The Many Anxieties of Terror: New Age Islam's Selection, 31 March 2016
New Age
Islam Edit Bureau
31 March 2016
• The Many Anxieties of Terror
By Khurram Husain
• ‘Liking’ Hate
By Sana Saleem
• Disappearances Revisited
By I.A. Rehman
The Price of Complacency
By Aisha Sarwari
• The Changing Face of Desi Humour
By Maria Sartaj
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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The Many Anxieties of Terror
By Khurram Husain
March 31st, 2016
MORE than half this war is already won, but it’s the half that’s left which really counts. They can kill our children and attack our schools and playgrounds, but for all the stomach-churning wretchedness of this fight, none of these acts threatens the integrity of the state or the cohesion of society.
However cold this may sound given the horrible bombing in Lahore, it is a central fact in this fight. Not too long ago, the aim of the Pakistani Taliban movement included capture of the state of Pakistan, and they made credible advances towards that objective. It was slightly less than a decade ago that the movement consisted of militias that were capable of conquering and holding territory.
Omar Khalid, now the leader of the Jamaatul Ahrar, was amongst them in Mohmand Agency. In his early march through the agency, he encountered spirited opposition from one village in Prang Ghar that refused his demand to surrender. That village, I was told at the time, controlled some of the key routes through the mountains that separated Mohmand Agency from Bajaur, which opened a route to Lower Dir and Swat, where another militia connected with the TTP was marching towards Mingora.
The other militia was led by Fazlullah and it successfully captured village after village in the valley, eventually reaching Mingora itself. The attempts to control Prang Ghar, according to those familiar with the terrain, were partially motivated by the need for a direct overland supply line between Fata and Swat.
What is left is the endgame, and this is the trickiest part of the entire operation.
Until then, overland communications between these two regions had to traverse through Afghanistan or very close to the border in any event. So Omar Khalid’s march into Mohmand was not just a power grab for the sake of it, but part of a larger strategy to consolidate territorial gains and create the conditions for further advancement.
Anyone who has followed events even cursorily over the past decade remembers this. The year 2009 proved crucial in reversing this advance of the TTP, starting with the Swat operation in May, and continuing through with an escalation in drone strikes on the TTP leadership. The loss of territory and the creation of a leadership crisis at the top destabilised the movement and it has struggled to find its footing ever since. By 2014, it had been scattered and suffered from defections that left it a rump of what it used to be.
Today, all it is capable of doing is sending ill-trained youngsters to scale the walls of schools and parks and go on a short-lived shooting spree or detonate a suicide vest. Its only objectives, made apparent in a video released by the Jamaat ul Ahrar, are to “avenge the oppression of the Mujahideen in the tribal and urban areas” and “humiliation of the Mujahideen in Pakistani prisons”.
“Our second objective is to seek the safe release of Pakistani and foreign Mujahideen in Pakistan,” says the video statement. I used the transcription available on the Long War Journal website.
The rest is all a ramble, about establishing a caliphate in the world and seizing nuclear weapons. The rump of a militia that once fought to conquer and hold territory in a swathe running from Fata to Mohmand, Bajaur and Swat, is today sending kids to kill other kids in schools and playgrounds to “avenge the oppression of the Mujahideen” and to seek the safe release of their captured colleagues.
So what is left is the endgame, and this is the trickiest part of the entire operation. Scattering the TTP between 2009 and 2014 took a mighty fight that displaced millions of people. What lessons have been learned from that mighty half-decade long fight?
First, the fight must be waged by a ruler who is not hobbled by legitimacy concerns. This was Musharraf’s biggest problem. His lack of legitimacy was the stone in the general’s shoe, and all his attempts to take on the Taliban ended in grief for him because nobody could figure out who exactly he was fighting for: the country or himself. The Swat Taliban tightened their grip on Mingora amidst the din of the Lal Masjid episode and the lawyers’ movement.
The large campaigns waged by former COAS Kayani in Swat and South Waziristan did a lot to scatter the TTP. But during this same time, as the army fought extremists in the country, the legitimacy of an elected government came under serious assault through a series of bizarre crises running from Memogate to the Tahir ul Qadri march on Islamabad. The TTP’s assault on democratic parties during election time in 2013 was also a highlight of this period, undermining the gains made in the northwest.
Second, the fight must feature no distractions, and its tools should not be used to pursue political objectives. For example, one cannot wage a campaign against extremism while using the blasphemy allegation to silence opponents, whether political or in the media. While the fight advanced against the militias of the TTP, a TV channel found itself accused of blasphemy and had the hounds of the far right, of the variety currently camped in the Red Zone and worse, unleashed upon it.
