WE’RE great at hyperbole. Every political march is the longest yet, and participants never number less than a million. Every project is a game changer — whether it be a power plant, a public transport system, a road or even a dispensary — and is guaranteed to usher in an era of prosperity and transform the destiny of this nation. Hyperbole is indeed a national trait, and it’s safe to say that those indulging in it don’t really believe it any more than the rest of us do.

But sometimes even the most bombastic rhetoric isn’t enough, as in the case of the Army Public School Peshawar massacre on Dec 16, 2014. It was indeed the blackest of days; the most horrific of terrorist outrages even for a nation too used to the murder of innocents, too inured to atrocity. The oaths we swore were heartfelt: to take revenge, to seek justice for the innocent dead, to never forget.

There was action too: Zarb-i-Azb was already under way but any lingering voices questioning the need for this military operation were silenced. Military courts were instituted to try terror suspects and the National Action Plan was formulated. The efficacy of the former and the stillbirth of the latter are topics that have been exhaustively debated, and we shall not focus on those.

We can’t bring the 132 children lost in APS Peshawar back.

Three years on we extol what we call the sacrifices of the slain, we call them our little martyrs — and if many of us are uncomfortable with that nomenclature and what it implies, it is perhaps meant to provide some consolation to the parents who will never see their children again save in photographs and memory. To some of them, perhaps this does provide some comfort, but for many others that comfort is too cold. And that’s because this is all they have been given: songs, tableaus and promises.

But what else could be done, one might ask? We can’t bring those children back; we can’t travel back in time and shield their bodies with our own. What is it then that we could do?

We could listen. We could add our voices to those of the parents of the children of APS when they make their only demand, one that they have made time and again to no avail: that there be a public inquiry into the massacre, that the inquiry report we are told exists be released to the public. This is what Shahana Ajoon, a mother who lost her 14-year-old son, demands of us. In an article published this Dec 16, she says none of her questions have been answered.

The parents were promised an inquiry report, but when they approach the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to demand it, they are told it exists but cannot be released for security reasons. When they approach the federal government they are told that APS is an army-run school and they have no authority over it.

Shahana says that just a few months after the massacre, due to unrelenting demands from her and other parents, they were invited to a briefing where officers showed footage they claimed to be of slain APS attackers and handlers.

At that point one father stood up and said that he had seen these pictures before, that some of them were in fact of the terrorists who had attacked Bacha Khan Airport.

“Are we being fooled?” asks Shahana. All she wants, she says, is for someone to come out and say, ‘Yes, since I am sitting in this chair, it was my responsibility to protect your children and I failed.’

If you’re asking why these demands are being made now, know that they have been made from the very outset. Two months after the massacre, parents protested outside the school, claiming that they were “being kept in the dark about the investigations”, and demanding a judicial inquiry. They got only assurances, and every subsequent protest has attracted less and less attention, almost as if it were an embarrassment, an inconvenient truth that proves the lie of the loud claims of the state.

Our reaction to this atrocity wasn’t feigned. The horror, the anger and the despair were real, and have not dimmed in these three years. Our tears flowed then and still flow now. And if we feel like this, can we dare to imagine how the parents of those children feel? And then can we imagine that they still have been given no answers? That they are fed only on more pageantry and more promises.

And if this is how we treat those who should be venerated above all, then let’s not feign surprise when the victims of the Kasur child abuse scandal — again a case where the hyperbole is insufficient to describe the horror of it — cry out that they have been denied justice, that they have no recourse but to set themselves on fire outside the Punjab Assembly? What words can we offer them, when we are so utterly devoid of will?

The writer is a journalist.
Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, December 25th, 2017