Malala Yousafzai: Shooting of teen peace activist triggers revulsion

http://www.thehindu.com

Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old peace activist who became the `voice of girls in Swat’ when the Taliban controlled the valley in 2008, was injured in a shooting incident on Tuesday; triggering a nationwide wave of revulsion at terrorists and their apologists.

Malala was returning from school in Swat when unidentified assailants opened fire at the vehicle in which she was travelling. Two other passengers were also injured in the attack. Malala was first taken to a local hospital. Her condition was reported to be stable even as Prime Minister Raja Parvez Ashraf announced in Parliament that a helicopter was being sent to Mingora to bring her to Islamabad for treatment. Malala had received death threats from the Taliban for speaking out against terrorism and advocating girls education. According to some media reports, the assailants first asked the passengers in the vehicle to identify Malala. When they did not oblige, the assailants opened indiscriminate fire at the vehicle. Malala shot to prominence in 2009 when she began writing a diary in Urdu under the pseudonym `Gul Makai’ for the BBC about the travails of living under the Taliban regime. She was only 11 then but her heart-rending accounts caught international attention and she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by Amsterdam-based advocacy group KidsRights in 2011. As news broke of Malala being shot, condemnation was quick to follow from across the political spectrum.Anguished by the television footage of the girl being treated in hospital, the general drift of the discourse on all platforms – television and social media – was that the `fog of war’ was not an excuse Pakistan could any longer afford. The nation would have to see terrorism for all its evils without making excuses for it; that there cannot be ``good terrorists and bad terrorists’’.