The fight has changed since 2014, when the TTP splintered. This is no longer a fight against militias seeking to control territory. It is now a fight against armed extremists doing whatever is left in their power to pursue narrow ends. Much has to change to manage this fight. The political leadership needs to find its courage. But equally importantly, the endless campaign of vilifying civilian institutions must end. To take this fight to its logical end, and truly establish the writ of the state across the country, the rules of the game by which the state operates must be taken more seriously than they have been since 2008.
Khurram Husain is a member of staff.
Source: .dawn.com/news/1249012/the-many-anxieties-of-terror
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‘Liking’ Hate
By Sana Saleem
March 31st, 2016
SOON after Mumtaz Qadri was hanged, several of his supporters heckled Minister for Information Pervaiz Rashid at the departure lounge of Karachi airport. Several videos doing the rounds showed protesters attempting to throw a shoe at the minister. Yet amid all the frenzy a noteworthy part of the altercation was the discussion between the minister and the supporters.
As Rashid began to speak, several people in the crowd kept talking over him. A man intervened: “Let him at least express his opinion, we can have differing opinions; let him say what he has to say as we are expressing our democratic right to protest.”
It’s noteworthy because for some time now a significant majority has been deprived of that right. The mere mention of ‘free speech’ in mainstream media is seen as an excuse to justify attacking or insulting religion. It’s often depicted as a dirty word that is only ever used by people who supposedly have Western values. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
There’s no dearth of arguments on how the internet can or has served as a tool for engagement, debate and discussion — the same tool can be used to propagate and spread hate speech. Needless to say, hate speech and the internet is an issue that is being debated and contested the world over. How can one control it? What are the ways to do so without infringing on people’s right to express their opinion? How much is too much? And so on.
Curbing hate speech should not mean restricting debate.
In Pakistan, there have now been cases where people have either been arrested or sentenced to jail for spreading ‘hate speech’ online. This has prompted a need to understand how social interactions work online.
Take for instance the recent case of Rizwan Haider, 25, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for what the court deemed “sectarian hatred on Facebook”; his lawyer maintains that Haider only ‘liked’ the post and did not share it on his Facebook. For clarity, the lawyer is contesting that Haider did not share or propagate the material. This is important to understand especially in the context of the law and when our judiciary is faced with certain instances.
There’s also the compulsion of taking the ‘what’s on your mind’ tagline by social networks too literally. People have and will continue to use the internet to express their state of mind at a particular time that may or may not be politically correct.
However, that does not mean incitement to violence should be seen as a frame of mind and not be dealt with, but an understanding of how social networks function helps determine what the response should be, if at all. In the context of Pakistan, this becomes even more difficult because we have had our fair share of hate speech and incitement to violence being propagated offline and online. Yet, these two terms cannot and should not be used interchangeably.
As authorities vow to crack down on hate content, it’s important that this doesn’t further narrow the space to debate and reflect, ie authorities mustn’t regulate internet communications in a manner where debate or the space to express one’s opinion is sabotaged and the room for discussion narrowed even further. This is an issue that authorities globally are grappling with. So much so that recently the UN’s special rapporteur for freedom of expression weighed in asking for governments to be careful in responding to the dangerous grey zone of expression, an area where speech is not a direct call for action or incitement to violence but can arguably prepare the ground for violent action.
There’s a troubling trend where speech is criminalised too often, without taking into account the nature of social networks and or the speaker’s intentions. Take the case of Iyad El Baghdadi an Arab activist and journalist whose Twitter account was suspended by Twitter, because he was essentially translating a speech from a leader of the militant Islamic State group. More often than not people liking, sharing or even following posts on social networks doesn’t and shouldn’t reflect an intention to commit violence.
Sectarian hatred is not new in Pakistan; much of it has been propagated through literature and further strengthened due to misconception and the lack of space to debate these issues in the open. It’s too contentious, they say. Yet, these issues and conflicts of several hundred years will not be resolved simply by coming down hard on a Facebook ‘like’.
If anything, now is the time to let these debates play out in the open even if it means that some of us will be exposed as hateful, unreasonable bigots. We owe ourselves the opportunity to speak about our differences, without being told that we are a people so violent that even a mere discussion can result in killing.
Sana Saleem is co-founder and director of Bolo Bhi, a civil rights group working on gender and digital rights.
