The sum of a year can be assessed in many ways. In a landscape pocked by violence, it can be counted in deaths and injuries, in losses and gains, the many and the meagre, in victories that seemed unlikely or celebrations that seemed faded. That which occurred again and again can be distilled into a theme and then a premonition of what is to come, what has not yet happened, what is hoped will occur.
But the message of what has happened, the yearning for what we hope will come next, cannot balance on the neat mathematics of past and present, hope and fear. The distillation of what was and what will be is a task of selection; and what we choose to remember, what we elevate into an emblem of the year, into a portion of its identity, is also important, for it is the frame through which we gaze upon the picture of the past and into the vision of the future.
The beginning
The year 2013 began with the killing of women. On Jan 1, six women and one man, all workers of an NGO in Swabi, were gunned down when their van was attacked by militants. All the women, except one, were teachers, and all of them were killed in Swabi’s Sher Afzal Banda area. The next day, an anti-polio vaccination drive was to begin. A four-year-old child was spared by the attackers. On Jan 2, 2013, the second day of the year, a US drone strike in South Waziristan, a little over 200 miles away, killed 10, including Mullah Nazir, a Taliban commander.
January was also the month of the year’s first long march. On the 13th of the month, Tahirul Qadri, the founder of Minhajul Quran International, led a vast throng of his followers to the country’s capital. In buses and trucks and cars and vans, Qadri’s followers poured into the capital and camped before the Parliament House, all of them agitating for electoral reforms, ones that would prevent corrupt leaders from standing for office again. The system was dirty, full of greed and avarice and dysfunctional; it had to be cleansed and elections had to be held right away. Included among Qadri’s followers were women and children, and as they spent night after cold night in the open air, they spoke to television anchors recording the spectacle. We are here for the country, they claimed, we will stay as long as it takes. On Jan 17, Qadri reached an agreement with the government, having been provided assurances regarding his claims. In the end, the government remained standing; the same leaders continued to be in power, and elections were not set for an earlier date.
As February began, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) renewed its offer to hold talks with the government, with an apparent easing of the preconditions the banned group had originally insisted upon. The offer was made via a video featuring Ehsanullah Ehsan, who was then the group’s chief spokesman. On the same day as the offer, a bomb ripped through a mosque, killing worshippers gathered to say the Friday prayer in North Waziristan. The same week also saw an attack on a military installation claimed by the TTP. With terrorists mauling through the country, it was on the 16th of the month that the Shia Hazara community of Quetta, already bleeding and beleaguered from mounting attacks in years of neglect and apathy, was targeted for a second time in a very new 2013. The two attacks, claimed by Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, together killed nearly 200 people and were the deadliest of the year. After each attack, hundreds of Hazara women and children camped out with their unburied, pleading the government to take notice. Following the second attack, the country’s elected representatives passed two pieces of legislation to help counter terrorism. The Fair Trial Act was signed into law and the National Assembly passed an amendment to the Anti-Terror Act focused on tracking terror financing.
The killings continue
The legislature continued its efforts against terror as the days of 2013 grew longer. On March 8, the National Assembly finally passed the National Counter Terrorism Authority Bill, creating the National Counter Terrorism Authority, which would oversee coordination of all efforts to fight terrorism in the country, including the scientific study of extremism to enable improved policymaking.
Karachi, already reeling from the March 3 bomb blast that targeted the Shia community killing 48, saw another tragedy less than two weeks after. Parveen Rehman, a social worker, urban planner and activist who had been working for decades in Orangi, one of the most hapless slums in the city, was gunned down. Her associates claimed that while she had no enemies, her work exposing the land-grabbling activities of various mafias in Karachi may have angered elements in the illegal, lucrative business.
The same month also saw the PPP-led government at the centre becoming the first ever democratically elected government to conclude its full term of five years with the Election Commission of Pakistan announcing days later that national elections would be held on May 11.
April found the country’s middle caught in the frenzy of election campaigns as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the northwest and Karachi in the south remained addled by violence. In the tribal areas, campaigning was curtailed by the edicts of this or that extremist group from participation in the electoral process. In Karachi, the frenzy of targeted killings continued, eking four to 10 lives a day and choking the city’s morgues and hospital emergency rooms. On April 23, five bomb explosions in Karachi and Quetta saw 10 people killed and over 60 injured. Leaders of the Awami National Party in the north and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in the south were the most frequently targeted by extremist groups and terrorist violence during this time.
The election
May 11 arrived riding the tides of much ebullience and excitement. Whether it was this political party or that, one half of the country’s population — the women — remained under-represented among those contending for power with only 108 contesting elections for National Assembly seats. When the day itself came, only a little over half of the over 37 million women eligible to vote in the country were able to exercise their right to adult franchise. While threats from terrorist groups factored in, news reports emerging in the weeks leading up to the election, as well as after May 11 revealed that several political parties had agreed amongst one another to not bring out women voters in parts of the country’s northwestern regions. However, the country’s urban areas, such as Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, saw a higher number of women turning out to vote.
The country’s new prime minister, also chief of the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz (PML-N) took his oath of office on June 5, beginning his third term in the position. His 25-member cabinet was sworn in a few days later.
