The wages of sin

The wages of sin

By Kamran Shafi

SO then, the American-brokered Mother of All Deals, or MAD, has spawned the first of its many malformed babies. Upwards of 570 poor souls were injured, some of them horribly mutilated; and more than 140 met their undeserved and tragic end.

A festival of dancing and joy by innocent political workers who had gathered in their tens of thousands to welcome their leader back to the country was in a mad instant turned into blood-soaked tragedy.

I went to sleep at 11:30 pm on the night that Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan and woke at my customary hour of 6 the next morning.

I was making my way to the TV to see the rally’s progress when the telephone rang. It was my old friend Prapa from Bangkok inquiring how I was. ‘Fine, Prapa, why do you ask?’ I said. There was a pause. ‘The bomb attacks,’ Prapa said, ‘on Benazir’s rally. I thought you were there.’

‘What!’ I yelled, and lunged for the TV. There it was, in living colour; at the exact moment that I put on the TV, the station was running an old clip which graphically showed bloodied bodies lying about, some writhing in agony, and a man screaming and hopping around on one foot, the other one missing, blown away.

I burst into tears right then, readers, at what has been made of my country and yours: where the ineptness and asinine policies of an army dictator, lord and master of all he surveyed while he held it by the throat for eight long years, has brought it to its present pass; where the obscurantist merchants of death and destruction, their daddies and granddaddies in the establishment looking on benignly, can turn our happiness into abject sadness in the flash of an eye.

Where life, be it that of a man or woman or child, is nowhere near being sacrosanct. Where cruelty and hard-heartedness have taken the place of kindness and compassion.

To add insult to injury, the federal and Sindh governments have fallen over themselves in muddying the waters with instantaneous diagnoses of what exactly happened, including announcing assuredly the exact weight of the explosive used by the suicide bomber.

Newspapers friendly to MAD on the very next day of the carnage have also apportioned blame.

But how in God’s name can the Sindh government be so cocksure that the explosions targeting Benazir Bhutto and her rally were caused by a suicide bomber?

And is it not too early in the day, especially in a country where police investigations are not of the highest standard, for the authorities to definitely say X amount of Y explosive was used?

I have some little experience of explosives (no, I did not learn how to make time bombs at FC College like our Commando did!) from my days in the army and know that it would be near impossible for a suicide bomber to cause the kind of damage — anyone notice the mangled car? —or the number of casualties.

The possibility that it was a remote-controlled bomb planted in the car simply cannot be ruled out at this early stage of investigations.

Which would lead us elsewhere: while it would still be possible for Al Qaeda to have carried out the bombings due to its effective tentacles in virtually every urban centre in Pakistan, particularly Karachi, the blame could as easily be that of the extremists nurtured and used when needed by the ‘agencies’.

To tell the truth, the bombs in Karachi came as a veritable blessing for the junta at this fraught time for it, made even more fraught by the arrival in the country of the leader of Pakistan’s largest political party as demonstrated by the crowds that welcomed her.

Just see how immediately afterwards Shujaat Hussain, whose king’s party could never manage to gather even one-sixth as many people in all of the six years that it has played second fiddle to the dictatorship, suggested to Shaukat Aziz that political rallies be banned across the country.

One can imagine the size of the cat let loose in

the Gujrat dovecote by the quite nonsensical statements coming out of Pervaiz Elahi too.

Be which as it may, and no matter how opposed one was/is to Benazir even talking to an army dictator and thereby giving the army a further inch, she is back and bully for her.

This leads me to say that all who believe in the supremacy of civil society and rule of law and Constitution must stand up and tell the junta and its hangers-on that we have had enough of mudslinging on opposition politicians alone.

That whilst we are aware that there are serious allegations of corruption against politicians opposed to the junta, there are equally serious allegations of corruption against those in the king’s party too. And that the top generals (‘Pakistan’s billionaire generals’, according to The Guardian) are not known for being pure as the driven snow either.

If you don’t believe me, go visit Chak Shehzad, Islamabad the Beautiful, and see the humongous mansions being so lovingly built there.

So then, what next for Ms Bhutto? She must now insist that Nawaz Sharif and his brother be allowed to come back to their country and lead their party in the coming elections.

The political parties must get together on one platform and take immediate steps that would forever consign the army to its barracks and training areas.

Benazir should then address our tribal brothers and sisters and say she is here to put salve on their wounds, inflicted by an unthinking and inept and cruel dispensation too often acting the part of Tonto to the US government’s The Lone Ranger.

Ms Bhutto should say that it is her fervent desire that peace

return to the tribal areas, and that henceforth, judiciousness rather than gun-slinging will determine the government’s policies of applying the state’s writ in Fata.

Incidentally, I agree absolutely that foreign terrorism and forensics experts be called in to investigate the Karachi bombings. Don’t say I didn’t warn you when you see the faces that exercise will unmask!

P.S. In honour of President George W. Bush’s great intellect, we shall be regaled by his pearls of wisdom every week. Enjoy!

Bushism of the Week: ‘I feel strongly that there ought to be fair justice.’ — President George W. Bush; Washington DC, Sept 20, 2007

kshafi1@yahoo.co.uk