YEAR in and year out, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan documents the horrors inflicted by the government and society on the weak and the disadvantaged.

Minorities, women and prisoners of every stripe are humiliated, tortured and oppressed in an institutionalized fashion. Foreign human rights organizations point out these excesses regularly as well. But rather than taking steps to halt these horrors, successive governments, some journalists and the elite prefer to dismiss these reports as exaggerated, uninformed and an "interference in Pakistan's internal affairs."

The police and sundry intelligence agencies use torture as a routine investigative tool; in fact, it is their only investigative tool. Even fingerprinting, a 150-year-old technology, is not widely used as our cops prefer to thrash suspects to within an inch of their lives. But we are all comfortable with this state of affairs. All discussions of the endlessly debated police reforms revolve around the structure of the proposed set-up and not the method of investigating crime.

However, lest we feel we are alone in this socially accepted and sanctioned brutality, let me introduce those readers unfamiliar with his unbiased and honest reporting to Robert Fisk. Writing for The Independent, Fisk recently filed this despairing article:

"Why, I ask myself, am I spending more time than ever in 25 years covering the Middle East, cataloguing the barbarity, torture, hangings, head-chopping and human rights abuses of the region? No, I'm not talking about Israel's death squads, its vile torture apparatus at the Russian compound in Jerusalem and its shoot-to-kill army, some units of which are turning into an indisciplined rabble. I'm talking about the blind, cruel, vindictive Muslim regimes of the Middle East. Because I'm beginning to ask myself if there isn't something uniquely terrible about the way they treat their people, the way they kill their people, the way they abuse them and flog them and string them up..."

It is perhaps revealing that Saddam Hussein, despite the hundreds of thousands of deaths he is responsible for, continues to be a hero to millions of Muslims across the Islamic world. I know the following passage will not make any converts, but let me quote from the preface to Samir Al-Khalil's book (published in 1989) "Republic of Fear":"Since I finished writing Republic of Fear, the chamber of horrors that is Saddam hussein's Iraq has mushroomed into something not even the most morbid imagination could have foreseen. The war with Iran ended in the summer of 1988 on favourable terms for Iraq. But did the violence stop, or even abate? On the contrary, it turned in on itself...

"The day after the ceasefire came into effect, Iraqi warplanes went into action with chemical weapons against Kurdish villages. Between August 25 and 27, several thousand helpless civilians died. The attacks continued on a systematic basis through September. It had of course been done before, in the town of Halabja in March 1988 where around 6,000 perished... How many died in these attacks? We may never know. Tens of thousands of army deserters had collected since 1980 in the marshes region of southern Iraq. They were given an ultimatum. What happened to those who handed themselves in? We know only what happened to those who didn't; they were gassed."

Al-Khalil goes on to lament the silence that greets such viciousness outside Iraq: "Western governments looking toward lucrative markets... are not doing enough. They turn a blind eye to the worst excesses when these do not involve them directly. More ominous is the active support Saddam Hussein's regime receives from the Arab world - from regimes in particular but also from public opinion... Not a word of condemnation of the indiscriminate use of poison gas to eliminate a civilian population has appeared in the Arab press..." Nor in the press here, one might add.

It is not the widespread use of systematic violence in our part of the world that is as disturbing as its easy acceptance at every level of society. Defenders of the system point to the blood on the hands of other civilizations at different points in history. But actions are judged in the context of their times: just because other societies destroyed statues in earlier times is no justification for the Taliban to blast the magnificent giant Buddha carvings in Bamiyan. Similarly, Halaku Khan's trail of terror does not give his successors the licence to kill.

Nevertheless, the blood-letting does not stop: in Algeria, tens of thousands of innocents have been slaughtered, many by having their throats slit, in an unending civil war. Thousands of Kurds have been killed in Iraq, Turkey and Iran over the years. We Pakistanis have the blood of an unknown number of Bengalis on our hands. Iranians and Iraqis bled each other white for a decade. And everywhere in the Muslim world, torturers and hangmen go about their grisly task every day.

Back to Fisk: "Down in Saudi Arabia, where public execution is a fine art, they're well on their way to meeting last year's rich crop of 113 beheadings... Our friends the Saudis are second only to the merciless Saddam when it comes to butchering their people in public... Then there's the other refinement of Saudi sadism: "cross amputation" (the chopping off of right hand and left foot for supposed crimes)..."

Apologists for these regimes seek refuge behind concepts like "Muslim traditions" and "deterrent punishment" as if the world had not moved forward from the days when cruelty was built into statecraft. But now fundamental human rights are at the heart of constitutions around the world. For a modern state to indulge in such barbarism on a daily basis is to deny the progress humanity has made over the centuries.

For believers, here are some words from Fisk's article to ponder over: "What does it represent, this behaviour by the states of the Middle East? Yes, I know the Americans are poisoning, frying or shooting their condemned at a ferocious rate. And of course I know about 'sharia' law. I've heard more than I want to about its severity. But what about the mercy and compassion that are among the first words of the Quran? In Arab and Iranian homes, Muslim families exhibit infinitely more compassion and love than westerners. They don't send their elderly and incurably sick to die in nursing institutions. The old and the fatally ill spend their last days in their family homes, cared for to the end by relatives. Shame on us. But how come the same men and women can stand on a rooftop to scream at a woman strangling on a rope?"