Sectarian conflict

Ours is a divided society – indeed there are few societies that are not, and for many countries around the world that very diversity is a matter of pride and celebration. Not so here. Our divisions are often outlined in bodies, blood, and bullets. The scenario played out on a lonely stretch of Karakoram Highway on Tuesday was a familiar one. As many as four buses were stopped by men said to be wearing army uniforms (not difficult to obtain anywhere in the country), the passengers CNICs checked and 18 of those with obviously Shia names summarily murdered by the roadside. The slain were innocent pilgrims returning to their homes and families from Iran. This is not the first time this has happened on the road between Dassu – Komilla and Chilas, nor, it seems, will it be the last. Those who died had committed no crime, but were merely different in the detail of the way they practice their faith to those who killed them.

Intolerance and brutality clearly form the religion of those who perpetrated the killings claimed by Jundallah and followed by unrest and immediate closure of schools in Gilgit for three days. Interior Minister Rehman Malik in his typical style spoke of the attacks as being part of a ‘conspiracy to destabilise the country.’ This utterly fails to recognise that the need is to create strategies that will minimise or mitigate sectarian strife, rather than exacerbate it by trying to parlay it into some sort of nebulous ‘hidden hand’ meddling in our affairs. There seems to be little doubt that the killers came from the Darel or Tangir, were Sunni and their prime motivation was not to ‘destabilise the country’ but to kill as many Shias as they could. National destabilisation will be far from the minds of these men, butchering members of a different sect uppermost instead. The three-man commission constituted to investigate this latest massacre is already an irrelevance. There is no expectation that the killers will be caught, nor even that there will be a serious attempt to catch them. At a fundamental level it is intolerance and fanaticism that must be addressed if we are ever to move forward as a people.