Teaching children to glorify wars and belittle other faiths is also a form of violence.
It struck you in the pit of your stomach. The pain was gut-wrenching. You felt as if the ground beneath your feet had parted. Your mind was blown into a million little pieces. How do you cope with the images of schoolchildren, some as young as 11 and 12, their school uniforms drenched in blood, their faces peering out of coffins? Mothers wailing inconsolably, fathers with a vacant stare in their eyes; eyes that looked like dried-up wells in the middle of a parched desert. Mirrors to souls wounded so deeply that life itself had ceased to have any meaning.
The massacre of 141 people, including 133 children, at Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, 2014, was, at first, beyond comprehension. The grief and pain of the parents and siblings, many of whom had just managed to escape the orgy of killing at the school, defies rendering in ordinary language.
The initial shock soon gave way to an all-consuming rage. Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership, which had hitherto been unable to see eye to eye on how to deal with the Taliban, met in Peshawar and declared to the citizens of their beleaguered country that ‘enough was enough’. Significantly, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, flanked by opposition leaders, including erstwhile cricketer Imran Khan — known to be a Taliban apologist — told newsmen that there would be no distinction made any more between ‘good Taliban’ and ‘bad ones’.
Surely, moral outrage and anger are all too natural in the face of such a gruesome incident. If calculated murder of over 10 dozen children does not make us angry, perhaps nothing will. However, anger also blunts your capacity to see things in perspective. It engenders a tunnel-vision manifested in the punitive overdrive the Pakistan government went into immediately after the Peshawar massacre. The unofficial moratorium on the death penalty, which had been in place since 2008, was lifted. The hangmen were called up and at least six convicted terrorists were executed by December 21, 2014, despite urgings by international human rights groups to the contrary.
Almost everyone in Pakistan today is saying they want to stand true to the memory of children slaughtered in Peshawar. That seems to be the least common denominator across the political and societal divide. Exceptions are rare. These include increasingly jittery Taliban supporters, such as Maulana Abdul Aziz, the head Imam of the Red Mosque in Islamabad that was stormed by the Pakistan Army in 2008 following a prolonged standoff. Underneath this common resolve, however, lie fundamentally divergent worldviews and ideologies, currently concealed by shared grief and anger.
The struggle of man against power, wrote Milan Kundera, is the struggle of memory against forgetting. The key question today is what is it that you decide to remember and how? You could view Peshawar as an isolated incident, a total aberration in an otherwise acceptable state of affairs. Or, you could see it as the extreme end of a spectrum of violence that defines contemporary religious terrorism. The conceptual choice has significant consequences for how the public thinks about an event like this and how policymakers respond to it.
What happened in Peshawar has no exact parallels. Yet, children falling prey to terrorism and violence is now so common — and in such a wide variety of contexts — that it hardly strikes you as something unusual. Violence against children is now part of what Hannah Ardent memorably called the ‘banality of evil’.
The Taliban, for one, have made a career out of blowing up schools on both sides of Durand Line, the official border dividing Pakistan and Afghanistan. Children, let us not forget, also find themselves within the ranks of suicide-outfits from Boko Haram in Nigeria to the Taliban in Pakistan. Some of these children themselves witnessed extremes of physical violence before being duped or coerced into becoming soldiers of jihadist Islam.
Malala Yusufzai, mature beyond her years, nailed it when she said recently: “I tell my story, not because it is unique, but because it is not.” To transcend your own suffering and to connect it with that of others is indeed a sign of a beautiful mind and a spacious soul.
Now that we have decided to remember, let us also remember that, as Malala fought for her life after being shot in her school van, many in Pakistan had the temerity of calling her a Western stooge. She had herself shot to gain popularity and find herself a foreign passport. So went a shamelessly repeated conspiracy theory. How is that for denial and moral depravity?
In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Malala remembered schoolchildren killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan — children who in official accounts in Pakistan are dry statistics, if anything at all. The truth is, children caught in violence, children blown up in suicide attacks, as well as children orphaned by acts of terrorism are all victims. Seldom do we pause to think that children within the folds of the Taliban, who blow themselves up having been brainwashed into believing that it is the shortest route to paradise, are victims too. So are Afghan refugee children in Jolazai and Mosazai camps at the outskirts of Peshawar, whose only fault is that they were born on the wrong side of the border. Yet, as Pakistan mourns the Peshawar massacre, many hyper-patriotic politicians and TV anchors are demonising refugees and demanding that they be driven out supposedly because refugee camps serve as sanctuaries for the Taliban.
Consider also the suffering of Esha, 14, who has problems walking and speaking, and Esham, 13. They are the children of Asiya Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman who has now spent four years on death row for allegedly insulting the prophet of Islam. She was framed and convicted — as the standard practice goes, on instigation by local extremists — under Pakistan’s notorious Blasphemy law bequeathed to the nation by dictator Zia-ul-Haq. In the apparently evolving consensus against the Taliban in Pakistan, no one has dared to openly suggest the following: Let us now repeal this draconian and blatantly discriminatory law. Enough is enough.
To me, as a Pakistani and as someone who has worked with children across the country, including Peshawar, this is not the way to honour the memory of little souls butchered by the Taliban on December 16, 2014. Sure, responsibilities must be fixed. Those involved in planning and abetting the massacre must be caught and put on trial. Fixing individual criminal responsibility, however, does not imply that you can wriggle out of collective failures.
The ‘we shall not forget Peshawar’ pledge, ringing out across Pakistan today, must also encompass an acknowledgment of a million guises that violence parades in. We must also promise our children, all children, that militants will never be used as strategic assets. We must also acknowledge that teaching children to glorify wars and belittle those who do not happen to share their own faith or nationality is also a form of violence, albeit not as spectacular as the cold-blooded mass murder we witnessed in Peshawar. We have no choice but to become fully conscious of the brutalisation of children in conflict zones, on its peripheries, and in seemingly normal settings. Only then will we cease to pass on violence blindly to future generations.
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