Death of justice
November 17, 2012
Nearly two years after Geo reporter Wali Khan Babar was shot dead in Karachi, it seems that Babar, a dedicated and respected young professional, is to be denied the justice that he deserves even after death. While the conviction of those who killed him will not bring Babar back to life, it may have offered some solace to his family and deterred similar targeted killings. Hopes that this would happen died on the night of November 11, as assassins shot and killed the last eye-witness to Wali’s murder, Haider aka Saleem, after barging into his house and pumping two bullets into his head. The Sindh High Court had given clear-cut instructions to the provincial government to give Haider ‘foolproof’ security. This obviously did not happen. Senior police officials say that, with Haider’s death, it will be extremely hard for the trial court to reach a conclusion. Haider, who had identified five suspects in a police line-up, was due to appear before the ATC on November 13 – two days after he was murdered. The case has since been adjourned.
While 23 witnesses were listed in the murder case of Wali Babar, only six had agreed to testify – there is no doubt that fear of being killed was a key factor in this. Between January 2011 and now, all six have been killed, Haider the last to be brutally murdered. The victims included two policemen, a police officer’s brother, an informer linked to the investigation and two civilians. The killers are obviously ruthless men but as we have seen in other cases before this, their actions, backed by the larger gang they belong to, mean they have almost certainly been able to evade justice again. It is an unfortunate reality that the rule of law has collapsed and justice is now but a distant dream. Wali Babar’s killers may very well escape scot-free, illustrating the plight of a country where order has completely broken down, with cities run by gangs. While the courts may be ready to dispense justice, work on the other side by the prosecution – investigators and the evidence collectors – has simply been dismal, non-existent. The decay that was allowed to take over has now completely set in and authorities seem helpless against these criminals. The question now is if we can get things back to some kind of order. The tragic deaths of Wali Khan Babar, Haider and numerous others, suggest that this may not be the case, leaving us as mere witnesses to the violence and mayhem that now rules this land.
Security blues
November 17, 2012
The interior ministry and its mercurial leader Rehman Malik might as well have banned the citizens from walking faster than was good for them, or not wearing anything brown on alternate Thursdays. The ban on motorcycle riding in Karachi and Quetta was fortunately overturned in the case of Karachi. The ban touched new heights of nonsense as was swiftly realised by the Sindh High Court, which suspended the directive from the ministry before it could be implemented. The interior ministry had also banned the use of vehicles without proper documents, though how the ban was supposed to be implemented remains something of a mystery – there being about 1.5 million registered motorcycle users in Karachi alone, not to mention the unknown numbers of unregistered users. The minister then directed that shops and businesses should close down by 5pm closely followed by howls of protest from the commercial sector.
Friday morning saw the closure of cellular services in Karachi from ten in the morning through the evening, once again on the grounds that this would thwart the conspiracies of those bent on destabilising the country – presumably terrorists now keep office hours. Of slightly more use – only slightly – Rehman Malik announced a ban on the display of weapons during Muharram. The sale of SIM cards is also to be banned from December 1 and it can only be a matter of time before fortune-telling parrots are banned on the grounds that they sometimes get it wrong. We do not wish to belittle the seriousness of the security problems faced not just by Karachi but the entire country – they are many and they are complex. For this very reason we need a closely-reasoned and practical anti-terrorist strategy that is agreed on nationally and provincially, and operates to a set of universal protocols. Such a strategy could be activated at times of tension such as during Muharram, be founded in practical realities and agreed across a range of stakeholders. Instead, we have an interior minister given to inflicting strange and unnecessary bans on the general population to the security of none and the frustration and inconvenience of millions.
The Gaza cauldron
November 17, 2012
The body count is rising almost by the hour. On Thursday 31 Palestinians died as a result of Israeli actions and three Israelis were killed by rocket-fire emanating from Gaza. Israel has activated 30,000 reservists as a possible precursor to ground action in Gaza. In a move heavy with political symbolism, the Egyptian Prime Minister Hisham Qandil visited the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. During the course of the visit he carried the body of a child who had died of wounds, blood staining his clothing, an image that is going to resonate across the Middle East and the Muslim world more generally. Qandil called Palestine ‘the heartbeat of the Islamic nation’ and in doing so opened a new chapter of Egypt’s relations with Gaza, Hamas and the Israeli state. As if to emphasise that post-revolutionary Egypt was not playing with the same deck as under the Mubarak regime, he said that there would be a visit, facilitated by Egypt, of the Tunisian prime minister on Saturday. Both visits will go some way to reducing the sense of isolation felt by Gazans and give a signal to Israel that Egyptian compliance in the face of disproportionate responses to Hamas actions was no longer a given.
The latest upsurge was caused by the Israeli killing of a Hamas military commander last Wednesday, with matters quickly escalating. Militants say they have fired more than 350 rockets from Gaza and Israel said it had intercepted 130 of them using its ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile system. In Tel Aviv on Thursday air-raid sirens sounded for the first time since the first Gulf War in 1991, warning against incoming Fajr-5 rockets. The cauldron that is Gaza never ever goes off the boil, it just boils at differing levels of intensity and occasionally boils over – usually to the detriment of the 1.1 million refugees in Gaza that are under the wing of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). There has been no substantive move for the resolution of the Palestinian conflict in decades. Talks aplenty, solutions nil. Until Israel understands that it cannot have its cake and eat it too, there never will be.