Mere 'collateral damage'?

How can women remain indifferent to Karachi's carnage that took place on May 12. takes a look at the recent situation of the city that has taken violence to a level never observed before…
By Lubna Jerar Naqvi

The national political arena is abuzz with the blame game on who is responsible for the deaths of more than 48 people on May 12 as Karachi was assaulted for the umpteenth time. As this debate goes on, and will no doubt continue until the next spate of 'political leverage', deaths become statistics to be mulled over by the media and political players. There are those who actually lost someone in these riots and who will have to deal with the vacuum created in their lives forever. All political parties claim that they have lost people in Karachi on May 12, and they have documents to prove the authenticity of this claim, but is the actual loss really theirs? And as if 48 deaths were not enough, the authorities in Sindh have now given the rangers 'shoot-to-kill' orders that have already resulted in the deaths of non-political people. According to a new report in a newspaper on May 15, three people including a minor were killed in Lyari, apparently due to the order of 'shoot-to-kill'. There is a discrepancy regarding the number of non-political people killed by the rangers, as the area police claims that 'only two people' had been killed in a gang shoot off, while eye witnesses, residents of that area claim that the police and rangers had opened fire on people protesting against the May 12 carnage.

Even if we do accept the police version that 'only two people' killed on Monday were due to a shoot out between the gangs, the fact remains that these young men – Sunny was only 17 years old and Sohail was 27 – had families. Both families have lost a son and no explanation or compensation can bring them back. Let's for one moment believe that both Sunny and Sohail were gangsters, and were killed when their respective gangs clashed, but how can we explain the death of 10-year-old Faizan, son of Abdul Karim, who was killed when the law enforcers opened fire in retaliation to 'opposition, protest and stone pelting'. How can you explain to a grieving mother that her son was shot in cold blood because the government has given trained men with guns a free hand to 'shoot-to-kill'? Will she understand this reasoning? Will collateral damage make sense to her after she buries her beloved son under heaps of earth never to see his face or hear his voice again?

And who will be responsible for the likes of two-year-old Nabil Faisal and his nine-month-old sister Wania, who lost their father Faisal Tariq on May 12 when unknown people shot him in an Edhi ambulance. Faisal and the others were taking Faisal's wounded brother to the hospital when armed men opened fire on the group of about 5000 people. The sole fault of Faisal Tariq was that he had joined the groups going to the airport to welcome the chief justice. Nabil Faisal only two has no means to support his mother and sister, and it will be at least another 15 years before this child will be capable to support what is left of his family Will either the provincial or federal government support such victims of senseless carnage? And by support we don't mean the paltry compensatory amount that the government always promises to the relatives of the victims. Will women like Faisal Tariq's widow be given state support so that they can raise their children honourably with good education and a wholesome life?

What justification can one give of the targeted killing of the sixty-five year old Edhi driver Faiz-ur-Rahman, who was shot three times in the head, neck and abdomen at point blank range? The only reason for Faiz's brutal murder was that he had refused to comply with orders of the armed men to throw out a wounded man from his vehicle. Faiz-ur-Rahman was neither a political activist nor a government servant; he was just a humanitarian working for one of Pakistan's greatest and most revered philanthropically run organisation. And he was just doing his duty of transporting the dead and wounded to a hospital. Ironically, he had volunteered to go into the besieged area where other drivers were wary to go simply because at this time ambulances were also being shot at.

This is a first event for violent Karachi where an ambulance driver has been targeted in riots. Even during the worst times in Karachi, when the city was plagued with pitched battles between rivals, ambulance drivers, especially the Edhi drivers, were allowed to tend to the dead and the wounded and were not besieged. This reveals the brutalism that seems to have become the character of Karachi. It may not be too late for the concerned people – the government, all political parties and the citizens of not only Karachi but of the country – to converge and tend to this ailment that is facing the industrial and financial hub of the country. Karachi has been inflicted with the malaise of social and civil degradation for decades now; no one not even its own citizens pay any heed and drag their existence forward. It is all well and good to hold social events like Humara Karachi basically aimed at the upper social strata of society, giving the city an ersatz facade of being a cultural hub. But that is not the solution to the ground realities facing Karachi in many forms, one that has surfaced many times before May 12 in the form of callous brutality that has become an inherent skin-deep trait. Karachi needs to concentrate on developing a tolerant civil social basis along with infrastructural development, which was also an imperative need for this forsaken city, and investigate areas which need to be developed so that incidents like this do not occur in the future. The people of the city deserve to live a safer life and this can only be obtained if measures are actually taken to provide security to the people in their day-to-day lives. This can only be achieved if those in authority, work alongside the common man and both segments of the society accept their conjoined responsibilities of making Karachi a safe city – they owe this to the safe future of their children.

