On August 18th 2009 Asma Jahangir, then chair of
the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, met with the US mission in Pakistan to
brief them about an HRCP report. The report alleged that Pakistani military had
engaged in public, extrajudicial killings of suspected Taliban & Taliban
sympathisers in the Malakand Division, even referencing mass graves.
Jahangir confided in the US mission however that the more
inflammatory incidents of abuse had been ignored by the HRCP so as to avoid
arming the Taliban’s propaganda machine. She then asserted that the HRCP would
have tried to downplay the
abuse allegations if the military had used the “usual tactic” of extrajudicial
murders; staged encounter.
A staged encounter is when security forces kill a suspect in
custody and then claim he died in an exchange of fire with them, an
“encounter”. Such as the one Rao Anwar conducted to murder “Taliban” Naqeeb
Mehsud.
This Faustian bargain is at the heart of the trouble brewingin Islamabad right now. To understand the Pashtun grievance, and the ongoing
protest, one has to examine how the war against Taliban has unfolded in the
last decade, and how it has been covered.
The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan systemically targeted and eliminated
tribal leaders within FATA, establishing their control over the region but also
robbing it of leadership and voices that could represent the people there. The
Pashtun nationalist party ANP was next on their hit list. They lost many
workers and leaders to targeted attacks, Bashir Bilour the most notable among
them. Their coalition partners in the KP & Federal government at the time,
PPP, of course lost Benazir Bhutto to a terrorist attack.
This meant that when the military operations took place, there
was no Pashtun leadership from FATA to protest or identify any abuses and/or
profiling that occurred. The Pashtun nationalist party, ANP, & the PPP for
that matter, had themselves suffered at the hands of TTP and pushed for
military action. Little interest was shown in keeping the military in check.
Rights watchdogs, activists & liberal sections of the
press were already willing to back abuses against the population of FATA, which
happened to be largely Pashtun, if it meant ridding the country of Taliban. The
HRCP’s willingness to downplay extrajudicial murders is only one example of
steps taken which, coupled with the appalling state of journalism in the
country, presented a distorted image of the war to mainstream Pakistan. One
which was completely void of any abuses that the, again largely Pashtun
population, suffered at the hands of the state.
The easily identifiable bits are the support for drone
strikes & military bombings inside FATA, and the framing of opposition to
them as being pro-Taliban. Yet there are other ways of shaping discourse.
Treatment & plight of the Pashtun IDPs, which numbered
in millions, never could wade into the national conversation. The missing
persons issue has largely been linked with Baloch separatists and is reported
in that context. The number of Baloch missing persons cases HRCP could confirm
in 2012 is 198, whereas the number of missing person court cases in PHC alone, in the same year,
were over 2000. It’s an epidemic for Pashtuns, and it is never in the news.
Then there’s the misreporting about casualties. Over and
over completely fabricated figures for the number of people killed by TTP are
published. Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies compile the actual numbers by tallying
the count from each reported attack in their yearly security reports. As of 1st
January 2018, 22,048 people have lost their lives in violent terrorist attacks.
This includes lives lost in sectarian & separatist (Baloch) violence, not
just the TTP. Yet you hear 45 thousand, 55 thousand, 60 thousand. A fetish for
increasing the death count plagues our media. This is to drum up support for
the war, to do what is “necessary”.
What is necessary here is military bombings, profiling and
extrajudicial killings of suspected Taliban. For which there are no figures.
There is no telling how many have lost their lives in bombings or encounters/custodial killings. Even though we know all that has happened, some cases are
detailed in Amnesty International report “Hands of Cruelty”.
This comes back again to the necessity of dealing with the
Taliban, and the firm belief of our military, rights watchdogs and the press
that any information that could hinder that goal should not be shared with the
public. The problem with extrajudicial killings in this war however, as it is
constructed now, is that the murder you condone is of a “suspected” Taliban,
but a confirmed Pashtun.
A Naqeeb Mehsud.
Karachi is where the line has been crossed from “necessary”
evil to clear ethnically, politically biased crime against Pashtuns. The demonisation
of Pashtuns in the city was started by the terrorist Altaf Hussain and MQM, who
had a political interest in doing so and a history of profiting from ethnic
hate. Much like when Trump banned Syrian refugees by linking them with “Muslim”
terrorists, Altaf Hussain railed against the “Talibanisation” of Karachi by
FATA refugees for years.
The difference was that unlike in the case of Trump, the
press here were in the corner of Altaf Hussain. Another difference was that
Altaf himself is a terrorist and the MQM, not the TTP, and certainly not the
Pashtun refugees, are the biggest threat to peace in Karachi.
According to the Police,
by end of 2011 alone over 7,000 people had been killed in ethno-political
violence in the city. “Ethno-political” is code for MQM & PPP, who the
press aren’t at liberty to identify. By the end of the same year the number of
people killed in “terrorist” - TTP, AQ, LeJ - attacks in the city was 720.
It is true that TTP militants did find their way into
Karachi and established operations there, but the first target killing credited
to TTP came in the August of 2012,
an ANP leader Amir Sardar. The results of the Karachi operation launched in
2013 show that they remained small players in that respect.
According to a Rangers briefing about the operation in Aug
of 2016, they were able to fix responsibility for 7,224 target killings in the
city. Only 557 killings were traced back to members of banned organisations;
TTP, LeJ, AQ.
Yet it is young Pashtun men that are bearing the brunt of
extrajudicial killings in the name of fighting terrorism. Extrajudicial murders
in 2014 were
925, and in 2015 were 700 in Karachi. Naqeeb is
just one of 450 killed, majority Pashtuns, by Rao Anwar alone. MQM members,
according to party claims, that have been lost to extrajudicial killings stands
at 62.
You have to be dishonest to not see the contrast here. One
organisation has gotten away with murder, with collusion or condoning by rights
groups & the press, because they claim to represent an ethnic group.
One ethnic group has suffered at the hands of the state,
with collusion or condoning by rights groups & the press, for the crimes of
an organisation that doesn’t represent them. It is not difficult to see why the
media is as uninterested as it is in covering the Islamabad sit in.