After activists die
7
SALWA Bugaighis believed in a different future and in a better one. Even as post-Qadhafi Libya dissipated into chaos, and hopes were lost in complications that emerge after revolutions, she kept the faith that the mechanisms of democracy would deliver.
When elections were held on June 25, she — a senior lawyer who had participated in the 2011 uprising against Qadhafi — went out to vote in Benghazi. She was among the few who did.
When she returned, assailants were waiting for her, their faces hooded, their guns pointed. They shot, stabbed and killed her. They abducted her husband. When the police finally came, they arrested the gardener who had himself been injured in the attack. Two days later, Salwa’s security guard and the sole witness to the attack was also found dead.
The death of Salwa Bugaighis came during Operation Karama, a military assault led by Libyan Gen Khalifa Hifter against the Islamist militias that have in recent days been strengthening their hold over the city. The suddenness and violence of the attack on her shocked even those living amid the unceasing uncertainty of war.
They are mourned, and then forgotten as the world they fought for and represented becomes ever more elusive.
Her funeral was attended by large numbers of people mourning not simply the death of the activist but also of the vision she represented: Libya as a constitutional liberal democracy, where equality for women is a priority. According to the New York Times report, her death eclipsed even the election; it was perhaps an apt symbol of its outcome.
Vijay Prashad, an author and human rights activist who knew Bugaighis, wrote that “lawyers like Bugaighis fought to try to establish the rule of law in Libya to no avail”. In the end, he dismally concludes, hasty deals were made with the urban militias; the Islamists, the old social classes and women’s rights could be sacrificed to the pressures of orthodoxy.
The grim colours that shaded the last hours of Salwa Bugaighis are familiar hues to the Pakistan living through Operation Zarb-i-Azb and those that have come before. The earth on the graves of our most recently slain activists is after all still fresh and bullets destined for those still living probably already loaded.
Less than two months ago, lawyer Rashid Rehman was killed because he believed that no Pakistani citizen should face criminal punishment without a fair trial and due representation by counsel. Like Bugaighis, his assailants too struck in the late evening, barging into his office in Multan.
Just over a year ago came the death of Parveen Rehman, one of the country’s most selfless slum activists. As in the case of Salwa Bugaighis in Libya, the deaths produced outrage, mourning — and then nothing at all. The assailants are never caught, the populations bearing witness to death after death move on. The mourners have new casualties to cry for.
It is commonplace to think of these deaths as signifiers of local truths. Salwa Bugaighis was an inconvenient woman, unwilling to look the other way at the corruption of her liberal cohorts who wanted plum positions in the post-Qadhafi set-up, or to shrug and accept that women would never be equal in the new Libya.
Similarly, the deaths of activists in Pakistan are ascribed to local details: Rashid Rehman took on a controversial client; Parveen Rehman likely angered a host of urban mafias by continuing to push for the transformation of Karachi’s largest slum.
Individual reasons pinned to single deaths thus obscure the pattern that runs through the threads of each. Nearly all of the dead enumerated here had a vision where governance is based on the law, where popular mandate must be tempered by concerns for minorities, where inequality is a moral evil and identity and inheritance do not determine one’s destiny.
Unlike the easily sold on changing societies, they had less political power, fewer layers of guards and bodyguards (if any), and a courageous belief that their countries, caught under the yokes of militarism and dictatorship, could have a future as constitutional democracies.
This vision was in turn poised on the role of the individual actor as crucial to the dispensation of social justice; the exercise of individual will for the public good was in fact the last act of many of them. Salwa Bugaighis cast her vote, Rashid Rehman took on the case of a lawyer-less client, Parveen Rehman continued to sit in an office in a slum. For these acts of moral courage, they died, leaving behind a moral vacuum filled in turn by faithlessness and cowardice.
In the worlds they are leaving behind, morality is less a matter of individual courage and more a matter of state fiat, mob justice, and lurid theatre. Its instances include bans on this and that, videotaped executions, public floggings, and a reduction of what is right to what is visible and public.
In this collective killing of individual morality lies its dream of automation, where no decisions remain to be made and where the powerful are always the good and the right. There is little room for law or justice or equality in this narrative, for these are no longer produced via the details of procedure. Automatically legitimate, they are simply products of power and the conglomeration of strategic interests.
Activists die, are mourned, and then forgotten as the world they fought for and represented becomes ever more elusive, overcome by shadows that make equality or justice seem like the fantasies of fools. The chaos of contemporary times, where Libya and Pakistan and Egypt and Syria are all entrapped in relentless wars, allows for this — permits it, underwriting the deaths of brave individuals to ensure the silence of frightened collectives.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, July 2nd, 2014
