NEW years in Pakistan now arrive with the memories of massacres past. So it is with this one, when the commemorations of two assassinations that took place four years ago remind the country of the wounds that fester but do not heal.

On Jan 4, 2011, Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was gunned down by Mumtaz Qadri, a guard who was part of the Elite Force that had been assigned to the governor’s security detail. The shooting took place near his home; it was later revealed that Taseer had been shot 27 times. According to reports, Qadri gave himself up at the scene. It subsequently came to light that his motive for the killing had been Taseer’s vocal opposition to Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

In the stunned aftermath of the brazen killing there were more shocks. During the three-day mourning period announced by then prime minister Iftikhar Gilani, the Jamaat-i-Ahle Sunnat Pakistan issued a statement saying, “No Muslim should attend the funeral or even try to pray for Salmaan Taseer or even express any kind of regret or sympathy over the incident”. The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan joined them by saying that anyone praying for the slain governor would also be guilty of blasphemy.

The half-measures of the present will be just as useless and ineffective as the inaction of the past that has fomented extremism.

Siding with a murderer was not just an extremist project; when Mumtaz Qadri was produced in court, lawyers showered him with rose petals. Even though members of parliament from the PPP made statements asking the government, which was led by their own party, to take decisive action, no such thing happened. A mere two months after the governor’s killing, Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s minister for minorities, and the only non-Muslim in the cabinet, was gunned down.

Mumtaz Qadri, the killer of Salmaan Taseer, is still alive and well in Adiala jail in Rawalpindi. A few months ago, he was implicated in having orchestrated an attack on a man convicted of blasphemy and another on trial for the same offence, both of whom are also imprisoned in the same prison. According to newspaper reports, Qadri had convinced one of the prison guards to attack Mohammad Asghar, a mentally ill man imprisoned and sentenced to death on charges of blasphemy.

It took Qadri a little over two weeks to convince the guard to commit the act. When interrogated, the guard confessed that he had been taking “religious lessons” from Qadri. The initial inquiry report also said that two other guards had been similarly persuaded by Qadri to kill those accused of blasphemy and imprisoned in Adiala jail.

The ghosts of the case continue to haunt Pakistan. A few days ago, a vigil was held for the assassinated governor at Liberty Chowk in Lahore, where members of civil society gathered to mark his death and that of so many others who have died at the hands of extremists in the country. They would not be let alone. A group of nine to 10 men wielding batons showed up at the scene and began to attack the participants. At some point, the police were called. By the time they arrived, the assailants had fled the scene. The next day, it was reported that some 40 people had been arrested in relation to the attack.

Even as the country’s politicians seem to be clamouring to condemn extremism and lining up to justify the need for the establishment of military courts to try and convict terror suspects, there were few condemnations of the attack on the vigil. Nor have there been calls for finding out how and why Qadri, a known killer, continues to hold sway in prison and is able to brainwash the guards assigned to his cell.

The government’s inability to connect the dots between the unsolved assassinations of the past and the hopeful constitutional amendments of the future signals precisely why the latter is likely to fail in accomplishing its objectives. While military courts are being hugged and kissed as the solution to the problem of proliferating terror, existing iterations of extremism — the criminal, the vigilante, the imprisoned but unpunished and the legal — have yet to make their way into the public debate.

It is believed, perhaps, that leaving the more controversial issues — such as the ones that led to the killings of Salmaan Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti — to the side while the more recent and viscerally troubling Peshawar carnage is kept front and centre, will allow for the development of a national consensus against terror.

It is precisely in this assumption that the problem lies. If certain parts and components of extremism are dealt with and others are left untouched to appease the very forces that have unabashedly fomented terror in the country, then the half-measures of the present will be just as useless and ineffective as the inaction of the past.

The moral confusion that exists in the country today is born of precisely this habit of putting some things on the table, while other more controversial and challenging ones are left to fester. The continued silences on the assassinations of the past, the vigilante justice that justified them and the still existing laws that led to them are all real examples.

It is clear that Pakistan’s current civilian set-up believes that passing the buck to the military, disavowing their own responsibility for convicting terrorists, is a good political game that will prevent them from putting their own lives on the line.

All of that is well and good, and clearly understood by the watching and waiting public. What remains unclear, however, is what will happen to existing laws that have become instruments of terror and to the unpunished killers of forgotten assassinations.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2015

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