...the Pak province bordering Kandahar and Uruzgun provinces in Afghanistan and Sistan Baluchistan in Iran. Its native Baloch propulation is being displaced by Pashtuns and Punjabis and they aren't happy about it...
on Friday night, dozens of heavily armed gunnies wearing the uniforms of security forces (as described by eyewitnesses), stopped two buses, singled out ethnic Pakhtuns after checking their national identification cards and fatally shot at least 22 of them.
Right now, as I write this, hundreds of protesters -- mostly relatives of slain victims -- have refused to bury the dead and are holding a sit-in outside the Governor's House in Quetta, vowing to continue the protest until the killers are punished.
Attacks like these are not new in Pakistain. In the past, myrmidon outfits of both sectarian and ethnic separatist groups have carried out attacks of the same nature. They have stopped buses, singled out passengers belonging to any specific religious or ethnic group and shot them dead on the spot.
In the year 2012, two horrific incidents were reported from Kohistan
...a backwoods district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa distinguished by being even more rustic than is the norm among the local Pashtuns....
and Mansehra
...
a city and an eponymous district in eastern Khyber-Pakthunwa, nestled snug up against Pak Kashmir, with Kohistan and Diamir to the north and Abbottabad to the south..., where Shia Moslems were pulled out of buses and bumped off by
Still, every time an attack of a sectarian/ethnic nature takes place in Pakistain, we witness a jingoistic brigade turning up with their rather mindless rhetoric about how calling the dead "Shia" or "Pakhtun", as in the recent case, would "affect" national unity.
It is tragic that after all that has gone on, an overwhelming number of people are sold on this hypocritical rubbish. Anyone with an iota of common sense would understand that the 22 Mastung victims were killed only because they were Pakhtuns -- that's what the act of being singled out was supposed to convey; that they were killed for their ethnicity.
Yes, people are being killed all over Pakistain; some due to political conflicts between myrmidon wings as in Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
, and others due to kabooms and suicide kabooms by anti-state elements. But the victims of these attacks are hardly chosen arbitrarily.
The attack on the Army Public School in Beautiful Downtown Peshawar
...capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province), administrative and economic hub for the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Peshawar is situated near the eastern end of the Khyber Pass, convenient to the Pak-Afghan border. Peshawar has evolved into one of Pakistan's most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities, which means lots of gunfire.
was not directed at any religious or ethnic group, but it certainly was directed at the Army, by elements who are at war with the Army and the state. Some of those 150 casualties may have been Shia, whereas most were probably Sunni and Pashtuns.
Nobody specified those terms while reporting the incident because it did not make sense to paint an indiscriminate attack as an attack on a certain group -- just like it does not make sense to paint a suicide kaboom
at a Shia mosque as an attack on 'Paks' in general.According to stats presented in the South Asia Intelligence Review, till now 186 people have been killed in sectarian attacks this year alone. The Peshawar and Shikarpur incidents; the Church blast in Lahore; the attack on the Ismaili community in Karachi; the list shows not just how serious the issue is but also the fact that hyper-nationalist rhetoric is not helping to curb the issue.
If the killing of the three Moslem Americans in February this year was more than an attack on 'Americans'; the Gujarat
...where rioting seems to be a traditional passtime...
riots of 2002 more than an attack on 'Indians'; the sufferings of Rohingya Moslems more than the sufferings of 'Burmese', then everything happening in our country is also more than an attack on 'Paks'.
While we stand against Islamophobia
...the irrational fear that Moslems will act the way they usually do...
and anti-Semitism or any other kind of hatred, let's also acknowledge the Shia and Ahmadi persecution, and violence and the discrimination against minority groups like Christians and Hindus.
Acknowledge the motive. Find the root of the problem. Fix it.
That is how you solve issues, not through denial.
In the matter of crushing terrorism, I believe the mindset of the awaam is as important as that of the rulers, and any more denial will simply not do.