His car was intercepted near a market in the nation’s capital, Islamabad, by a white Mehran filled with gunmen donning shawls. Four people were sitting in the car. One of them got out with a Kalashnikov. He came in front of the car and opened fire. I ducked. Minister died on the spot, his driver Gul Sher, who survived the ambush, told Reuters.
Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian Pakistani, and Federal Minister for Minority Affairs, hit by 25 to 30 bullets was declared dead upon arrival at Shifa International Hospital. He was 42.
The Qaeda and the Taliban of Punjab took responsibility for the assassination in leaflets found on the scene of the crime. This is the punishment of this cursed man, it wrote.
Bhatti was accused of being at the head of a governmental body charged with revising Pakistan’s blasphemy law. With the blessing of Allah, the mujahidin will send each of you to hell, the leaflets warned…
The Christian minister was the second high profile official campaigning against the blasphemy law to be assassinated since the beginning of the year (another prominent militant, Sherry Rehman, a member of parliament, is currently in hiding).
On January 4, Salmaan Taseer, the Governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was also gunned down.
He had been openly and publicly campaigning (one brave feat) in favor of granting a presidential pardon to Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman with four children sentenced to death last year for committing blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. Enraged by his campaign, one of Taseer’s bodyguards assassinated him.
The killer, caught at the scene, was immediately embraced by many Pakistanis, and became the champion in the cause to preserve the country’s blasphemy law, resurrected in the 1980s by the authoritarian and Islamic government of General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq.
The law, according to its critics, is designed to repress the nation’s small religious minorities. Christians account for about 2% of Pakistan’s 170 million people.
Conviction under the law is conditioned on the testimony of witnesses, and thus, easily obtained….
Although no one convicted has received the mandatory death penalty, many of those accused and later released on appeal were murdered by mobs seeking justice.
This law is being misused. Many people are facing death threats and problems. They’re in prison and are being killed extra-judicially, Bhatti declared last November, during the effort to obtain a pardon for Bibi.
After Taseer’s murder and the public reaction praising the Governor’s assassin for his deed, the government publicly abandoned all efforts to reverse the blasphemy law, thereby emboldening the extremists and undermining its own agenda.
This kind of attack (Bhatti’s murder) was expected after the government’s response to governor Taseer’s assassination. Because of the government’s very weak response, it has encouraged the hardliners in society, Amir Rana, of the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, told Reuters.
Bhatti himself knew he was under threat.
They want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan, and whoever stands against their radical philosophy, they threaten them. When I’m leading this campaign against the Shariah laws, and for the abolishment of the blasphemy law and speaking for the oppressed and the marginalized, persecuted Christians and other minorities, these Taliban threaten me…I am ready to die for a cause. I’m living for my community and suffering people and I will die to defend their rights. So these threats and these warnings cannot change my opinion and principles. I will prefer to die for my principles and for the justice of my community rather to compromise, he declared in an interview.
In fact, his bodyguards were not by him at the time of the ambush, but were waiting for him in his office, at his request.
Bhatti clearly knew what was coming and that nothing or no one could prevent it.
I am sad and upset but not surprised. These people have a long list of targets, and we are all on it. It is not a matter of if, but when, Tahira Abdullah, a Pakistani human rights activist, told The Guardian.
The Pakistani government denounced the assassination, and President Asif Ali Zardari characterized it as a heinous act.
Yet, the reluctance of the authorities to alienate the extremists even after the Taseer murder, their refusal to confront directly and energetically those who seek not only to deny the right of free speech to their opponents, but have no qualms about brazenly killing them as well, in the capital’s streets and in broad daylight, has dangerous and pernicious consequences.
The radicals are now dominating the debate and manipulating the government’s agenda at will.
Unlike the government, they are not afraid to voice and defend their convictions, no matter how lethal or odious.
And the ideology that led to this assassination has now sent another determined and deadly message to the state-that it will continue to fight till the last liberal falls, wrote Aamer Ahmed Khan, editor of the BBC Urdu Service.
If the authorities choose not to react out of political expediency or pusillanimity, then the President and government should resign….The people should then be left free to elect whatever government it wants after a democratic electoral campaign…
It is time to implement the law and not surrender in front of extremists. Our founding fathers did not wage a struggle for an intolerant society. They wanted equal rights for all human beings regardless of their caste, creed and religion. We must reclaim our tolerant heritage. Pakistan cannot let the blood of Mr. Taseer and Mr. Bhatti go to waste. RIP Shahbaz Bhatti. A brave man like you will surely be missed, wrote the Daily Times in an editorial…
The Pakistani authorities have squandered that heritage and lost the courage and the will to defend, let alone promote, their own values.
Yet, what have we, in the West, done to help them?
In the name of eradicating Islamic extremism in Afghanistan, we have infected Pakistan, where offshoots of al-Qaeda now prosper and boldly attack those who embody the values we profess to defend and advocate for the region, purportedly with the support of the Pakistani government who pretends to share them, but is now too weak to defend itself.
Has not our war in Afghanistan simply moved next door?
Are we sure that military means are the best and only way to reach our objectives?
Just yesterday, Western forces killed nine youngsters (9 to 15 years old) in Afghanistan. They were gathering wood on a hillside…
NATO, naturally, apologized. We are deeply sorry for this tragedy, General David Petraeus declared, but the damage, alas, was already done.
Ten years, $383 billion, and tens of thousands of casualties later, we are still fighting in Afghanistan.
Does any one in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else for that matter, still believe that we are there to help and protect these people?
How many more supporters of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban did this latest tragedy spawn?
Is there any objective reason why, at this rate, we should not still be fighting the same war with the same results ten years from now?
What state will Afghanistan or Pakistan be in then?
In what state will we be in?
If we truly desire to thwart extremists in the region, then we must propose a radically different agenda, based on development, not the eradication of evanescent enemies: schools, clinics, water, electricity, trade; this is what these people yearn for…
Helping people to help themselves, and mobilizing the necessary resources to do so is a noble project, and that only we can offer.
How can the Taliban, of whatever variety, even begin to compete with that?
(the photograph above of Shahbaz Bhatti is by AFP)
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