Does anyone care?

A PRIVATE school in an upscale Peshawar residential area notified its students and their parents thus: “The school will remain closed till Feb 22. The school will re-open on Feb 23. The school will again remain closed on Feb 24.”

After ordering a week-long closure of educational institutions, the Frontier government has again ordered their closure till Feb 26.

This unusual open-again and close-again holiday schedule is not part of the academic calendar, nor has this been necessitated because of some natural calamity. The closure of all educational institutions has come about as a result of the MMA strike schedule which, barring escalation in violence, will culminate on March 24.

Needless to say, schools, which usually end their academic year with annual examinations in March, will have to rethink and reschedule their plans, meaning that students will have to wait for another month or so before they get promoted to the next class, shortly before the summer vacation begins in June.

But who cares? When the protests against the blasphemous cartoons began, one of the first things the rioters did was to force school students out to join them and then stone a college in Peshawar.

Little else matters when it comes to politics. Last week’s vandalism in Peshawar, the worst in its history, bears ample testimony to this. As groups of arsonists, looters and stone-throwers moved from one place to the other, the government that is duty-bound to protect the life and property of its citizens refused to move. Chief Minister Akram Durrani declined calls for a ban on rallies, even though frenzied mobs torched Daewoo buses, ransacked and burnt KFC and Telenor and smashed signboards of numerous other shops.

The police were ordered to show ‘restraint’. Little wonder then that, despite making some meek attempts to control the mob through the use of teargas and baton-charge, they did not know when and where to draw the line as the crowd moved around at will, rampaging and ransacking public and private property.

One wonders why the government did not close schools and colleges ahead of the violent demonstrations, knowing that similar protests barely three days earlier had also become unruly.

Also, if the police did not have enough strength, somebody at the top should have considered this and requested for reinforcements from the Frontier Constabulary or the Frontier Corps. Why did the police have to wait for the situation to get out of control before asking for back-up support?

Why then wasn’t the police deployed at places everyone knew were potential targets, leaving them at the mercy of mobs that cared two hoots about public or private property?

The undeniable fact is that morale is low in the police department that has been beset by internal fighting and intrigues of the worst kind. And this has had its inevitable negative fallout on the force’s performance.

Look at what happened in Hangu, a small town sitting in the midst of craggy mountains. We have never had a reputation for enjoying long memories. Many a tragedy has struck this hapless nation, but we have made little or no effort to step back for a moment and analyse the problems that have bedevilled us. How else could we have forgotten that Hangu has a history of sectarian violence? Had we remembered it, the suicide bomber who struck the area on Youm-i-Ashur probably would have been pre-empted.

Chief Minister Durrani post-haste ordered an immediate judicial inquiry headed by a judge of the high court to, among other things, fix responsibility for the tragic incident that left around 40 people dead and scores of others wounded.

The judicial probe has begun but one wonders whether it will also look into reports that the government had been forewarned of a possible terrorist attack in Hangu. What security measures did it take to thwart sabotage? And if the district police officer, Hangu, was handicapped by force shortage, what steps did he take to offset it? Second, why had the police not prepared a contingency plan to deal with any untoward incident?

A nine-page contingency plan drawn by the Hangu DPO was actually a deployment plan, not a contingency plan to cope with a volatile situation. It is evident that the plan was meant for good times, hoping that everything would work out fine and Ashura would end in a peaceful manner. The plan did not visualize a situation resulting from a terrorist attack.

Hangu has had a history of sectarian violence since 1988 and it has been declared as one of the most sensitive areas in the NWFP. The security agencies had already issued warnings to the police of a possible terrorist and suicide attack and therefore those at the helm of the police department should have known what to expect.

The district security branch that formed the Phase-I (pre-emptive and pre-event activities) of the deployment plan was poorly staffed. It was left to an assistant sub-inspector with 10 constables at one end and a head constable at the other to ensure “timely collection and dissemination of intelligence”.

The three-page instructions for duty in Muharram that were circulated with the plan end on an optimistic note, without giving police a clue as to what to do if there was an incident.

Hard times are ahead as the MMA warms up to take on the government. Be it the religious right, or the largely disaffected and disillusioned youth, or the common citizen stung by spiralling prices or militants wanting to strike at the government at the first available opportunity, the bottom line is that those at the top will have to discharge their responsibility of providing protection to the law-abiding, tax-paying citizens of this country. This requires will and determination.