Whose War?

WHOSE WAR?

Maryam Sakeenah

Ear splitting blasts, gored flesh, charred limbs, corpses falling left right and centre in a steadily mounting death toll. A matter of course. Nothing to be shouting about from the rooftops.

The Quran says: "Whosoever killeth a human being, except by way of punishment for murder or spreading fitnah in the land, it shall be as if he killeth the whole of mankind, and whosoever saveth a human being it shall be as if he saveth the whole of mankind." (5:32)

The judgement is easy to make, in fact simplistic. It's that 'Islamist' again. Full stop. When a suicide bomb went off the other day, the news flash reporting it took care to specify in its 4-word content, 'Bearded terrorist kills 9'. In this age of information influx, news flashes and alerts, there's hardly another version to choose from. It's the Islamists bombing the hell out of everywhere. They're at it again. It is too obvious for any digging-in-deeper.

But a closer look is unsettling for the simplistic assumptions. In the final analysis, who is the loser? Who gains? Who suffers the ire, the renewed vigour for 'crushing extremism'? It is the state that wins understanding and approval for its dirty methods, the powerful boost of the 'silent majority.' It wins solider grounds for justifying the alliance with the U.S in the War on Terror and for the militarization of our northern buffer zone of yore. It wins sympathies, concern and millions of dollars from overseas in 'combatting the common threat.' The crusade is powered with every bomb going off, and each time someone can say, 'We told you so. See?'

Even when it gains him not a shred of anything at all but reasons and excuses for his enemies to use; even when it gains nothing but gusto for the War on Terror; even when it gains only disappearances and deportations to Cuba; even when it merely adds to the terror of the Terrorist apparition and no more, the Islamist goes on killing himself. An insanity we seriously believe_ the whole lot of us.

And why? There's a clear agenda. Dr. Nasir Khan writes, "Everywhere, the media reveals a sort of preconceived image of Islam the writers intend to convey to their readers." They intend to convey a propaganda-based image of a subhuman, archaic, barbaric creed bred out of the wilderness of the Arabian desert; a patriarchal, misogynistic, narrow cult whose followers are vile, depraved, bloodthirsty, pathologically violent gun-toting terrorists planning a global spine-chilling Hollywood-like terrorist plot. On CNN, the phobia of a grand terror conspiracy against the U.S in the making is almost palpable, systematically pumped into the viewer's brain. "But", writes Dr. Khan, "in view of the real power wielded by the West throughout the Middle East and beyond, the so-called 'threat of Islam' is really quite groundless. In fact, right-wing political manipulators and Christian fundamentalists can very easily provoke major crises between the Muslim world and the West. In fact, the global expansion of Western colonialism is the story of plunder and destruction across continents."

The ongoing crusade unleashing terror and hate all across the globe is another feather in the cap of Western civilization. The West's intelligence agencies and its monopoly over the media combine to form a live warring mechanism firing and pumping up the ongoing War of Ideas. The limelight, however, is not here, for it doesn't serve The Purpose.

Consider that arsonists desecrating mosques in Bradford, setting fire to Islamic centres in Texas, bombs going off in mosques in India where Muslims are the minority community or hate-filled anti-Muslim wall-chalking is never an issue anywhere.

On August 5, following the U.S's brash threats to Pakistan for real possibilities of strikes on 'suspected targets' within its territory, the Washington Post ran a jolting report. It said that the US intelligence estimate submitted to President Bush last month was deliberately changed to prove that Pakistan has Al Qaeda bases operating inside its territory. As a natural, foreseen consequence, the threats to attack Pakistan followed. And the Presidency aspirant Obama cashed heavily on the skewed-up report for his electoral campaign.

So much of what really is a pervasive, global threat is unreported, unexposed. The hidden hands go on pulling the strings behind the iron curtains. Claudia Nelson writes in her article 'A Terrorist Organization', "The CIA is a terrorist organization according to both international ands American definitions of terrorism and is guilty of engaging in unconstitutional and illegal behavior." In her article she quotes numerous instances where the CIA was involved in shady activities. The operation in Vietnam, masterminded by the CIA, claimed 20,000 lives, often at random. In the 80s, the CIA used profits from cocaine smuggling to engineer coups and destabilization movements in Africa in which tens of thousands of civilians died. The coup in Chile bringing in the unscrupulous, violent Pinochet regime was funded and supervised by the CIA. The Cuban airline bombing in 1973 killing 73 unearthed clues pointing again to the CIA. In America itself, the CIA conducted the 'Operation CHAOS', which was a 'vicious , aggressive domestic surveillance operation against anti-war activists.' More to the CIA's credit is the failed coup against Chavez in Venezuela in 2002 and distortions of data about Iraq to justify its occupation by the U.S. Nelson concludes, "You cannot claim to fight terrorism, or claim to be the beacon of democracy with an organization like the CIA in your ranks."

