Unnoticed crimes

Amidst the hype created by Dr Tahirul Qadri and the events related to his sit-in, other incidents of key national interest are going unnoticed. There were no TV cameras to bring into homes the pictures of the people, who on January 16, brought 15 bodies of their loved ones from the Khyber Agency to the Governor’s House Peshawar in protest. The 5,000 or so protesters said the bodies — some of them mutilated — belonged to persons killed by security agencies in Bara Tehsil. They held that they were not militants, but innocent civilians. The bodies of a woman and two children were not brought along. All the bodies had been found in the Alam Gudar area of Bara.

Negotiations with Bara elders and government officials took place, but were not accepted by the protesters. The senator from the Bara area, Hameedullah Jan Afridi, faced an especially hostile reception with police dispersing the protesters using tear gas and batons. They resumed their demonstration on January 17, with students from Peshawar also joining and clashing with the police. The violence is unfortunate and does nothing to build trust for authority. The matter of mutilated bodies turning up in the Khyber Agency, where the military is locked in a struggle with the Lashkar-e-Islam militia is not new. Reports of such nature have surfaced before. Human rights monitors, both in the agency and other areas of conflict, have cited acts of torture by security agencies before. No one has been brought to book for these crimes. The protests in Peshawar are then hardly surprising, given the growing desperation of the people.

Stories of terrible suffering have been told by the people of Bara. Such acts by state forces, of course, only add to the hatred for them, thereby further weakening the state. The fact that personnel in uniform resort to illegal acts only adds to the cycle of violence. Such atrocities have to stop; offers of compensation are not enough — and the action against protesters in Peshawar could only aggravate the situation.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th, 2013.