Source: dawn.com/news/1249005/liking-hate
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Disappearances Revisited
By I.A. Rehman
March 31st, 2016
THE suicide of Saddam Husain, an Intermediate student, apparently out of despair over his sister, who disappeared in August last year, calls for a review of cases of enforced disappearance, the plight of the families affected and the state’s inability to defend the victims’ rights.
The case of Saddam’s sister, journalist-cum-activist Zeenat Shahzadi, has often been discussed in the media. She was picked up in August 2015 from a bus stop near her Lahore home days before she was to appear before the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (CoIoED), in connection with the case of Hamid Ansari, an Indian national who had been held for trying to help his Pakistani friend. She was also pursuing Hamid’s case in the Peshawar High Court. The security agencies attracted suspicion as they had picked her up some days earlier.
Her case was being heard by the commission since September 2015 without any progress. Although disappearance cases are also pending in the superior courts, the CoIoED is now the main forum for dealing with them, and a brief look at its work is in order.
A good practice by the CoIoED is the preparation of a monthly report on cases of disappearance dealt by it. The report goes to a large number of authorities who must be fully aware of the ordeal of the affected families. One wonders whether it would be advisable to include the Supreme Court, the houses of parliament and the National Commission on Human Rights in the distribution list.
The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances received 66 new cases in February.
According to the latest (March 3, 2016) report, the number of cases on record on Dec 31, 2010 was 138 only. These were perhaps the cases the commission received from the three-member retired judges’ commission of 2010. The view that the number of disappearance cases at the end of 2010 was probably higher is widely held in non-official circles. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa led other provinces/ territories with 57 cases, followed by Balochistan (47), Punjab (15), Sindh (11), Fata and Azad Kashmir (three each), Islamabad (two) and none from Gilgit-Baltistan.
Between March 1, 2011 and Feb 29, 2016, the commission received 2,996 new cases — the largest number of cases (1,234) from KP. Sindh with 740 cases surpassed Punjab (611) while only 205 cases were reported from Balochistan.
Out of the total 3,134 cases dealt with by the commission, 400 were given up for one reason or another and 1,352 cases reached a conclusion, leaving a balance of 1,382 cases. The number of cases pending before the commission is thus higher than the cases decided during the past five years. Does this give an idea of the time the commission will take to clear the backlog?
The commission tells us that 1,352 persons have been traced over the past five years. It might have also told us as to how many of them have returned to their families and how many are under some form of custody.
Assuming that the number of persons involuntarily disappeared is equal to the number of cases, the rate of recovery is best in Punjab — 305 persons out of 626 or 48pc. In Sindh 337 were traced out of 751 (44pc), and in KP 544 out of 1,291 (42.14pc). Balochistan has the lowest recovery rate — 80 traced out of 252 (31.75pc).
Amongst the 1,382 cases pending with the commission, the largest single group belongs to KP — 671, followed by Sindh (293), Punjab (208), Balochistan (129), Fata (37), Islamabad (32), and Azad Kashmir (11).
The rate of enforced disappearances remains high; the commission received 66 new cases during February 2016.
While the good work done by the commission must be duly acknowledged it does not have the clout the Supreme Court has to force the various agencies to comply with its orders. The intelligence agencies are looked up to for two reasons. In quite a few cases credible evidence has been available to show that the involuntarily disappeared persons were held by them. The judicial commission of 2010 noted several such cases, determined the period of their unauthorised detention and ordered payment of compensation. Secondly, even if they are not directly involved with a case of disappearance the state has the right to use their resources to trace any missing person.
Matters should have improved if the government had acted on the recommendations of the judicial commission of 2010 and the Saleem Shahzad commission (2012).
The 2010 commission had proposed legislation to regulate the working of intelligence agencies, advised them to rely on the police for arresting anyone, and censured the police for concocting false cases against persons who were given in their charge by the intelligence agencies (after they had completed their interrogation).
The subject was far more thoroughly discussed by the Saleem Shahzad commission, headed by Justice Saqib Nisar of the Supreme Court.
The commission recommended that the press be made more law-abiding and accountable and that “the balance between secrecy and accountability in the conduct of intelligence getting be readjusted”. For gaining the latter objective the commission suggested legislation to outline the mandates of the intelligence agencies and making them accountable at three levels — before the minister-in-charge, before a parliamentary committee, and through a judicial forum for redressal of the grievances against them.
It is certainly time the government made earnest efforts to implement the recommendations of the two commissions, help the intelligence agencies to retain the people’s trust and provide the families of the involuntarily disappeared persons the satisfaction they as of right deserve.
