement with core issues. Instead, we mourn for the victims in a grand, collective, highly emotional catharsis, mediated by Facebook and Twitter. Then we are quick to move on to the next tragedy that comes along. Obviously nothing really gets fixed.
Sukarieh dubs this mindset ‘reactivism’, a counterfeit activism, where we are “perennially reacting to crises and never addressing their roots”.
A vivid demonstration of how counterproductive this stance is may be gauged from the recent anniversary of the Army Public School tragedy, at an event organised by the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa government, where parents of the murdered children mounted a highly charged protest against provincial and federal officials.
Why would they protest? The entire nation is already sympathetic to their cause. We know they suffer an incalculable loss and we honour their children as martyrs. But they are very bitter. They don’t want plots of land, they don’t want compensation. One year on, they only want truth. They want justice. They want accountability.
And the real shocker here — as Asad Rahim Khan wrote eloquently in these very pages — is that we have yet to even get a proper, objective and unambiguous account of what actually happened on December 16, 2014. We don’t really know anything for certain. How many attackers were there? Were they foreign or local? Who were these people? How did they get past multiple checkpoints? Where did the funding come from? Why are media reports and press statements so conflicting? Why have no heads rolled for the failures of the intelligence agencies? Where are the reforms? Why are we, the people, not raising a storm about this? Why are we not clamouring for a public inquiry?
Instead, we are in reactivism mode: we diligently change our display images on Facebook and craft emotional tweets. We blame the politicians, we blame the army, we blame foreign actors, but we never ever really blame ourselves for not demanding accountability and hard change, for our superficial activism, and our utter lack of civic engagement. Our entire conversation fixates on the horror, the suffering and the sacrifices; it is the discourse of victimhood.
The fatal cost of our position is that it actively perpetuates the status quo. This lack of focus and persistence on our part is why politicians get away with symbolic gestures and empty speeches. This suits them wonderfully well too. It is immensely difficult to reshape political realities, to fix structural injustices in society, a lot of feathers get ruffled and vested interests tend not to like it. It’s so much easier instead to give handouts. It makes for great photoshoots.
After all, politicians needn’t tackle structural problems like feudalism and mass poverty when they can simply use taxpayer money to launch the Benazir Income Support Programme instead. They need not initiate embarrassing inquiries and intelligence reforms when they can simply get away with glorifying the APS victims, erecting schools in their names and giving handouts to their families. They needn’t reform Pakistan’s crippled education system, one textbook at a time, when it’s so much easier to pay accolades to Malala Yousafzai instead.
And eventually these problems just fade into our mental background and become the new normal. The Charsadda attacks are horrifying, no doubt, but they’re certainly not surprising. We still don’t know the full story of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Almost a decade of democracy and missing persons are still missing and the practice of illegal detention continues. The judicial inquiry revealed that our electoral system is horribly broken but there are still no meaningful reforms in sight. Nothing gets fixed.
As long as we persist in reactivism mode, it is a sure guarantee that the APS parents will resurface at the next anniversary or at some public forum with the same inconvenient complaints. And it will be like it is with the Palestinians, that perpetual cycle of suffering, hype and silence: “We are forgotten until we are in the news” to quote Abu Hisham, a 70-year-old from the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon, “And remembered just as people in need, not as people with a cause.”
Published in The Express Tribune, January 28th, 2016.