V.K Singh, a high-ranking army officer in India worked as a senior officer in the Research and Analysis Wing_ India's powerful intelligence agency 'RAW.' Singh writes about the organization, "There is a lack of any accountability and misuse of the agency by its political masters… there is absolutely no parliamentary monitoring… the chiefs have unlimited powers and are not accountable to anyone at all." He further mentions a RAW official Rabinder Singh, who was a CIA mole working in the RAW. After his hidden motives came to light, no investigation was carried out, or was deliberately delayed. The spy conveniently defected to the U.S, alongwith top-secret RAW documents, including 'sensitive information on neighboring South Asian countries.' There was no follow-up to this infamous case either.

Shortly after the spate of suicide attacks began in Pakistan, the national press ran an important report regarding 'proofs of foreign involvement' in the bombings. The Nation reports, "In the flood of suicide attacks in the aftermath of the Lal Masjid operation, the country's intelligence has found proofs of Indian involvement in the militancy." The official revealing the fact called the proofs 'strong, irrefutable and rock-hard.' "The investigation into the killing of the Chinese nationals in Peshawar also points a finger at the same country. There is also significant proof of the involvement of the RAW in the Baloch nationalist uprising. The neighbouring country's intelligence agencies are 'pouring in huge funding' for the purpose, the official further stated."

A fortnight ago in Peshawar, a terrorist gang of three brothers was busted. The convicts confessed to "being involved in a series of blasts in the city and sabotage activities including two bomb blasts in bus terminals. They were planning more of the same on trade centres, banks, important public buildings. There was also evidence of their involvement in the killing of the Chinese on Charsadda road. The netted terrorists had backing by the intelligence agency of a foreign country." (The Nation)

The news item bore a tiny header eclipsed somewhere in the odd inside pages of the paper. However, this was the only paper carrying the sensitive details. Luckily, the report had caught my eye. The paper failed to add, however, that the terrorists this time were 'unbearded.'

Whose agenda does this truly serve? There is plenty of method in the madness of the mayhem. It is noteworthy that of late the spate of attacks have acquired a malevolent and malicious character hitherto untried. Attack on a funeral in Swat, attacks on congregations, the attack on the peace jirga in Darra Adamkhel and the Rawalpindi attack targeting a senior eye surgeon associated with the Army Medical wing are all notably atypical; an anomaly quite uncharacteristic of militant operations in Pakistan which, it must be confessed, show at least some discrimination between combatant and non-combatant, civilian and non civilian. The attacks launched by the restive pro Taliban fighters in the north clearly differ fundamentally, and do not become dastardly and indiscriminate as opposed to NATO sponsored operations bombing schoolchildren and wedding processions. It is commendable that the Taliban spokesperson vociferously condemned the brutal killing and mutilation of the kidnapped American soldier in Afghanistan. Yvonne Ridley would tell you of her firsthand experience as an espionage suspect and prisoner in the hands of the evil Talibanist mullahs_ an experience that helped her transform from Yvonne Ridley to Maryam.

What is also noticeable is the cover-up of crystal clear evidence proving the involvement of intelligence agencies in the ongoing mayhem. The sheepish stance of the government in keeping mum and not showing the world the clues which, put together, complete a pattern that unveils the hidden hands is disgraceful.

There's an audible silence, a hush that gives away a great deal. We're tight-lipped, being pawns in the game_ sans sovereignty. The dead are gone and their mourners hushed up. The blasts don't hurt, after all_ they help win converts to the wisdom of Enlightened Moderation and the anti-terror crusade. Blasts in the violet air keep the crusade charged for the propaganda to thrive in and the ideas of a 'pro-West' Muslimhood to take root. They keep the dollars coming as we shake hands and smile at the camera for another press release, another 'confidence building measure.' Who said Pakistan was First?

