Pakistan: ''The military has the answer''

EDITORIAL :DAILY TIMES

The entire country is in mourning over the killing of over 80 innocent Hazara Shias on Saturday in Quetta. Angry protests are being held across the country demanding the arrest of the accused through a targeted operation. The genocide of the Hazara Shia has even broken the silence of leaders like Imran Khan, billed as soft on Islamist-cum-terrorist organisations like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). Terming the outfit un-Islamic, Imran has demanded of the government to arrest the culprits. The Supreme Court (SC) in its suo motu notice of the killings has asked the government to crack down on the group claiming responsibility. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has criticised the failure of the government to take action against LeJ so far. The atrocity in Quetta is not new. The group claiming responsibility is not new either. The situation, where the relatives are sitting with the corpses of their dead, refusing to bury them unless the culprits are punished, is a repetition of the Alamdar Road incident when a twin blast killed even more Hazara Shias then as on Kirani Road now. The promise held out by the government to take control of the situation is also not new. Politicians blaming the intelligence agencies and vice versa is a time tested technique to shy away from accepting responsibility. The problem is not that difficult to comprehend. The culprits have been admitting their claim of killing Hazara Shias and are living among us freely. Malik Ishaq, the leader of the LeJ, moves around without fear of retribution. Those who say that Quetta should be handed over to the military are perhaps naive enough not to know that it is already the military calling the shots there through the Frontier Corps (FC). Nothing, not even a leaf can stir without the consent of the military in Balochistan. The FC having been given police powers after Governor’s rule was imposed, has clearly failed to deliver anything positive. This is the very force responsible for the brutal elimination of nationalists in the province; an accusation proved beyond an iota of doubt by even the SC. This being the lay of the land, why is the military not taking the onus? Why is it silent, seeing the government taking all the heat of the protest staged across the country over the repeated killing of Hazara Shias in Quetta? Even if the entire police force were removed, as the Inspector General of Balochistan is replaced along with other officers, Quetta would still reverberate with death tolls, because of trying to solve the problem in the wrong way. It is tantamount to helping the FC evade its responsibilities. The removal of the incompetent previous government of Balochistan after the Alamdar Road massacre last month has brought little if any change in the government’s inability to control the deteriorating situation in Quetta. The dark night has already descended on the Hazara. The message could not have been clearer. Eight hundred kilograms of explosive was used, making Saturday’s bombing the biggest attack in Quetta’s history. If this is not enough, what are we waiting for before getting down to the business of purging this country of the jihadi monsters we used in yesteryears as proxies? Who can know how best to handle its creation than the creator? It is the military, and none else, who can suppress this jihadi phenomenon. Thanks to our negligence or complacency, the extremists are equipped with the latest weaponry. The silence in certain quarters is feeding into the conspiracy theory that things are being allowed deliberately to deteriorate. Are we into some sort of systematic eradication of minorities in the country, more so Shias? This is what the killing of Shias in Karachi and Lahore too depicts. As far as Balochistan is concerned, the military establishment first, and then the government, owes an explanation to the people of the country.