[ This guest post in Kafila marks one month of the 16th December massacre of school-children by Islamists in Peshawar, Pakistan ]

Pakistan has become a euphemism for insanity.  Doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. There are though some incredibly brave, thoughtful, humane and patriotic Pakistani men and women who have decided enough is enough and they are determined to chart a different future for the country.

After speaking with one of these activist leaders I was reminded of the Russian author Ivan Turganev’s heroes Bazarov, the young Nihilist from Fathers and Sons or Insarov, the Bulgarian revolutionary from On the Eve.  Youthful, galvanized, resolute, compelled by the rightness of the cause and their destiny, dreaming of a new country and their place within it, they were the first glimpse of “the new men,” lonely and ultimately tragic.  In 1860 Turganev’s heroes were ahead of their time, pulling along a people unwilling to change tradition and unwilling to cede privilege. In 2015 Pakistan, there is a huge obstacle in the way of these courageous souls. They are outnumbered by the rest of us.

The time has come for each of us to recall what it was we were doing when our children were being executed in Peshawar. Is there even a word which encompasses the horror when 135 children are executed? Make no mistake it was our collective shrug which has tipped Pakistan over the edge and into this very dark abyss.  It was our collective indifference which let these children be stalked by death at the hands of cold blooded murderers who went from child to child executing them that December 16 morning in Peshawar. We let our children die alone and scared, with no one to comfort them except other wounded and dying children. And we know, yes we know, that it is not a question of if, but merely a question of when the next body blow will hit Pakistan’s families. We also now know well that more than three decades of breeding monsters in petri dishes has served up the reign of the militarized mullahs and their religion inebriated militias willing to shoot every one of us in the head should we dare to disagree.

Military courts have never been a good idea for any country, especially one which aspires to preserve a hard won democracy. There will be grave excesses and questionable verdicts. Innocents will become victims and there is a great danger that these courts will be where political opposition will go to die. But as much as I want to focus on the merits or demerits of these courts, I keep coming back to the basic premise of why we have arrived at the threshold of military courts? How has this even come to pass that with an act of Parliament a democracy has willingly forfeited critical space, and the fundamental defining tenets of democracy; due process and the right of habeas corpus, to the very folks who led us to this juncture in the first place? The answer resides within each one of us, within our choices, our ambivalence, our confusion, our prejudices, our indifference, our ignorance and of course our fear. Click link below for full article;

http://kafila.org/2015/01/16/love-in-the-time-of-military-courts-fawzia-naqvi/

Posted By F. Sheikh