Caught in a perilous welter

When a people get caught up in a welter of anger and hate, that could be the worst thing to happen, often ending up in predicaments with disastrous consequences. History is a witness. Arguably, this nation is presently intricately entangled in such a destructive web. Yet, none seems any pushed about it. Distressingly, the partisans across the spectrum are, instead, blithely arrayed against one another as if they are no part of the same polity but the commanders and foot soldiers of warring nations. And they are carrying on with their fracas spiritedly and with full gusto. A blinding spell of anger and hate against each other is swaying them completely, which has visibly scotched all their faculties for rational thinking and sapped all their spirits for conciliation, understanding and accommodation. In full play are their intransigence and confrontation, with which they are dealing deadly blows even to the state institutions, or whatever is left of them, some with their atrocious deeds, some with their inflammatory rhetoric. None seems worried what all this is leading up to. Perplexingly, the partisans appear unaware of the awful reality that the things now are not what they were before March 9 and what was possible before has become impossible particularly after the May 12. For, there is a street sizzling with public anger, discontent and disillusionment, which appears in no mood to accept or put up with what it would have before those fateful days. Going by the media reports, the administration is contemplating imposition of emergency rule or martial law to cope with the runaway aftermath of the March 9 episode and the darkening shadows of the May 12 mayhem. In all likelihood, these contemplated moves of the administration are going to backfire, given the prevalent public nasty mood. The opposition’s contrivances to make political capital out of the fallout of the two events, too, are certainly going to come a cropper, as the people have so far given the cold-shoulder to its incitements to come out on the roads. If nothing else, from the massive public demonstrations on the Turkish city streets in these days on the opposition’s appeals, this opposition of ours can know how discredited its stands in our people’s eyes. And if it is any wise, it must come to the terms with the new palpable reality that the people are now seeking out new heroes to lead them, not into the stables of the opposition or, for that matter, of the government for any horses to ride on. If the partisans still fail to read this popular public mood and remain engrossed in their own present fracas, they will not just shoot themselves in the foot but also throw the nation into an uncontrollable turmoil and turbulence. Hence, they must step out of the destructive welter of anger and hate, and let sanity prevail. It must be well understood by them all that none is innocent and all are guilty, though the top hierarchy of the administration, most of all. This hierarchy could have easily avoided the avoidable judicial crisis, in the first place; but it did not, and instead walked into it unthinkingly, further aggravating it all the way with its own acts of omission and commission. Then, it earned the people’s ire and scorn unfathomably by letting the May 12 Karachi mayhem to happen, which by the popular perception it could have averted had it acted as was it expected, which it did not. For its part, the opposition wishfully misconstrued the judicial crisis as a god-sent opportunity to burnish its drab politics, without realising that there was not even a bleak chance of this for it. The people’s sympathies were not with it; those were and are with the dysfunctional Chief Justice. And if the people are furious with the MQM and its backers of the Islamabad establishment for the horrific Black Saturday slaughter of Karachi, they are in no mood either to put some political gains in the empty basket of the opposition on account of this great humans tragedy. As far this doleful carnage is concerned, the opposition figures nowhere in the people’s calculus, which is wholly riveted on unforgivably to the thuggery of the MQM murderers and the chicanery of their Islamabad apologists. Nonetheless, this welter of anger and hate is expanding on to go beyond the partisans of the political divide and take in its sweep the entire spectrum of the polity. And that is worrisome terribly. This should come to an end at once in the greater interests of the nation. The first step towards this end has to be taken by the administration’s top hierarchy, which instead of holding up the goblins of emergency or martial law must take the initiatives for grand national reconciliation, to which all including the politicians and the lawyers must respond constructively. The adrift that has the nation in its vicious clutches is very real and very alarming. It must be stopped at any rate.

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Time is like a river.
You cannot touch the same water twice,
because the flow that has passed will never pass again.
Enjoy every moment of life.

I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.