Eternal grief

Why must children suffer for this country to realise its mistakes?

The list of children we have failed is long: Zainab Ansari, Malala Yousafzai, Aitzaz Hasan, the children of APS Peshawar. They had to suffer for the sins of this country’s rulers and elite who have grown so distant from the plight of common people that only the suffering of children gets their attention.

We dub the children who give up their lives for this country as martyrs. We do this to console ourselves — it matters little to the children. No child should ever be a martyr, because children are not supposed to be soldiers. They are not supposed to sacrifice their lives for a higher cause. They are only expected to live and be free. Children are supposed to be protected.

Pakistan’s schoolchildren are expected to display peerless bravery simply to attain an education. A fundamental right under our Constitution. Zainab Ansari was on her way to a Quran class when she was abducted; Malala Yousafzai survived an assassination attempt while on her way home from school; Aitzaz Hasan tackled a suicide bomber who planned to attack his school; 132 children lost their life in APS Peshawar.

According to Human Rights Watch, there were 867 attacks on educational institutions in Pakistan from 2007 to 2015, resulting in 392 deaths. Despite these figures, most public schools lacked basic security features until the attack on APS Peshawar. The report by Human Rights Watch points out that before the Peshawar attack, approximately 5,000 public schools in K-P, 2,600 in Punjab, 3,600 in Balochistan, and 49,000 in Sindh lacked a boundary wall for protection.

It took the lives of 132 children for us to realise this was a problem.

This month, the country marked six years since the attack on APS Peshawar. Six years on, the parents of the victims are still searching for answers.

How these people have been treated is a testament to the moral decay of our leadership.

Consider this, it took six years for a report on the incident to be published. For comparison’s sake, New Zealand prepared a comprehensive report on the Christchurch attack within one year of the incident.

Six agonising years of waiting. Meanwhile, the country moved on.

The parents are owed accountability. They are owed justice. A state that lets feelings of injustice fester within the hearts of its people sets itself up for failure. We appear to be on that track.

No individual who fostered a system that allowed militants to walk into a school and kill indiscriminately has been held accountable. Elected ministers, members of law enforcement, the security establishment, all get to walk away and blame ‘bad intelligence’.

The APS report spans more than 500 pages. It speaks at length about the security lapses that led to the attack occurring, the problems associated with having a porous border with Afghanistan, the inadequacy of the first layer of security, and locals who gave shelter to the terrorists.

What the report doesn’t speak about — at least not at length — is the structural and institutional reform that needs to be implemented across the country to prevent such attacks from happening again.

To be sure, after the events of APS Peshawar, terrorism decreased in Pakistan because of a strong military response. But a military response is reactive, we still need proactive solutions to keep our children safe. For one, we can’t keep depending on the military to do the job of local law enforcement. Yet, police reform, something that nearly everyone in Pakistan agrees is necessary, never materialises. Neither does judicial reform, reform that would allow our ordinary courts to try terrorists while protecting the judges and witnesses involved.

The National Action Plan (NAP), framed in the aftermath of the attack, was supposed to guide us towards reform — a better, safer country. But all we really did was hand over control of pressing national problems like reforming our court system to the military. The Constitution was amended to give us military courts to expedite trials — due process be damned. Legislation passed in the aftermath of the APS attack authorised secret trials by military courts and annihilated established due process standards such as the presumption of innocence.

This was supposed to be a temporary measure to allow us to whip our regular courts into shape in the interim. That never happened. Military courts eventually went away, while regular courts stayed the same.

And so, the police and courts were never reformed. Instead, we did what we do best: try quick fixes to a deeply entrenched problem.

For other problems, we didn’t even try. According to NAP, we were finally supposed to get around to reforming Pakistan’s madrassahs. This is something that is only spoken about, but hardly ever acted upon. Despite legislation existing, there is no word on implementation. Unchecked and unregulated, madrassahs continue to produce hatred and bigotry amongst their students.

Curbing hatred amongst our people should have been one of the top priorities of the state. Hatred breeds terrorism after all. But the rise of the TLP and its open peddling of hatred and violence paint a picture of a state that continues to look the other way.

Meanwhile, for the parents of the APS victims, the long search for justice continues. They continue to live with the state’s hypocrisy. The story of Advocate Fazal, who lost his son in the attack, encapsulates their treatment. Advocate Fazal became the president of the APS Shuhada Forum and campaigned extensively to obtain justice for the victims. When he became a member of the PTM, he would have multiple FIRs registered against him because of this. Earlier this year he survived an assassination attempt on his life.

For some in Pakistan, there is no end to suffering. Their grief is eternal.