Sabika Sheikh

Ten people died and at least another 10 were injured several of them possibly mortally, in the latest incident of gun violence in an American school. It is the 22^nd time this year that there has been such an event and fatalities in such incidents now exceed fatalities in the armed forces as of this date. Terrible as all these incidents are there is a particular relevance to Pakistan in this instance. Sabika Sheikh, a Pakistani exchange student due to return home on June 9^th, is among the dead. She was studying in the US via an exchange programme set up by the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study — the YES programme. The news was quickly on social media along with a picture of a confident smiling young woman posing against a granite block incised with the word ‘Texas’.

There will be families of thousands of young Pakistanis who are studying today in America who will have seen the report and wondered at the safety of their children, of their siblings — and they are right to wonder. Some will have sent their children to the US in the belief that it is a safer place than Pakistan, that the education is of a better quality and they will return home the better for their experience. The vast majority will, but the tragic reality is that American schools are no safer than Pakistani schools, and school shootings in Pakistan are a rarity but almost commonplace in America.

The State of Texas has some of the most lax gun laws in the entire US. The guns that the teenage shooter used belonged to his father. He is white and to judge from his (now taken down) Facebook pages had a close interest in neo-Nazism and had made no secret of his desire to kill people. He did just that. We have nothing to offer America and Sabika Sheikh died in the flower of her youth. We offer our sincere condolences to her family.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 20^th, 2018.

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