May 25, 2019

Security establishment in Pakistan moves to silence dissent

located:	Pakistan
editor:	Shadi Khan Saif

In a pathetic show of discrimination and hypocrisy, the security establishment in Pakistan has booked a prominent female activist who was demanding justice for a minor victim of rape and murder.

Gulalai Ismail, winner of the Reach all Women in War Anna Politovskaya Award, has been charged by the police for making what they claimed was a seditious speech that incited people against state institutions. The context of her speech is in connection with the rape and murder of yet another minor girl from the ethnic Pashtun community.

As a leader of the grassroots movement for the safety and rights of Pashtuns, the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), Gulalai can be heard in this specific speech demanding actions against policemen who were reluctant to lodge report against the barbaric rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl called Farishta in the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad.

What the security establishment projected as and ‘anti-state’ speech was actually a brave shout for justice by the award-winning rights activist against the military’s extrajudicial arrests and rapes in areas hit by militancy. “This is not the first incident of the sort of rape by the army men against women, children and minor boys and girls”. Gulalai went on to charge the army for running ‘war-economy’ in the country.

Now, instead of considering to investigate the serious and repeated allegations of the army’s misconduct in insurgency-hit areas, what the security establishment seems to be doing is to bluntly silence the dissent. The powerful army of the country is evidently on the same path it adopted to suppress the Bangladeshis during the 1960s that eventually led to the independence of East Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh.

Gulalai referred in her speech to the same tactics used by the soldiers in insurgency-hit tribal areas in Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan as well as the northwestern Swat valley.

The recent alleged charges under the Terrorism act against this female activist come after the army publicly announced to suppress her Pashtun Tahafuz Movement saying that ‘’their time is up!”.

The confrontation course between the army and the Pashtuns could only do more harm to the people and state of Pakistan than any good to either.

Photo: Mariana Katzarova; Gulalai Ismail (center) received the 2017 Anna Politkovskaya Award in London at the WOW festival in March 2018.