Talking peace

Of course, as Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said in his first address to the National Assembly in over half a year, giving peace a chance is important. Our country urgently needs to be freed of the violence that has torn it apart, piece by piece, causing more and more blood to spill over the years. In this sense, the four-man committee the prime minister has set up to initiate peace talks with militant groups is indeed a good step, especially since an All Parties Conference in September last year had unanimously called for a dialogue effort to be initiated. At the same time, the government needs to clarify a few questions that inevitably arise from this situation.



While we all want peace, are indeed desperate for it, some parameters for acceptability need to be set. The statement by the prime minister that militants must lay down their arms before the dialogue is welcome. Questions also arise about the mandate given to the four-man committee comprising journalists Irfan Siddiqui and Rahimullah Yousafzai, Pakistan’s former ambassador to Afghanistan Rustam Shah Mohmand and Major Amir, a retired ISI official. The government needs to be more forthcoming about the committee’s mandate and the agenda that the talks will follow. Also, it must be noted that no parliamentarian has been included in the committee.

As we go into this process, we must hope that it will work. But on a broader basis, from the perspective of the state, it is also important that it retain its writ. The process ahead needs to be carefully thought out. So do the next steps. Successive peace accords have fallen apart in the past. Our priority must be to find a way to gain peace and stability in our country, but without in any way giving in to those elements, which have been responsible over the past years for the deaths of thousands of our countrymen, most of them civilians. It is of utmost importance that as a first step in any talks process, the violence stops and some sense of normalcy is restored to our troubled land. It is indeed welcome that the government finally seems to be making an attempt to tackle the menace of militancy and we hope that this initiative has a positive outcome.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 31^st,  2014.

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