It is very understandable. The US suffered huge setbacks in its mired Iraq and Afghanistan policies. The fiction of 'a war for peace, liberation, freedom, democracy' has become quite a mockery. It is for the world to see the morass the US invasion left in its travails, the debris that was once Falluja or Jalalabad. Noam Chomsky describes the ruins of Falluja after US airstrikes: "It looked like a city of ghosts. People bled to their death in the city… it was a desolate world of skeletal buildings, tank-blasted homes, weeping power lines and severed palm trees, devoid of running water, electricity, commerce or schools, with lakes f sewage in the streets, the smell of corpses inside charred buildings…" Furthermore, "The US invasion was a truly horrible and brutal one for hapless Iraq. Hatred of the US is now rampant in the country subjected to years of sanctions that had already led to the destruction of the Iraqi middles class, the collapse of the education system and the growth of illiteracy and despair. Basic services deteriorated, hospitals running out of the most basic medicines. There is a countrywide food shortage, and over 400,000 Iraqi children suffer from wasting_ a severe form of malnutrition. Facilities are in horrid shape and specialists are fleeing the country… no figures were provided on the death toll in Iraq, but it is estimated to be much higher than a 100,000. According to a university professor in Iraq who remembers the sacking of Baghdad hundreds of years ago by Halagu Khan, the difference between Halagu and the American invaders is that Halagu was far more humane."

As a result, the US policies the world over have received a severe setback, and are beginning to be seen as unjust and myopic. People are beginning to question, to disagree and to understand why a victim would refuse to be a victim and strap bombs around his body. As Edward Said explained, "Take a young man from Gaza living in the most horrendous conditions_ most of it imposed by US backed Israel_ who straps dynamite around himself and then throws himself into a crowd of Israelites. I've never condoned or agreed with it, but at least it is understandable as the desperate wish of a human being crowded out of life and all of his surroundings; who feels his fellow citizens, other Palestinians , his parents, sisters and brothers, suffering, being injured or killed. He wants to do something, to strike back."

The anti-US sentiment has been on the rise, particularly so in frontline states that have felt the outfall of the insane wars. Pakistan, Newsweek's 'Most Dangerous Place' has the highest anti-US sentiment the world over, and sympathy for the militant cause. This can also explain the overwhelming anti-Musharraf vote in the recent elections: a public refusal to play poodle. This certainly undermines the US agenda in its 'major non NATO ally', and the CIA gurus are at pains to engineer a psychological overhaul of the disruptive anti-US public opinion in the Wild, Wild Pakistan.

And so, the bombs serve_ especially those readily labeled by the media as suicide hits sponsored by bloodthirsty Islamist fanatics. Each time a bombshell goes off killing our very own, victimizing innocents_ people like you and me, the fiction permeates deeper, the righteousness of the US's crusade against potential suicide bombers receives understanding and justification. And each time, simple minds tuned to the media matrix switch sides, converting to the creed of the crusader. For, the God-made softness in the human heart can never condone the killing of innocents. When maniacal, brain-controlled madrassah-goers hankering for Paradise are shown to be perpetrators, it is the madrassah and its student who suffer the ire, the disdain. The message: "It is these beasts we are out to kill. For they would kill you if we don't them". It is the simple logic of demonizing the enemy. Showing you that the bearded one there disguises a beastly heart, and deserves to be dealt with the way the US believes it ought to be done. Show how bad and ugly and dangerous the enemy is. Next time they smoke out militants from a cave dwelling, they'll be sure there will be fewer sympathizers. There are few who would dig deeper and wonder about the missing links to the conclusion jumped at.

The mission before the US and its military-intelligence arsenal is to convert the War on Terror from 'America's war' to 'Our war.' It is a transition from theirs to ours that is vital to US interests in Pakistan. The Muslim citizen would never support a War he knows serves American interests. So the psychological strategy is to show it to be not so much America's war as a war we need to fight for our own great good_ a war the great West fights for us out of its great sense of compassion. So the sympathy has to be directed away from the desperate militant-rebel, and has to be channellized to serve the American cause. And well, if the strategy demands a few bombs and corpses here and there, a consistently rising death toll of innocents, well, so be it. As Madeleine Albright would say, "it's a number we're not terribly interested in."

That's the Way of the Brave New World. You lump it if you do not like it. For they're gonna have fun on this planet. They're gonna play the Great Game. You're with Us or against Us. Choose_ for the life of you.

The Pretense of Democracy

THE PRETENSE OF DEMOCRACY

Maryam Sakeenah

'No timeframe for elections', the headlines blared as the latest from the President. The next day, a stunning somersault after the storm the statement had kicked up: 'Elections to be held in January.'