Attacks on history
In the early hours of June 15, with half of 2013 under its belt, a country used to attacks of all sorts saw one of another kind. Under the cover of an otherwise ordinary darkness, militants stole into the Ziarat Residency, known for having hosted one of the last sojourns of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Once inside the ill-protected residence, they set fire to it, lighting a blaze that would consume the history within its walls. By the time people found out, by the time help came, by the time the fire was put out, the building had been gutted. The simple implements of a founding man’s life, the spaces that bore witness to his last moments, all eradicated. The Balochistan Liberation Army claimed the attack. In other tales of usual mayhem, the month also saw drone strikes in the country’s tribal areas and countless killed owing to targeted killings in Karachi.
Television, babies and quotas
The heat and humidity of July were particularly exacting this year, as they fell during the fasting month of Ramazan. A variety of religious programming and shows proffering spiritual guidance and cooking instructions took to the Pakistani airwaves for the ostensible purpose of assisting television audiences in the rites and rituals of piety. One of these, hosted by Aamir Liaquat, made national history by becoming the first to give away orphan babies to childless couples on television. Liaquat, whose broadcast appeared live on Pakistani televisions screens for 12 hours every day for the fasting month, did on at least two occasions give away newborns, both girls. The couples, Liaquat insisted, had been screened by the staff of the show for suitability.
In other news, the newly-elected national legislature of the country extended the mandate of the existing quota system that apportions all federal employment based on ethnicity (except for a slice of 7.5 per cent to be limited for those who can gain admission via “merit”). The quota system, which has been the subject of much debate over the span of Pakistan’s existence, is still needed, so the argument went that because the people of “backward” areas remain underprivileged and the intent of the system had not been actualised, the procedure must remain in place.
Presidents past and present, bans and Taliban talks
In the month of August, President Zardari became the first democratically-elected president of the country to successfully complete his term. The following month, President Mamnoon Hussain took the oath of office, becoming the country’s new head of state. And just as one president completed his term and another began his, a former president was awaiting trial. Having returned to Pakistan in March, former president Pervez Musharraf remained under house-arrest in September, awaiting the constitution of a formal panel of judges to adjudicate the treason charges against him which was finally done in November with the federal government levelling five formal charges of high treason against him.
September also saw the arrival and uneventful passage of the one year anniversary of Pakistan’s ban on YouTube. The ban, originally slapped in Sept 2012 over an anti-Islam film posted on the website, was maintained by the new government despite objections from activists. It was first imposed after bloody clashes stemmed from protests over the derogatory film and even while a “Freedom on the Net 2013” report ranked Pakistan as “not free”, chances of the ban being lifted anytime soon remain slim.
Pakistan entered the winter of 2013 with the first hiccups of dissatisfaction with the new government. With over 100 days passed, some saw the continued plummeting of the rupee, a failure in ceasing drone strikes and Taliban talks stuck in the doldrums as portents of failure. On the issue of negotiating with the TTP, while the government and its supporters kept on asserting that these talks would be held in the interest of “peace”, they had few details on how the negotiations would get beyond the issues that the TTP had asserted as early as January. The most crucial among these being the Constitution of Pakistan, the authority of which the TTP has repeatedly asserted it does not and would not recognise.
All of this, and the continuing murkiness of agreements, disagreements, objections and collaborations over drone strikes, came to a head on Nov 1 when TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud was killed in one such attack. The controversy over the permissibility or advisability of drone attacks bubbled over in the days that followed, with heated debates on Pakistani airwaves and in some cases a deplorable lionisation of a man, who during his lifetime plotted the deaths of thousands of innocent Pakistanis. The Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf, which heads the provincial government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said it would block Nato supplies en route to Afghanistan and proceeded to do so not long after.
It was not until Nov 20, 2013 that the Prime Minister's Special Advisor on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz revealed to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that the government of Pakistan had indeed been ready to begin talks with the TTP on Nov 2. The United States, Aziz insisted, had promised Pakistan that it would not carry out any more attacks during talks with the outlawed group.
A final month of elusive clarity and missing security
The year began with the death of NGO workers in Swabi, a day before the beginning of a polio drive in KP. There were 53 reported cases of polio in the country in 2012; in 2013 these rose to 73, with the World Health Organisation estimating that nearly two million Pakistani children had not been immunised owing to the cessation of anti-polio drives. As Waziristan became home to the highest number of children paralysed by the disease, a “polio emergency” was declared in Karachi, owing to recurring cases. On account of this, many countries began to consider further visa restrictions against Pakistanis.
The TTP, which had claimed responsibility for the killing of immunisation workers on a number of occasions, continued its spree of attacking vaccinators in December. As the year entered its last few days, gunmen shot dead a polio immunisation worker while he was administering drops to children in the Khyber tribal region and with 2013 coming to an end, Pakistan saw over 3,000 killed in terrorism-related violence.
The future in flux
The measure of the year in a country at war inevitably makes for dismal assessments. The truth, whether things were really good or really bad, depends ultimately on specifics. In Pakistan, these could be location, whether you were the unfortunate one from Khyber or Karachi, or the fortunate one from other parts of the country; wealth, whether you eked out a living peddling this or that on a street corner, or drew in a hefty salary courtesy of government employment, pure luck or simply lineage. The future thus dangles on a similar scale, with those untouched by violence or perfidy or poverty insisting on its brightness, its ultimate promise, while the rest mourn the passing of one more year, and fail to see hope in the next.
—By Rafia Zakaria