Dawn.com’s Huma Yusuf argues that we shouldn’t forget the past just because Sufi Mohammad wants us to.
Now that the Nizam-i-Adl regulation has been passed, women in Swat can be punished for emerging from behind the veil. Drug addicts and bribe takers will be maligned through robust campaigns while prostitutes and pimps are to be expelled from the valley. The sale of CDs will be restricted and hoarders will be exposed and reprimanded. Even corrupt police officers will be checked by the ever vigilant members of the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Muhammadi (TNSM). In other words, all manner of minor transgressors and petty criminals who offend right-wing, religious sensibilities will be dragged to qazi courts in the name of justice.
But Taliban militants who have blown up girls’ schools, kidnapped security and media personnel, and beheaded innocents get off scot-free.
On Tuesday, TNSM chief Sufi Mohammad claimed that the new regulation would protect militants accused of brutal killings from prosecution. According to an article in Dawn:
Asked on Tuesday in a television interview whether the new courts would hear complaints from Swat residents about Mullah Fazlullah or his followers, Sufi Mohammad said they could not.
‘We intend to bury the past,’ the TNSM chief told a private television channel, sitting off-screen. ‘Past things will be left behind and we will go for a new life in peace.’
Sufi Mohammad’s forget-the-past attitude would be laughable if it weren’t so upsetting. Given how controversial the Nizam-i-Adl regulation is, the only way the TNSM could have earned any credibility is by doling out justice under the regulation to all offenders in Malakand – particularly the unabashedly violent militants who Mohammad claims to manage.
No one should excuse the Taliban for this exercise in hypocrisy. We should not for a moment forget that they are choosing to forget the past only because it serves them well in this instance.
In all other circumstances, the Taliban in Pakistan have proved to be vengeful and vindictive, capable of holding long-term grudges that end up being fatal for many innocent Pakistanis.
Speaking to The New York Times in March 2008, Tariq Pervez, the director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, explained that terrorists were stepping up their activity in Punjab in an effort to target Pakistan’s law-enforcing personnel.
At that time, Mr Pervez suggested that militant groups based in Pakistan’s tribal areas were singling out Lahore because Punjabi law-enforcing personnel had been involved in the operation at Islamabad’s Red Mosque in July 2007 and were the targets of terrorists seeking revenge.
Indeed, suicide bombings in many parts of the Punjab, including attacks on security forces in Islamabad and the recent Manawan police academy attack, have later been described as an attempt by militants to seek revenge for the excesses of the Lal Masjid operation.
Last December, in the picturesque village of Shalbandi in Buner, a suicide bomber belonging to the Taliban killed 30 people in order to avenge the death of six militants killed by the villagers four months prior. The attack took place at a school that was serving as a polling station during by-elections for the National Assembly.
Chances are, all militant deaths will at some point be avenged in the most brutal and unnecessary fashion. Given this reality, Sufi Mohammad’s decision to leave the past so as to progress into the future exposes an unforgiveable double standard. If Taliban militants are not willing to forget the past when it is young men from their ranks who end up dead, then the residents of Swat, Buner and other terror-ravaged areas should not agree to get over the past and move on. They should demand that Swat-based militants be the first to face speedy trials in the newly appointed qazi courts - and they should be punished according to the strictest dictates of the Sharia law that they spilt blood to see enforced in the region.
Sufi Mohammad’s reliance on his own version of divine logic should not trump the basic tenants of justice.
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