This might be great news, but it doesn't make a lot of us any less despairing of the state of affairs. The stroke was played with ingenuity for it will buy the General more time to let the raids, crackdowns, arrests, operations, police-boot-kicks-in-faces and baton-charging of lawyers, professors and students go on. After all, the ends justify the means. The great end in sight is the Restoration of True Democracy, as defined by the Father of True Democracy. To this end, the forthright soldier is committed. The announcement will help quieten down the endless stream of criticism directed at the unscrupulous regime from the outside world. The fragile 'progressive image', so painstakingly put up with all the marathons, Sufism conferences, obscenity galore and crackdowns on madrassahs and masjids is at stake.

The General is intelligent. He knows showing a simple readiness to hold elections can be a great whitewash for all the crimes, the high-handedness, the atrocities. He knows Democracy is the Elusive Beloved, the be-all and end-all of our political endeavour, the one thing to be lived and died for. And, all said and done, he knows we don't know a jack about what democracy means.

He is right. For this is why democracy here is little more than a magic word you use and abuse as a justification, an excuse and a vindication for a regime's dirty methods. All dictators have used the rhetoric of democracy to keep the nation dumbed down. It is all being done to strengthen 'true democracy', you know. we all serve that one great end, and have been serving it these past 60 years.

And yet, I repeat: we don't know a jack about what democracy means or what it truly involves. To us, democracy is a periodic balloting exercise. Full Stop. We know little more than that, and this is why holding a vote becomes the one criterion for any regime to get its legitimacy or to win approval for its methods. And this is exactly why Musharraf had to announce elections: the disquiet around the world needs a hushing up. The magic wand of the declaration to allow a vote has done the job remarkably. However, a vote held under a regime with credentials such as these has no credibility and is a very flimsy cover for its illegitimate methods. But then, who wants to dig in that deep?

The celebrated declaration doesn't brighten up the faces around me. It doesn't bring a promise of deliverance. It means little as life goes on with its vicious monotony, sun up to sun down, leaving the common man to bear his ordained lot.

Notwithstanding the frequency of election dramatics, our socio-political setup is a messed up morass of feudal hierarchies, a patriarchal setup where clout and political weight, pressure groups, lobbies, rhetoric and demagoguery count. The system breeds poverty, illiteracy, ignorance, misery and helps to maintain the status quo for its self-perpetuation.

Because the ignorant, illiterate man can never acquire the political consciousness to discriminate. He can never question why or stand up for his right. The hungry man will be so completely trapped in his hand-to-mouth existence, he wouldn't ever think beyond the next meal. The human being trapped in a minimal existence is the politician's strength. His stunted mind, his minimal self can never threaten. Like the sheep who are taught to keep up the chorus, 'Four legs good, two legs bad,' and overnight, are taught to unlearn and relearn the expediently modified version: 'Four legs good, two legs better.' The rhetoric does the trick: for the glorification of he State. For welfare, progress, development, freedom, democracy. The sheep keep bleating in chorus reassuringly, and the leader keeps up the chest-thumping, his rhetoric heavily laden with the glamorous word, 'democracy.'

Despite the electoral exercises, the voting and the ballot box, such a system cannot but throw up leaders of the same crop. The system is designed to create more of the same, to give security and perpetuation to the status-quo and to bring into power people who do not threaten the system with promise of change but in fact are products of it and dependent on it for political survival. So long as feudalism, social inequality and injustice thrive, the system will never bring to the fore any freshness. Making a graduate degree a necessary condition for an assembly seat will only bring in more fake degrees. Increasing women seats in the assembly will only bring in wives, daughters and sisters of the same crop. Implanting an election exercise on top of a rotten system can never truly democratize. It keeps bringing in, by turn, the same sequence of faces. The change has to be from the grassroots.

Plato believed that democracy of the vote was a self-destructive system because, as Will Durant interprets him, "the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best people and the wisest courses to take. To get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is only necessary to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play. The crowd so loves rhetoric and flattery, that at last the wiliest, calling himself the 'protector of the people', rises to power. In democracy we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. The people blindly elect the lesser of two evils presented to them as candidates by the nominating cliques. To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office and selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good_ that is the problem of political philosophy."

To create such a system, there needs to be done an overhauling of the status quo from the grassroots, and without the hypocrisy of voting. Durant, commenting on Platonic thought further writes, "True democracy means perfect equality of opportunity, especially in education, not the rotation of every Tom, Dick and Harry in public office. Public officials shall be chosen not by votes nor by secret cliques pulling the unseen wires of democratic pretence, but by their own ability as demonstrated in the fundamental democracy of an equal race."

