ISLAMABAD: Sombre scenes and utter silence greeted onlookers at the Aabpara Chowk on Friday evening, as activists wheeled out 141 coffins and placed them before the gathering.

Most of the coffins bore the number 141 with Never Forget written alongside – an obvious reference to the innocent lives lost in the Peshawar tragedy. But there were other coffins too, one for slain minorities’ minister Shahbaz Bhatti, one for slain Christian couple Shama and Shahzad, one for the heroic Aitzaz Hassan, and others for Lady Health Workers, Hazaras and ‘human beings’ from other religious and ethnic groups.

Prepared by Christian activists, the coffins were brought to the venue by truck and offloaded by nearly all those in attendance. Men, women and even children carried them coffins on their shoulders and placed them on the road, side by side. On this cold January night, as members of the Hazara community squatted next to the coffin marked Hazara, one was instantly reminded of the scenes from Quetta’s Alamdar Road, where mothers and sisters had sat in the freezing cold for days alongside the unburied bodies of their loved ones. It was an emotional time and there was hardly a dry eye in the gathering.

Jibran Nasir, who has been at the forefront of the civil society movement against Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz, said that the organisers had decided to remember all the nation’s martyrs. He announced that after the demonstration, the coffins would be left on the road to remind the government that their killers are still at large.

The pluralistic gathering also meant that there many ideologies represented at Aabpara Chowk, not all of whom necessarily agreed with each other.

A visible split among liberals was between those who were more vociferous in their demands for terrorists and other criminals to be executed for their crimes, and those who felt that advocating death for anyone was a bit too harsh.

Bushra Bano Arain, president of the Lady Health Workers (LHWs) Association, broke down during her speech as she recounted the sacrifices of her 66 fellow workers who had laid down their lives in the fight against polio.

But rights activists such as Farzana Bari did not use such words. Imtiaz Haider, a lawyer present at the protest, told Dawn said he did not believe that any one, even if they are Taliban, should be hanged.

“Our problems cannot be solved by hanging people. The US hangs the most number of people in the world, but the crime rate there is still very high,” he said.

“Instead of hanging terrorists, we should go for better policies to eradicate terrorism,” he said.

Singer Arieb Azhar said that although he had never been in favour of the death penalty, but after the Peshawar tragedy, he too believed that that terrorists should be hanged.

“Any punishment given by the court should be implemented. If the court announces death penalty it should be implemented,” he said.

Published in Dawn, January 17th, 2015

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