Clearing up the confusion

So far, for every answer given about the assassination of minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, many new questions are raised. It has now been established that he was staying with his family rather than in official parliamentary housing. We also know that he didn’t have his official security with him at the time of his murder. This raises a number of troubling questions. Did Bhatti refuse the security because he feared that his own guards would turn against him? Is the security provided by the state so ineffectual that an embattled minister felt safer staying in an undisclosed but unguarded residence rather than government housing? A newspaper report, published a few days before Bhatti’s killing, stated that he was among the few ministers not given a bullet-proof vehicle. Interior Minister Rehman Malik deflected a question about this by saying that it did not fall under his ministry’s purview. It is imperative that these questions be answered so that other threatened ministers can receive the most effective protection.

Finding the killers is vital not just so that justice can be served but also to establish how Bhatti was so easily targeted. Now is not the time for conspiracy theories, but it must be ascertained if Bhatti’s assassins simply tailed him to find his location or if they had inside help. Bhatti was so scared for his life — justifiably so as it turned out — that he kept the details of his daily routine limited to as few people as possible. His murder would be all the more tragic if it turned out that he was betrayed by one of those confidants.

At the same time, indulging in a blame game needs to be avoided. In Pakistan today, there is no such thing as foolproof security. As the Salmaan Taseer assassination showed, when so much of the country has been infected by a poisonous mindset, chronic insecurity is a fact of life for those who have the courage to speak out against retrograde forces. Until attitudes are changed, beefing up security will be a cosmetic measure that does little to tackle the true problem of extremism.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 5^th, 2011.