A truly democratic system, therefore, is not merely one in which people go to the vote, but one in which the fundamental, core values are social justice, economic and social equality, liberty and respect of the individual human being. A genuine system is one in which the social and political machinery is geared towards reinstating and protecting the respect, dignity and basic human rights of the individual; in which, as the Prophet (S) of Islam said, "the honour, life and property" of an individual is safe.

A true political democracy rests on social and economic democracy as its basis. Such a system naturally engenders from within itself, a genuine political hierarchy which acts in service of the system, to maintain the core values of justice, fundamental rights, freedom and equality.

Every crisis, they say, comes with an opportunity. The crisis we are living through presents such an opportunity too. In the current scenario, we are witnessing the collective resentment of literally all departments and shades of life against the autocratic system_ the front against this government consists of lawyers, journalists, professors, students, religious leaders and members of the civil society. For the first time in history has Pakistan's civil society assumed this role to fill up the vacuum created by the opportunist, self-serving politicians who failed to deliver. Any genuine change has to come from the civil society. When the rot of parliamentary democracy fails, it is the civil society that must rise to the fore as the guardians of the values that got trodden on in the melee_ justice, equality, fundamental human rights. It is the civil society that is qualified and imbued with the potential to turn the tide and become the ground-layers of a genuinely egalitarian order we have been dreaming of since long. It is an immense opportunity. If the civil society fails to rise up to the occasion, the rotten, exploitative order might win over once again for another, prolonged hypocrisy. It probably is, as that pioneer of our freedom had said all those years back, 'Now or Never.'

The Amplitude of Silence

THE AMPLITUDE OF SILENCE

Maryam Sakeenah

The painting-up in white of the indelibly Red Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) is a powerful symbol. An attempt to whitewash the redness of the act, to erase the disturbing memory of blood, gore and decapitated dead bodies; to placate, to impose an Oblivion. Just like the naming of the ‘Operation Silence.’ An imposition of silence, an imposition of amnesia. Per force.

The Silence is audible, the absence almost palpable. The vacuum eternally gaping. Not to be talked about: the Unmentionable. Come July 12, the disturbing images were taken off screens, restive hearts fed again with all the usual rounds of jazz and glitz. The message: All’s well. The tragedy became the Unmentionable and the Forbidden as the media docilely complied with the orders. I only understand now that our heroic media men believe in freedom only conditionally. Images and memories vapourized like the many tiny corpses that were whisked away, vanishing into thin air. The right to know the truth and the right to mourn was withheld.

The silence becomes criminal. For, as Brecht said, ‘it implies silence about so many horrors.’ ‘Operation Silence’: I admire the honesty of the guy who came up with that name. But why the silence? My mother taught me it was bad manners to talk about gory details to people, to bring up a sombre topic or to talk death at the dining table. We are being made to revise our lessons at table manners. A reality too shocking, too overwhelmingly cruel to be faced squarely. Hence, the Unmentionable. The reality of our ugly national character, the reality of the vile bestiality we are capable of, our unholy fanaticism for the goddess they call ‘Enlightened Moderation.’ The goddess with fair tresses and cleavage who comes flashing on TV all the time. Like the picture of Dorian Gray mirroring the ugliness, obscured from view to keep the visage attractive and pleasing: Enlightened and Moderate. A visage beneath which hulks a terror_ that if the picture mirroring the reality is brought out, the thin covering will wear off and give way. The Picture of Dorian Gray, locked up carefully, grows uglier by the day, its rotting teeth gaping horribly, the eye sockets darkly caving in, the sickly skin wearing off. Yet still it wears that wicked smile that speaks of is triumph. Eventually. Mirroring our ugliness all the time, growing more horrible_ doling out to us days to make merry living up to the ‘progressive image.’

The greatest support this regime claims it enjoys is of that magical, mythical, fantastical entity: the Silent Majority. Then what to make of my neighbour next door, my colleague at work, the bystander there, the patient in the doctor’s waiting room and the client at the barber’s_both cleanshaven and bearded_ who, that fateful day, confided in me the pain, the disapproval, the outrage over the incident. What to make of the numerous nameless callers on private TV channels whose voices choked with tears as they spoke? What about the numerous messages I, and so many of my friends received soaked in blood and tears? I think: The ‘silent majority’ is the repressed and gagged silenced majority in the grip of the empowered, favoured and heavily petted elitist U.S-educated minority.

