The Sufferings of the Innocents
By Ghazala Akbar
London, UK
As Malala Yusufzai, the teenage female student shot in the head by a militant Hit Squad in Swat, makes a long and arduous recovery in a UK hospital, armchair apologists for the perpetrators are working overtime on the Internet to provide justification for their heinous act. Malala, they would have you believe is a teenage agent provocateur manipulated by Western intelligence agencies to promote dangerous ideas of secularism and intellectual subversion.
A clip from a documentary made in 2009 of the young girl and her father in a ‘meeting’ with the late Richard Holbrook, the AfPak Ambassador is furnished as ‘proof’ of the child’s complicity in this grand design. That she was 11 years old at the time and is clearly asking to return to her studies is of little consequence to her detractors. This in their vivid imagination is evidence of her treachery, the equivalent of a ‘smoking gun.’
Yet another journalistic ‘scoop’ purports the ‘diaries’ to be the fictional handiwork of the BBC Bureau Chief in Peshawar. His sinister objective was to use the cover of an innocent girl to defame the Taliban in the eyes of the inhabitants of Swat and the rest of Pakistan. As if the excesses committed in the guise of the ‘Nizam e Adal’ or the violent deaths of over 40,000 civilians and security personnel through bomb blasts and suicide attacks hadn’t already alerted Pakistanis of their less than peaceful intentions.
In this barrage of hate-filled innuendo, one particular email held my interest. It features a picture of Malala with the following caption. “How many of you would know my name if I was murdered in a drone strike?” My initial reaction was one of dismissive contempt. Surely the two issues could not be conflated. The militant agenda for Swat began as far as 1994, the first drone attacks began in 2005. Eventually, I saw the point of the exercise. The US War machine’s atrocities are rarely acknowledged or publicized. Those of its opponents always are.
Don’t get me wrong. I admire Malala and all that she stands for. I agree with the Newsweek magazine headline that proclaims her as the ‘bravest person in the whole world’. She certainly is. I am also appalled as all right-thinking people are at the crude attempts by certain quarters to provide a raison d’etre for this act of cruelty by linking Malala to drone strikes in South Waziristan. And I am under no illusion about the extremists and their agenda in imposing a specific version of Islam through a violent insurgency against the Pakistani State, its functionaries and citizens.
However, in all fairness, while expressing outrage over the shooting of Malala we must put things into perspective. We cannot forget or downplay the mayhem caused by predator drones and their multiple victims, many of whom are innocent men, women and children. Not everyone that is blown to smithereens is a ‘terrorist jihadist.’ Not everyone is a ‘high-value target.’ Some just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. All that is left of them is burning flesh and dismembered body parts. There are no post-mortems, no inquests into their hasty deaths, just a quick burial. Life for them is Hobbesian…‘poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ To God they belong, to HIM they return!
Unfortunately, the liquidation of nameless, faceless, poverty-stricken ‘Ragheads’, living in the back of beyond just doesn’t stir the public imagination as much as the gunning down of a brave teenage girl. Granted that representatives of the world media are not present to witness their destruction, granted that is a no-go area even for Pakistani journalists, the placid acceptance of sanitized official narratives of ‘surgical precision strikes’ eliminating ‘dangerous militants’ is disturbingly disappointing. We should care but we don’t.
It’s not as if drone strikes are high-risk operations that cannot be discussed for reasons of national security because the US administration openly acknowledges their use as a major counter-terrorism tool. During a lecture at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC in April 2012, John Brennan the Presidential adviser chillingly described these lethal attacks as ‘legal, ethical and wise’. Apart from one lone dissenter who was led away by security guards, nobody in the audience questioned the legality, ethics and the wisdom of pursuing a strategy which cannot distinguish friend from foe and often kills innocents.
The UK-based newspaper ‘The Mail on Sunday’ ran a story on October 22, 2012 highlighting the efforts of Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who works with ‘Reprieve’, a British charity promoting fundamental rights. He represents clients from Waziristan who are putting their faith in the legal system of Pakistan to deliver justice. One of the plaintiffs is Karim Khan, a teacher who lost his younger brother and 18-year-old son during an attack in their home. Their case will be heard in a Peshawar court. It is not expected to cause any ripples in the international media. Even in Pakistan, a favorable outcome will not be ‘Breaking News’. We have become so de-sensitized to terrorism related deaths, it has to be a real shocker for us to scream murder!
Ironically, if the victims or the plaintiff in the lawsuit was a woman he might have a better chance of being taken seriously. It is a sad but inescapable fact that it is the brutalization and victimhood of Pakistan’s women whether it is the assassinated Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto, the gang-raped Mukhtaran Mai, the blasphemy- accused duo, Asia Bibi and Rimsha Masih, the ‘terrorist’ Afia Siddiqui and the militant-defying Malala Yusufzai that grabs the headlines. It is in our own infamy that we have become famous, especially in the treatment of women … although a certain bakery employee in Lahore might be forgiven for imagining otherwise.
There is a lesson to be learned. Those that begrudge the international and national attention on Malala and bemoan world-wide apathy and disinterest in the innocent victims of drone attacks should take a leaf out of Malala’s copy book. They should understand that the pen is mightier than the sword. They should understand the value of female education and appear less xenophobic. They should be media and tech-savvy. Just think if there was a young teenage girl in Waziristan, blogging and tweeting, what it is like to live in constant fear of drones, or perhaps a Robert Fisk and Noam Chomsky to portray the horrors of hell-fire missiles, the world might just listen to the cry of the slaughter of the innocents .
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