Screams and silence

Sunday, April 05, 2009

The agonizing screams of the 17-year-old girl, whose public flogging in Swat was captured on video and played out before a shocked nation, still echoes through homes. This in itself is unusual in a country where reaction to almost any outrage is now virtually non-existent; we seem to live our lives in a kind of drugged stupor, almost oblivious to what goes on around us. Perhaps this is the only way to survive in so brutalized a society. The initial attempt by the NWFP government to downplay the incident and then to term it a conspiracy is a symptom of this malaise. We would pretend we simply do not see things rather than attempt to address them. It is for this reason that those who killed a widowed school teacher for refusing to give up work or flogged at least 25 other people in Swat have never been punished.
The SC's suo motu notice of the incident and its call to the victim to appear before it is of course welcome. The CJ is clearly determined to keep up his tradition of seeking out the most vulnerable and doing what he can to ease their suffering.
But is this enough? The answer is an unequivocal 'no' – of course it is not enough. When women were buried alive in Balochistan our government appointed a man who defended that act of barbarity as a minister; when another woman was thrown, quite literally, to dogs in Sindh we seem to have witnessed a cover-up of events. And now that an act of extraordinary evil has been played out on television screens we hear nothing but silence from official quarters.
It is all very well for people to act; as we have seen before the atrocious act of brutality will be protested by activists. But is this enough? The fact is that we need the state to move in as a player. To do what it is intended to in regulating the lives of people. The fact that a teenager was beaten to near death in the streets of Swat while bearded men pinned her to the ground demonstrates that the so called 'Nizam-e-Adl' enforced in the province means nothing at all. What kind of justice would allow people – in this case let us not forget a mere child – to be treated in this fashion? It is shameful that the provincial government made an effort to deny an outrage had even been committed; that it has entered into deals with extremists who openly defended the flogging on the grounds that the girl had acted immorally.
This silence is all the more appalling given that the ANP was elected on a manifesto in which it emphasized its opposition to extremism, maintained it stood for secular liberal values and was determined to defend the rights of people who had suffered long and very badly under the militants. Instead, it has completely betrayed these people – opting instead to stand by maddened, blood-thirsty militants who have the audacity to defend what happened and justify the terrible punishment meted out. There is now no doubt at all that the party of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan is dead; so too is the party of Zulfikar Bhutto. Instead we are ruled by fumbling idiots who clearly do not have the backbone to take a stand against the militants and rescue us from the depravity into which we have been plunged.
There is still time for the government – in the province and in the centre -- to act. It must take a stand against militants; it must end the acts of insanity we see in the streets and it must demonstrate a real commitment to rescuing people from the reign of these men who have unleashed their wrath on innocent people. We wait to see if they will act. If they cannot, or are unwilling to, do so, the only honourable path left open is for the ANP government in the Frontier to step down. If people cannot be saved from extremists, if young girls are to be beaten nearly to death on roads while people look helplessly on, we can say safely that we have bid farewell to civilization. Only a government willing to make an attempt to restore it has any right to run affairs – otherwise it can have no justification for remaining in office as barbarians operate freely across the province and subject its people to their crazed notion of what religion is all about.

Source: http://thenews.jang.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=170874