How about that majority all the way back in 1947 that chanted on the streets that battle cry ‘Pakistan ka matlab kiya, La ilaha ill allah’. How about the majority that was gathered that day in February 1948, intently listening to the sound of their Great Leader who declared, “ It is my belief that our salvation lies in following the golden rules of conduct set for us by our great law-giver, the Prophet (S) of Islam. Let us lay the foundations of our democracy on the basis of truly Islamic ideals and principles.”

And again, at Karachi the same year, he said to the tens of thousands before him: “I do not understand a section of the people who deliberately want to make propaganda that the constitution of Pakistan would not be made on the basis of the Shariah (Islamic Law). Islamic principles are as applicable today as they were 1300 years ago… Islam has taught equality, justice and fairplay to everybody… Let us make it (the Shariah) the future constitution of Pakistan. We shall make it and we shall show it to the world.”

That same leader, while addressing a gathering at Waziristan outlining the Frontier policy had said on April 17, 1948: “Pakistan has no desire to unduly interfere with your freedom. On the contrary, Pakistan wants to help you and make you, as far as it lies in our power, self-reliant and self-sufficient and help in your educational, social and economic uplift… We Musalmans believe in One God, one Book and one Prophet (S). So we must stand united as one nation. In unity lies strength; united we stand, divided we fall.”

It becomes poignant here. Fast forward to 2007. The idealism, the aspirations,, the dreams, the promises, the Cause lived and died for all dashed to the ground in one fell sweep. The Original Sin of the cannon-fodder at the Lal Masjid was the demand that the country live up to its original ethos. After a long wait in vain of over sixty years. So is the Original Sin of the militants at Swat held at point-blank range by the armed patriots. The vision betrayed, the dream gone sour_ who then are the patriots and who the traitors? Answers, anyone?

The voices of resentment at the great betrayal find no representation, no comforting echo in the corridors of power. They are leaderless, alientated, ostracized, disowned and even demonized. They are curtly told they do not belong. Just as the president had explained to us that the girls at the Jamia Hafsa shouldn’t get our sympathies as they didn’t belong to Islamabad, but had come from the ‘frontier.’ (Is the ‘frontier’ to be acknowledges as a part of the state? Does it still belong then?)

I remember the cartoon I saw in a history book dating back to Mussolini’s fascist Italy of the 1930s. It showed Mussolini with his hand held tight over the crater of a smouldering volcano, at the bottom of which could be read, “this is going to hurt you much more than it hurts me now.”

Every time I see the newsflash with headlines of suicide attacks and killer bombs going off in the northern areas, I remember the volcano. The volcano spewing out and unleashing its hurt, fire, tears and blood. I feel sorry for the victims and the lives lost. And I feel sorry about our inability to learn the rules of thumb: when you do not let the other be, when you do not let him live his way in his own home but impose an alien agenda with blind brute-force, you forget that it is going to hurt you too. You forget the grind of God’s mills.

I feel sorry also for those who discriminate dead bodies into definitive labels of the denigrating ‘killed’ and the respectful ‘martyred’_ definitions coined abroad. I laugh at the folly of him who raises himself on the pedestal of the judge, issuing the moral verdict of who to ennoble with ‘martyrdom’ and who to demean and sneer at with ‘killed’_ the pygmy looking ridiculous in his clumsy giant’s robe, forgetting that death does not discriminate but levels all; Forgetting the Ultimate Judgement that laughs to scorn the cleverly manipulated Machiavellian definitions; Forgetting that the universal criterion lives on still, deep inside men’s hearts_ cornered, muffled… yet resisting, surviving and unsettling.

The echoes of the bloodbath in Lal Masjid resound audibly in the Silence as our ears are deafened by the noise of bombs, gunfire and bullets like hail. What with all of the State’s intelligent designs to wipe out the memories, to obliterate the past in the way Orwell had predicted, the national tragedy resonates. Quietly, yet hugely it hulks in the background. Like the ethereal fragrance emanating from the much-frequented grave in Rojhan Mazari_ gently, quietly, subtly suffusing into the soul, touching a deep-buried cord somewhere in the recesses of the heart. In our desperate attempts to make light of the crime committed, to demonize and caricaturize the Immortalized by churning out State-approved versions of the tale, we forget that History’s Judgement is stringent and unrelenting. History refuses to paint up and whitewash. It refuses to leave the pages blank. And it is History’s Verdict that will outlast us all.