Reluctant regret—in ten words

Rahimullah Yusufzai ·

From the moment Raymond Davis, or whatever his real name, shot two young Pakistanis dead near the busy Mozang Chungi on Lahore’s Jail Road and contributed to the death of a third one in an avoidable traffic accident, the US government started making efforts to claim diplomatic immunity for the killer who confessed to the crime, taking the plea of self-defence.
In fact, every effort is being made to influence the police investigations and stall the judicial process. One evidence of this is the refusal of US diplomats to hand over the second vehicle and the driver and persons riding it when it crushed to death 25-year-old Obaidur Rahman, the trader from Shah Alam Market who had no role in the incident involving Davis and the two presumed “robbers.”
The US government is trying to bully Pakistani authorities to release Davis by accusing the police of unlawfully detaining him in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. Thereby, it also wants to avoid handing over the Americans and possibly their Pakistani employees to the police for investigation into the death of Obaidur Rahman due to rash driving. And all this is being done in the name of diplomatic immunity, which has been described by sections of the Pakistani media as license to kill.
The long, seven-paragraph statement issued by the US embassy on the Jan 27 incident carried only 10 words regretting the loss of life. “We regret that this incident resulted in loss of life,” is all that the embassy would say about the death of Obaidur Rahman, an innocent man riding his motorcycle when the fleeing US consulate vehicle, which was in violation of the one-way traffic rule, hit and killed him. It is this kind of insensitivity that further inflames the anti-US sentiment in Pakistan.
The vague statement apparently wasn’t meant to refer to the deaths of the other two men, 23-year old Faizan Haider, and Mohammad Faheem, 21, because it clearly mentioned that they “had criminal backgrounds and had minutes earlier robbed money and valuables at gunpoint from a Pakistani citizen in the same area.”
Having presumed that these “two armed men on motorcycles” were criminals, and that “diplomat” Davis acted in self-defence because “he had every reason to believe that they meant him bodily harm,” the US embassy is convinced that the killer can neither be arrested by Pakistani police nor tried in a local court due to diplomatic immunity. The police, on the other hand, has yet to conclude that Faizan Haider and Faheem had a criminal record, though initially a few senior cops had hinted that the deceased were “robbers.” According to his family, Faizan Haider was carrying a pistol for self-defence – just like Davis – due to a blood feud in which his brother had been killed a few weeks ago.
It is now for the police to investigate and decide if Faizan Haider and Faheem were robbers trying to rob Davis in a busy place in broad daylight. And it is for the courts to conclude that Davis indeed was a diplomat deserving immunity, in a case in which he fired with his Beretta pistol to kill two Pakistanis and then tried to escape with the help of other American “diplomats” seated in another vehicle that overran and killed an innocent man.
In fact, it is a straightforward case that professional police investigators would be able to sort out fairly quickly, if they were allowed to work independently. The judicial process too could proceed smoothly if there was no political pressure. If the past is any guide, this is unlikely to happen. Politics and diplomacy have already come into play in the case and the mighty United States would likely exert enough pressure on the spineless Pakistani rulers to do the needful.
If the Americans have their way and Davis is declared a diplomat enjoying immunity, then he would have to be returned to the US to face the judicial process at home. The way the US embassy is trying to protect him from Pakistan’s law, it would be hard to convince the families of the deceased men and the Pakistani people that justice would be done in case he goes on trial in the US.
There have been cases in which Americans committing crimes abroad against non-Americans, including the ones in which US soldiers murdered innocent people in Iraq and Afghanistan, have got away with light sentences. Already, many emotional Pakistanis are comparing Davis’ case with that of Dr Aafia Siddiqui – the frail woman of Pakistani origin sentenced to 86 years’ imprisonment for firing at and causing injuries to an American soldier in Afghanistan while she was in custody – and demanding that Davis should be publicly hanged. Others want Dr Aafia swapped with Davis, even though it is a bizarre idea because the two persons and their cases are so dissimilar. The US would probably be able to save Davis, but the cost in terms of losing whatever goodwill it has in Pakistan would be unusually high.
Many aspects of the incident are unclear. Even Davis’ real name is unknown because, during a briefing in Washington, State Department spokesman P J Crowley said the man’s name has been misreported. He refused to disclose his real identity, or the kind of work he was assigned to do in Pakistan. He also didn’t explain as to why the accused was carrying a firearm, which was obviously an unlawful act. The movements of the 40-year-old Davis were also mysterious as the Lahore police wasn’t informed about them. All this gave rise to suspicion that the Americans were trying to hide something to conceal Davis’ identity and his activities.
The US embassy insisted that Davis had a diplomatic passport and Pakistani visa valid until June 2012. The Pakistani authorities have contested the US claim that Davis was a diplomat, though they agree that he was a technical adviser working at the US consulate in Lahore. ABC News, a leading US media network, had earlier unearthed Davis’ identity, reporting that he was an employee of Hyperion Protective Consultants, a Florida-based private security company.
The way Davis fired 13 bullets with his pistol, shooting through the rear screen of his car, giving no chance to Faizan Haider and Faheem to fire back, showed that he was no ordinary diplomat. He was, more probably, a sharpshooter, who calmly made video clips of the two dead or dying men before trying to speed away. Was he, then, an undercover agent on special assignment, as many Pakistanis and sections of the media have been alleging?
All three Pakistanis killed by the Americans in Lahore that day were on motorcycles. “Robbers” riding motorbikes cannot have much of a chance chasing and overpowering a trained, fully armed undercover foreign agent seated securely inside a car.
On Feb 3 last year, the veil on the presence of US military personnel in Pakistan was partially lifted when three American soldiers were killed and two others were injured in a suicide bombing carried out by the Pakistani Taliban in Lower Dir district in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The blast also killed five Pakistanis, including Frontier Corps militiamen escorting the Americans, and injured 131, mostly schoolgirls from a nearby school. Every effort was made to disguise the Americans, who were dressed in shalwar-kameez and wearing local caps, as they were being driven to inspect a school destroyed by the militants and rebuilt with US money.
That was the first time that Pakistanis came to know that members of the US Special Forces, at least 200 of them, were secretly operating in their country, ostensibly providing counterinsurgency training to the paramilitary Frontier Corps. The Pakistani government and military had hidden this information from their people. Who knows how many others like Davis are in Pakistan on secret missions, with or without the agreement of the Pakistani authorities.