Pakistan's Shia:In the slaughterhouse

EDITORIAL:THE FRONTIER POST

How many Hazarganji has this beleaguered nation been left out to witness? And for how long? Now for months together, the Hazara community in Balochistan has its head in the crusher of sectarian slaughter. Its pilgrims are massacred while travelling on buses and vans for pilgrimage. Its religious congregations are fatally attacked with terrorist bombs and blasts. Its community members are mowed down in targeted shootings. Its mayhem continues right inside and outside the metropolis of Quetta. And no end is anywhere in sight to its carnage as yet. Then where are the enforcers of law? Have they lapsed into a swoon or a stupor? Why are they not doing something to stop this holocaust of this community? Why are they not nabbing the masterminds, financiers and perpetrators of this brutal slaughter? Surly, the shady characters wreaking this horrific bloodbath on the Shia community of Hazaras do not descend from the skies. They are very much present on the ground. They have their sleeper cells in the province and in the metropolis of Quetta. They plot their vile acts there. Their money bags sit there. Their handlers are ensconced there. Their slayers fatten in their own stables. Why then are not their lairs being sought out and they being smoked out? Where are the intelligence hounds of the provincial security apparatus? Haven't they been tasked to bust the hideouts of sectarian monsters and dismantle their terror networks? And why federal agencies are not going after these vile characters when terrorism, sectarian or otherwise, is no region specific but a countrywide vine, spreading all over the land in an interlinked manner. Terror groups are no longer monolith monstrosities, either. Quite perceptibly, terrorists of various hues and stripes have ganged up together, helping and assisting one another in their sinful criminality. And even those wearing the masks of spurious religiosity have linked up with criminal gangs of the underworld. This is a very vicious combination that indeed has transformed the entire land veritably into a slaughterhouse. No place is immune from the wickedness of this vile terrorist-criminal axis. Every province, every region, every niche of the land is in the eye of the storm. Terrorists and criminals kill and maim wherever and whenever they want. And every time, they just go scot-free. After every strike, the law enforcers are very prompt in telling the weight of the explosives used. But what they conveniently tell not unabashedly why had they failed so scornfully in preventing the use of these explosives. After all, they are not there to tell the explosives' weight. They are paid not to allow anyone to murder with those explosives. But no heads ever roll. No questions are even asked; no explanations demanded. It seems the top echelons have taken that so long as they are safe and secure, it hardly matters if the commoners are killed and maimed in terrorist assaults. No extraordinary concern is perceptible in their echelons even as the country has become a sprawling abattoir of terrorists and their criminal accomplices. It really is disconcertingly shocking that stray ideas and plans the top echelons had condescended to take up to beat out the terrorists are lying undone unattended for these top echelons' disinterest. Almost four years down the road, a contemplated nodal agency, national counter-terrorism authority, is nowhere near formation. The plan is lying stuck up some in the official labyrinths forgetfully. A proposed amendment to tighten up the anti-terrorism law is gathering dust in the Senate chamber for more than three years. For long, one is hearing of plugging up the holes in the evidence act but nothing has as yet come of it. This disinterest of the top echelons is self-hurting. They must understand. Terrorists will not keep confined to killing and goring the commoners. They will get the top echelons too. Already, a few of them have come under their attack. But if these echelons keep up with their disinterest, it will not be Hazaras alone to suffer fatally at the terrorism monsters' hands. Their vile hands will reach up to higher throats more frequently. The state security apparatus perforce needs to get out of its hibernation and move out systematically, methodically and powerfully against the terrorist thugs before they pull down the fa�ade of the state structure with their thuggery.