Quetta inquiry report - The wreck laid bare

Gul Bukhari

CH NISAR AND THE NAWAZ REGIME SUPPORTS TALIBAN.

Justice Qazi Faez Isa’s Quetta inquiry report does just that: lays bare the wreck this country is. Apart from the few things he found right and praiseworthy, everything else points to the train wreck this country has been in the making. From the lack of the hospital’s unpreparedness, slovenliness, inexplicable disuse of ambulances and non presence of medical and nursing staff, to the deplorable condition of the CCTV systems and the lack of training, direction and SOPs to the staff operating it, the lack of stretchers, medicines and first aid, to the vandalisation of the biometric attendance system… it is a confounding story. All this in light of the attack on the same hospital in 2010 and several judgments thereafter ordering the fixing of these various issues.

Then there is the indictment in the report on the complete lack of use of forensic science to detect and solve crime. Crime scenes were neither secured, nor evidence collected subjected to forensic examination by the police or other related law enforcement agencies. The fact that the commission probed these matters and then did seek help from the Punjab Forensic Science Agency (PFSA), and had the available material sent to it, helped identify the suicide bomber, his companion on the scene and other accomplices and their hideout in Hurumzai, Pishin near the Afghan border is stunning. The fact that a fact-finding commission becomes part of solving the crime is unheard of, at least for me. An operation was carried out at the Hurumzai hideout directly as a result of the Quetta Inquiry Commission, and five of the six terrorists holed up there were killed and one arrested. A mind boggling cache of arms, IEDs, chemicals, bomb making kits and detonators was also unearthed. Without this Commission, none of this was ever going to happen. All LEAs of Balochistan had been sleeping on the job. When the Inspector General Police, Balochistan was questioned, it was revealed he neither understood forensic science, nor its importance in solving crime.

The National Action Plan came under fire. The one pager, twenty point plan has no owners; it does not define who is responsible for what, who will report what and to whom, who will research what, who will research what and feed into what. It is a piece of paper that literally sounds like the proclamations of candle wielding NGO aunties in Jinnah Super after every tragedy. It has no timelines. The poorest orphan anyone will ever come across. And this after over 140 children, mind children, were mowed down in cold blood. Take only one point of the NAP: registration and control of madrassas to try and combat hate and propagation of violence spewed by them. The five Wafaq ul Madaris, when questioned, certified they were all good boys, and reported over 26,000 madrassas operating under their umbrella collectively and gave good certificated to the madrassas operating under them except one, which said that certifying such things was up to the government and not themselves; the Ministry of Religious Affairs reported circa 11, 000 madrassas operating in the country. None of these estimates include the non-documented madrassas. No government department was willing to accept responsibility for this one point of the NAP!

Forget the other nineteen points of the NGO aunty-style NAP put together by ‘All parties’ of the country in the wake of the Army Public School massacre, just forget them. Suffice it to say, that if you try to dig into any one point, your heart will sink, and sink, and sink into infarction. Another extremely crucial point that emerges from the inquiry is that every perpetrator, planner, mastermind is Pakistani, with NO links to foreign governments or actors. Conspiracy theories and concoctions of the Balochistan Chief Minister and the ex-COAS Raheel Sharif notwithstanding, not a shred of evidence has emerged that this atrocity was masterminded, planned and committed by any other than a Pakistani.

Let’s move onto the Minister of the Interior. The Federal Interior Minister. No stronger indictment of him has surfaced ever before. A little background first: ‘Section 11B of the Anti Terror Act (ATA) stipulates that the federal govt is vested with the power to proscribe a terrorist organization. Therefore the provinces are dependent on the federal government to do so. In the aftermath of the August 8th attack, the government of Balochistan, on August 16th, 20016, wrote to the Ministry of Interior to proscribe Jamat ul Ahrar as in addition to having claimed the August 8 attack, it was also responsible for ‘the explosion on Feb 14th, attack on a police officer on July6, 2016 and an attack on a FC vehicle on July 27, 2016’. The government of Balochistan also wrote a letter on Aug 16 to the Ministry of Interior to proscribe LeJ Al Almi and referred to five specific FIRs that recorded their crimes which included their murder of policemen and Frontier Corps personnel. The Ministry of Interior did not respond to either letter of the govt of Balochistan nor proscribed these organisations’.

These two organisations had claimed the Quetta attack (with no retractions to date, and no contradicting evidence either). The Federal Interior Secretary’s testimony was further damning. Without reproducing the whole of it here, I cannot even begin to demonstrate the criminality and intransigence of the Interior Minister. When questioned why the Interior Ministry/Minister hadn’t taken action, his answer was: I don’t know. Yes, ‘I don’t know’! The government of this country doesn’t ‘know’ in the post-APS Pakistan? It didn’t know why it didn’t take action and stalled the proscribing??

Weird mealy-mouthed explanations were offered by the federal secretary: “Its NACTA’s responsibility”; they wrote to the ISI to ‘confirm’; the ISI didn’t reply. The ISI replied: They should’ve gone ahead according to the rules of business! Why blame us? As a result of all this, Chaudhry Nisar suddenly found it right and expedient to proscribe Jamat ul Ahrar and Lashkar e Jhangvi Al Almi in November this year.

Yesterday, he was found addressing the Punjab Assembly on the issue, his entire thrust being an attack on the Supreme Court: How did such a “one sided” report appear on the media, without his “version” to account for? So finally, he has attacked the Supreme Court too. A report of the Supreme Court written after 56 days of unrelenting, unbroken, 56 days of work without a single day off. Well done Chaudhry Nisar! You appear more the culprit for the odious ‘defense’ you presented, where you conveniently missed out all the damning aspects of the report. And another point: the court never accused him of meeting ‘a delegation of ASWJ, but of meeting Luhdianvi and agreeing to his demands. In response, Chaudhry Nisar hid behind the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, Gen Hameed Gul, Ijaz ul Haq and what not, because he couldn’t defend himself against meeting Ludhianvi in the post-APS world.

Will he resign? Will he be made to resign? If neither of these two things happen, all hell will break loose.