January 10, 2021
A week after one of the bloodiest massacres of innocent civilians in Balochistan prompted a wave of protests across Pakistan, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s latest choice of words has badly exposed his failure to grasp the reality.
“No premier of any country should be blackmailed like this,” remarked Khan on Friday in response to the protestors demanding his presence in Quetta before eleven corpses of Shia Hazara Muslims are finally laid to rest.
The protestors had put forward a largely innocent plea after years of recurring attacks on their community members. Any visitor to Quetta’s Behesht-e-Zainab cemetery will find it hard not to be emotionally touched or outraged, given the tragic accounts of the ‘Hazara’ martyrs noted on one tombstone after another across the sprawling ground. Widows and young orphans routinely assemble here every day notably on Thursdays to mourn their departed loved-ones. Across neighbourhoods such as Quetta’s Hazara town or th
The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
IF bodies of slain loved ones can indeed be weaponised by mourning families to blackmail a prime minister, the Hazara Shias of Balochistan must be the most well-armed and lethal community in the country. But is that really the case?
To understand this point, let’s take a cursory look at what the Hazara community has gone through over the past two decades. The community is, or was, approximately 0.7 million strong. Over the past 21 years an estimated 1,500 of its members have been murdered.
The rage and the bloodlust of the murderers has not even spared unarmed women and children, including infants, what to talk of men. If the same proportion of about 220m Pakistanis had been killed as the Hazaras have lost of their own, the toll would be close to half a million.