The government must also prepare its brief for the Universal Periodic Review before the UN Human Rights Council next year by expediting action on the recommendations made during the 2012 UPR. These recommendations called for criminalising enforced disappearance, ratifying the Convention on Enforced Disappearances, and vesting the commission of inquiry on enforced disappearances with greater authority and resources. None of these recommendations is exceptionable or not doable.
Source: dawn.com/news/1249013/disappearances-revisited
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The Price of Complacency
By Aisha Sarwari
March 30, 2016
It is jarring to watch A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, the Oscar-winning Pakistani documentary. One certainly cannot do it in the shared company of popcorn and a cola. You need a truckload of shame and oxygen to help you survive when you hyperventilate. As someone who prides herself as a feminist, it felt like a personal blow and officially reduced my anti-patriarchy howling to a whimper. Our women-killing culture and the reality of the philosophy that justifies it, is so acute compared to the shouts and murmurs — which we use to console ourselves into believing are making a difference. You can’t fight a deadly virus with Joshanda.
The story of Saba, the 19-year-old young woman who got shot in the face by her father and uncle and thereafter dumped in the river to die, is one that immortalises the fact that we are the problem. The menace is not just that we are honour-crazed and that women’s behaviour is tied to the status of a man in society, but that we have continually denied that there is a problem with that equation.
Nothing defines this more clearly than Saba’s survival after the river ordeal. Scarred and bloodied in the eye, she somehow survived a drowning and came out intact with her spirit. She talked of justice, she talked of vengeance and fairness and she talked of taking the crime to the courts. Only to be sent back to eat her words. Despite police officials and lawyers supporting her bravery, the community elders, who are essentially the abattoirs of all truth and vitality, ended up gnawing at her enough that she did what all women do — forgive.
I think of many women survivors’ walk of shame from the court, the day they record their statement of forgiveness to protect their murderers. That is not their walk to walk, that is the walk perpetrators of violence should carry out. One foot after the other, thinking of the spirit they broke, the flesh they tore and the life they attempted to barter for their fake honour — all of which don’t deserve forgiveness. These men however, walk free from the jail cells, chests out and spring in their step. The world will greet them as if they have pleased the gods.
What a twisted world Saba’s Gujranwala is.
But wait, that is a microcosm of Pakistan. The council of religious leaders have given the Punjab government a deadline to do away with a women’s protection law that punishes men like Saba’s father and uncle with slightly more vengeance. That is precisely what women need — daggers, claws and fangs. Certainly not forgiveness.
Women don’t forgive men because it is in their nature, but because they fear men. They fear men because men can hurt them and get away with it. Men don’t fear men because they can’t get away with hurting them. Pakistan needs to awaken to the fact that we need to place women at par with men, so that for starters, our rivers have fewer women drowned in them.
The blight of honour killing extends far beyond Gujranwala, it permeates the four walls of most homes in the country. Honour culture is on a spectrum that ranges from denying women financial and educational empowerment, to shooting them in the face. There is a lot of pain and torture in between. Women commit suicide, they live with mental ailments and are mostly vertical corpses. Sadly, our culture of complacency, both from the government and from the religious elite, celebrates the dead or near-dead women.
A Girl in The River uses simple cinematic techniques to convey a ghastly reality. The most important part of it is that you don’t feel like you are watching a film but that you have peeked into the homes that Saba lives in and is cast away from and you scrimmage through the agrarian fields through which Saba was dragged to the river. It is sometimes the simplest film techniques that are hardest to pull off.
This Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy film, yes, puts a mirror to our face and makes us gag, but it also tells us that the place to start is not with women, but with transforming the justice system from priding itself in being a mere post office, into being a sanctuary of the marginalised in its truest sense. We don’t need post offices. We need a world where our anger is allowed measured and befitting expression.
Aisha Sarwariis a freelance writer based in Islamabad.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1076009/the-price-of-complacency/
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The Changing Face of Desi Humour
By Maria Sartaj
March 31, 2016
“I always like walking in the rain, so no one can see me crying.” This famous quote is attributed to the greatest comedian of all times, Charlie Chaplin. Comedy is tragedy in a long shot. Who could have imagined that Chaplin responsible for making millions laugh and forget their pain was battling with his own darkness in his private world?
Back home, Desi (local) humour has gone through a gamut of transformation itself, reflecting the changing times, crises and morale of the general public. Like everything else, Pakistanis and Indians have often compared their funny bones with each other’s. The consensus has often come out in support of Pakistan perhaps owing to our better grip on the Urdu language, and the increasing disinterest amongst Indians for speaking fluent Hindi.
