Extremists on campuses
A shocking attack that missed its target but claimed the lives of at least two others on Eid day in Karachi has revealed a dangerous and apparently growing dimension of militancy in the country.
Sindh MPA Khawaja Izharul Hassan, a senior leader of a faction of the MQM, survived the audacious attempt on his life on Saturday, but the alleged mastermind escaped the scene of the attack.
Believed to have been injured in the attack, the militant belonging to a new outfit, Ansarul Sharia Pakistan, was quickly identified by the Sindh police: Abdul Karim Sarosh Siddiqui, a former student of the University of Karachi.
The involvement in militancy of young individuals from the mainstream-education system is not a new phenomenon. Saad Aziz of the Safoora Goth carnage was a student of the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi, while Noreen Leghari, an MBBS student of Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Hyderabad, has been implicated in ties with the militant Islamic State group.
What is clear is that the higher education system in the country remains thoroughly ill equipped to either curb extremism among students or identify individuals before they are able to go on to commit violent crimes. In the wake of the latest Karachi attack, Sindh Chief Minister Murad Shah has claimed that a security audit and verification system will be introduced in the province to try and identify students with militant and terrorist leanings. That may be a welcome move, but it will need to be carefully implemented.
The blunt instrument of the state should not be used against young people who may simply have an educational interest in different ideologies or want to practise a different kind of politics to what the state condones. The focus must be narrow and precise: religiously inspired militants who are on the path of violence against state and society, be they so-called lone wolves or part of an established network of militancy.
The measures that need to be taken cannot be limited to the campus either. The physical and online networks of jihad must be monitored more closely. After more than a decade of fighting militancy, why is it still relatively easy for individuals seeking to join militant groups to do so?
Surely, as the militancy evolves, the state’s response in fighting it must evolve too. Finally, there is the original reality ie madressah networks through which a great deal of recruitment and facilitation of militancy occurs. The emergence of a new challenge does not mean long-standing threats can be ignored. More effort is needed on all fronts.
Rohingya exodus
THERE seems to be no escape from the cycle of violence and persecution the Rohingya suffer in Myanmar. In a tragedy last week, children were among the 17 people found dead after their boats capsized while they were trying to flee Myanmar and reach Bangladesh. The UN says that nearly 90,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh after violence broke out in Myanmar recently. Clashes have broken out a number of times over the past few years between the Buddhist majority in Myanmar and the Rohingya who are Muslim. The latest cycle of violence was apparently triggered when Rohingya militants launched attacks on police which left 12 security personnel dead. The response from the state as well as Buddhist mobs has been brutal, with Rohingya villages reportedly being torched. In the rush to flee the violence, a number of people have died in the waters between Myanmar and Bangladesh. The Rohingya — described by the UN as the world’s most persecuted minority — lead a miserable existence in Myanmar, with the state refusing to recognise them as citizens and insisting they are ‘illegal immigrants’ from Bangladesh. They have few rights, while a renewed wave of Buddhist nationalism has helped fuel violent attacks against them. In fact, former UN head Kofi Annan warned that if ethnic tensions are not addressed in Myanmar, there is a “real risk” of radicalisation. The attacks by militants on police, and the subsequent crackdown by the state and mobs, surely point to growing radicalisation on all sides.
In the immediate term, to prevent more tragedies such as incidents of drowning, Bangladesh must allow in those fleeing persecution and violence in Myanmar and not turn them back. Not only is blocking the access of those who are escaping death and injury inhumane, it also contravenes international conventions. While it is true that Bangladesh already hosts hundreds of thousands of displaced Rohingyas, allowing them to drown in the sea or return to face violence is unacceptable. The international community should come forward to lend Dhaka a hand in caring for the Rohingya refugees. However, the only long-term solution to the Rohingyas’ misery is for Myanmar to treat them humanely and with respect. While the debate about the community being genuine ‘sons of the soil’ may be inconclusive, compassion and humanity demand that they be treated as individuals with fundamental human rights. The world needs to put more pressure on Myanmar to stop its excesses.
Missing empathy
ON the surface, it would appear that Pakistan’s political elites hold only contempt for those in whose name they rule — those who must learn that, to adapt George Orwell’s searing words, all men are equal, but some men are more equal than others. Yet reflection reveals worse: a flint-hearted cynicism that makes these power brokers use to their advantage anything that might give their self-interest a fillip, regardless of notions of justice, humanity, empathy or even shame. These past weeks have presented enough evidence: last Thursday, a Rawalpindi anti-terrorism court finally delivered a judgement in the case of the 2007 murder of former prime minister and PPP leader Benazir Bhutto. The PPP was in government for five years after the 2008 elections, yet failed to pursue the case with any meaningful vigour. As the ATC proceedings slowed, party representatives stopped showing up altogether — even when the court started conducting day-to-day hearings. Not a single PPP representative was present outside Adiala Jail when the operative paragraph of the verdict was read out — this, from a party that has lost, over the course of years, so many of its supporters, as well as leaders, to the fight against anti-democratic forces.
But it is not just the PPP. After his recent disqualification, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif undertook a procession designed to demonstrate his popularity. As this spectacle was under way, in the Lalamusa vicinity, vehicles in his cavalcade struck and killed first an elderly man, and then a young boy — the latter, tragically, being crushed by following vehicles too — and failed even to stop. The PML-N leader, who proclaims such empathy with the masses, never bothered to visit the child’s parents. And the party — against all norms of humanity, decency and humility — had the temerity to hijack the family’s grief by proclaiming the child a ‘martyr’ to the PML-N cause. So easily is the hypocrisy of our political elites exposed. Perhaps it is time they stopped pretending.
Source: Editorials
Published in Dawn, September 5th, 2017