Slipping from view

Very quietly so nobody will notice the children of Kasur are disappearing. To be sure there is a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) looking into a case that for a few days had the attention of the nation, but nothing is going to come of it. Yes the findings will be published but every effort will be made to divert attention from the fact that children have been dreadfully abused. The ‘land dispute’ is currently favourite in the cover-up stakes, and in a couple of months’ time the matter will be dead and buried.

The reason for this is not just a desire for uncomfortable realities to be sidelined, it is more complex than that and at bottom it is closely allied to the fact that the civil administration simply has no idea what to do with a case where perhaps as many as 280 children have been abused, and that some of that abuse has been filmed and disseminated on the internet.

There is no protocol, no Standard Operating Procedure as to how to respond to such an event. There are no trained-in skills apart from thinly scattered child protection social workers and this awful event is far outside the competencies of the police, the investigating agencies and the civil infrastructure. Natural disasters — with varying levels of effectiveness — can be accommodated, the serial rape of minors both male and female, not.

Murder — tick. Theft — tick. Robbery — tick. Filming a child being sodomised — pass.

In a completely different context and a crime unconnected to the Kasur tragedy — has anybody heard what is happening to the Axact case of late? Another private TV station is reportedly picking up the broadcast arm of that debacle, but where — exactly — has the Axact case got to? And if it has got nowhere very much, might it not be for the same reasons that nothing is going anywhere with the Kasur case? That the scale of the crime was allegedly so wide and deep at Axact that it touched so many people in Pakistan that a full exposure and disclosure would cause a political firestorm in a country where the faking of academic credentials is a commonplace? Investigators will be treading very carefully indeed, perhaps not looking too closely and asking are those rumours true about what happened in the Axact building?

As at Kasur, Axact is bigger than the competencies that may be deployed to get to the bottom of what happened, but bigger by far than the political will to see the truth outed.

Remember the Baldia fire incident? It was the worst factory fire in the history of Pakistan, happening in September 2012 when 257 people died of burns, smoke inhalation or in the stampede as they tried to escape. Would it surprise you to know that the investigation is now into its third iteration, with a Joint Investigative Team (JIT… yes… one of them) supposedly constituted in March 2015 to report in 30 days. I can find no record of it having done so.

The dead of Baldia have all but vanished; their relatives go from pillar to post in the hope of relief. They may as well smack themselves around the head with a brick. As at Kasur and Axact, there are too many skeletons in the political closets for whatever happened at Baldia to ever emerge blinking into the light of public scrutiny.

Moving from the macro horrors of Kasur, Axact and Baldia to the micro-drama surrounding a woman who tried to leave the country with a very large sum of money in her luggage — more mystery. Allegedly, the woman in question had been globetrotting with the Birkin stuffed with oodles of cash for some years. Who knew, Huh? Whose cash? Who knows…

The woman in question does some highly-publicised jail time before being released on bail amidst confusion about… well just about everything. After a brief excursion into the Twitterverse, the woman, errr… disappears. Not in the same way that people have a tendency to do in Balochistan, oh dear me no, no gunny sack for her. But disappears.

Pakistan… the land where things disappear before your very eyes. Children fade away. Fake degrees? What fake degrees? Dead? What dead, where? Half a million dollars? Ah yes… I needed some make-up.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 20^th,  2015.

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