Youth parliamentarians remembered as ‘unstoppable’

ISLAMABAD: Maria Fayyaz thought back to July 28, the day she entered her room in the Margalla Hotel excited at the prospect of meeting her youth parliament roommate Rubab Naqvi.

“Rubab and I always shared a room, I was really tired but I stayed up waiting for her to come, I knew she’d knock on the door soon,” Maria said. While unpacking, Maria’s sister called from Bahawalpur to find out if she had arrived safely. “My sister asked me if I had heard of the plane crash, I didn’t think much of it, I just thought to myself what a terrible thing,” she said.

Desperately trying to hold back her tears, Maria continued to narrate the story of how she found out that her friends were on that very plane, “It suddenly hit me that Hassan (Prime Minister of the Youth Parliament) was on that plane, I started calling Hassan and Rubab but their numbers were off.” Tears rolled down her cheeks, “My heart sank; I couldn’t accept that they were on that plane, just then I got a phone call confirming my fear.” Maria describes her fellow youth parliamentarians as vivacious and unstoppable. “They were amazing people, Hassan was going to present his educational policy at this session, no one can take their place, we can only hope to fill the void that has been left by their deaths,” said Maria.

Zile Humma, a member of the opposing youth parliamentarian team, the Green Party, said, “All five of these people were so remarkable in their own ways, apart from working together we shared moments where we laughed, fought, disagreed with each other but the happiness that each of these individuals brought all of us is unexplainable.”

With her hand covering her eyes, Zile Humma’s voice trembles as she says, “You know when we had elections, even though Hassan was from the opposing party, he walked up to me and said I know you’ll vote for me, and I did even though a member of my party was also standing for the same position, he just had that aura -you couldn’t say no to him.”

A vigil was held by the youth parliamentarians for the victims of the Air Blue plane crash on Saturday. People crowded around the pictures of the six parliamentarians killed in the plane crash.

“The pain we have suffered from the loss of these fine individuals is unexplainable,” said Youth Prime Minister Hassan Sajjad Naqvi. “These parliamentarians believed in the rule of law and were determined to see their plans till the end,” he added.

Hassan Javed’s brother Baber Javed was at the vigil and described his brother as a “symbol of courage”. “My brother was one of those people who you could turn to for anything,” he said, “imagining a life without him is hard but what this incident has made me realize is that life is so unpredictable, you cannot take anything for granted.”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 2^nd, 2010.