If we backtrack to the 1970s, we see that comedians were a different set of actors than leading men of the Hindi cinema. There was a Mehmood, an Asrani and a Jagdeep for every Amitabh Bachchan and Rajesh Khanna, and a Tun Tun for every Meena Kumari. The popular actors of that time often shied away from attempting full-fledged comic roles, perhaps fearing the public wouldn’t take them too seriously afterward. Comedy is serious business though; clowns make complete fools of themselves in order to wipe away the tears of a stranger. A strong and timely coordination between words, body language helps them achieve just that, besides presence of mind of course. The funny business generating out of India shifted to mimicry of film stars during the late 1980s and the entirety of the 1990s, turning comedy into something that wasn't creative or impressive, to say the least.
That was the period when giant strides in the world of humour were being taken by the likes of Umar Shareef. He went on to become a sensation even across the border and to date; superstars like Shahrukh Khan and Kajol fondly talk of Baqra Kiston Pe and Buddha Ghar Pe Hai whenever they give interviews to Pakistani channels. Shareef's brand of comedy was street smart, accented and highly witty.
Another group, comprising of Moin Akhtar and Anwar Maqsood were a lot more subtle and classy in comparison, relying on their intellect in more distinctly low-key ways to make important social and political commentary.
The generation of those times picked up on these nuances and manipulated it in their own world. The content of the jokes of the aam admi (ordinary man) during the time mostly revolved around unemployment, dreams of settling abroad and unrequited love. They say that humour acts like a shock-absorber in the harsh road of life, making the ride a bit easier. Many of us turn to goofing around just to loosen up after a stressful day, as the child in us comes alive.
The current day scenario in Pakistan’s world of comedy includes social media accounts in addition to television shows. People masquerade as popular celebs to post jokes online and one such popular account is @aapazubeda on Twitter. Run by a youth from Karachi, he uses this platform to make political comments and the content can often be risqu?, which the anonymity of a parody account allows him to pull off. One of his brilliant thoughts recently was a tweet when Adnan Sami Khan took up Indian nationality. He wrote “Indians, keep Adnan Sami to yourself, we will blow up another one.” Of course, it sounded funnier in Urdu! They say brevity is the soul of the wit and this joke captured just that. The tweet was widely appreciated by Indians as well. The man behind this account sees the purpose of humour in society as a means “to tell others of our intelligence” but also admits that it’s a mask that one puts on to escape the harsher realities of life.
A performance is expected out of humorists every time they are outside their bedroom irrespective of how their day may be going otherwise. Actors like Robin Williams struggled with depression for years without the public being aware of their ailment.
There is another emerging group of ‘funny people’, and they don’t reside in either Pakistan or India. These are the overseas desis, young people whose online content is usually about balancing an Eastern self within the Western world. Their humour is much frothier, and often, more refreshing than what one encounters on Pakistan TV shows.
Pakistani humour, lately, has relegated itself to just politics. There are satire shows on every channel with similar concepts. Every channel has their lookalikes of Imran Khan, Asif Ali Zardari and Main Nawaz Sharif. These shows are an extension of the news itself, which this nation is hopelessly addicted to, like someone is to drugs. So in essence, these shows tend to bring down the morale of the public even more; I tend to flip through most of these shows.
The need for an uplifting sense of humour where hope is the main theme in a creative project or where the writer works consciously to divert Pakistan’s attention towards bigger dreams and aspiration is the need of the day. Needless to say, most content-creators only run after ratings these days. They say it is very easy to write dramatic content and very difficult to make the masses laugh with tears of joy.
In the world of fiction on Pakistani television there is one Faseeh Bari Khan who has to his advantage a brilliant Hina Dilpazeer, an actor par excellence. Khan is outstanding with his characterisations and captures the spirit of Karachi quite well. Kapil Sharma from India now commands immense respect from Pakistanis who regularly tuned in to watch his shows. This is the slight shift one has noticed in respect to Indian humour, which may have been dismissed earlier by us.
However, somewhere deep down the people of Pakistan seem to be losing their ability to laugh at themselves. Amongst the middle class, the focus has shifted entirely to mocking others based on their looks, lack of education or assets in the name of fun. The poor man on the road, of course, knows that laughter is the best medicine and that is why children found on the streets without shoes have the widest smiles on their faces.
Maria Sartaj is a freelance columnist with a degree in Cultural Studies and a passion for social observation, especially all things South Asian.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/31-Mar-2016/the-changing-face-of-desi-humour
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