Point of no return or just another incident?

It has been well over two months since the attack on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar. However, the APS tragedy was only part of a recurring nightmare and should be seen as such. The attack on Qasr-e-Sakina Imambargah in Rawalpindi is the third attack on a Shia institution in two weeks and fourth overall in the first 49 days of 2015. The nightmare started decades back and this attack is only the latest episode of a longer and increasingly opaque narrative.

From 2001 to now, scores of Shias have been killed in terrorist attacks across Pakistan. After these instances, the all too familiar blame game went unabated on TV and the officials paid lip service and did ‘condemnation’. No resignations of senior ministers, no upheavals in government departments, no major departure from state policy of ‘strategic depth’. Governments continued to tolerate extremist groups and even gave them space in mainstream politics.

The attack on the APS has been portrayed as the decisive moment, a moment after which we don’t just mourn but demand action, accountability, punishment and guarantees; it is a moment when we look inwards to fight the demons within and not blame them on imaginary forces and external factors. A moment in which we resolve to never let the tragedy be repeated. We have faced that moment so many times only to let it slip by.

One view is that the victims in the APS were mostly children studying in a school run by military forces and that there is little chance of obfuscating the basic facts: terrorists killing innocents without regard to their religious background. It is tragic that this obfuscation takes place when Shias are killed and it relies on phrases such as ‘sectarian violence’ which implies a Sunni-Shia conflict and that Shias are being killed by one sect and vice versa. Then there is the oft-repeated line of reasoning that it’s Muslims being killed or Pakistanis which also blurs the issue.

The Shia killings should be seen at face value and not confused with sectarian narratives. They should also not be addressed in the binaries of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. There is a group that publicly takes ownership of these attacks, the same one that killed APS students. What is the lesson for the killers here? You kill schoolchildren and you will cause a seismic change in national policy. You kill Shias and it is business as usual.

Forming military courts and taking the fight to the terrorists is one thing but we need to ask the real questions. How do we address the cancerous strain in the country? Where is the funding for terrorists coming from? How can these people stand against the writ of the state? Why aren’t apologists of perpetrators being considered as fifth columnists and barred from the public sphere or investigated for collaboration with anti-state elements? Why aren’t the religio-political parties and the men on the pulpit condemning them? Why is nobody question ex-generals about their statements regarding the patronage of recognised anti-state entities?

It is tragic that it took the blood of our children but let’s make sure that their sacrifice does not go to waste. We can reclaim our country step-by-step and the first step would be to protect a targeted community.

Published in The Express Tribune, March  7^th,  2015.

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