The Awami Workers Party held a protest in Islamabad on March 17 against the Pakistani establishment's response to recent terrorist attacks.
The establishment's response has been a mixture of inaction, misdirected repression, collusion with terrorists and promotion of their communalist and religious fundamentalist ideology.
The protest follows the bombing of two churches in the Christian-majority Youhanabad area of Lahore on March 15, in which 16 people were killed and more than 70 injured. Following the bombings, members of “the Christian community took to the streets,” socialist journalist Hashim bin Rashid wrote in the March 19 News International.
“They burnt a couple of metro bus stations, blocked major roads in Lahore and managed to stop Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif from inaugurating the Faisalabad-Multan motorway. During the protests, a group of protesters also tragically lynched two men who had been arrested by police as ‘suspects’.”
The two men burnt to death by the Christian protesters turned out to be innocent.
The media used the lynchings to portray the protests as a worse outrage than the terrorist attacks that had provoked them. “Someone must ask the interior minister why the two men were in police custody in the first place if they were innocent,” Hashim wrote.
“The short answer is that the Punjab police has been happy to target any Pakhtun-looking man found in the vicinity of a terrorist attack on suspicion as a means of satisfying their superiors and the media that ‘progress’ has been made. Usually, the bearded men arrested have nothing to do with the said incident.
“This racism against Pakhtun and Afghan migrants across Pakistan and, specifically, in Lahore has been documented by a number of news reports.”
Hashim questioned the media-fuelled outrage: “Where was their public anger when the Christian community in Gojra was brutally attacked in 2009? Where were they when 120 Christians were killed when a church in Peshawar was bombed in 2013? More specifically, since the outrage claims public lynching is worse than terrorism, where was all this anger when a Christian couple were lynched and burnt alive four months ago in district Kasur?
“It is clear to the Christian community that no mainstream Pakistani is going to stand up for them. This is why their decision to stand up and protest against their institutionalised political and social suppression is a welcome step.”
At the Islamabad action, protestors raised slogans against the government, the military establishment, the religious right and political parties involved in terrorism.
Explaining the AWP’s position on the matter, AWP Punjab president Aasim Sajjad Akhtar said that after the December 16 Peshawar school massacre, sweeping powers were given to the military establishment under the pretext of defeating terrorism. Yet terror attacks continued unabated three months after the attack. He said the unending spiral of violence demonstrated that summary executions and military courts were no lasting solution to the problem of terrorism.
The lifting of a moratorium on capital punishment in response to the Peshawar attack has led to a spate of hangings of prisoners on charges unrelated to terrorism. Between March 17 and 19, 25 prisoners were hanged. March 19 was set as the execution date of Shafqat Hussain, who was 14 when he was tortured into confessing to a murder he did not commit. After pressure from civil society activists, he has been granted a temporary reprieve.
“Even as tortured minors like Shafqat Hussain are being slated for execution under the new ‘anti-terror’ measures, the known killers of sectarian terror groups … continue to roam free because of their closeness and usefulness to the government and establishment,” a March 16 AWP statement said.
Akhtar told the Islamabad protest that it was the very foreign and security policies crafted by the establishment that had resulted in violence, sectarianism and increasing attacks on the weakest segments of the country’s population, including religious minorities.
National Students Federation leader Alia Amirali said terrorists are recruiting from among the millions of young people in the country who are being deprived of education, health, and gainful employment because of the ruling elite’s anti-people policies.
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