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In the small slice of 2015 that has passed, four doctors have been killed already. —Reuters
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The South Asia Terrorism Portal keeps some dismal numbers. Collected via news reports and collated by year, and date and number of injured and number of dead; its pages and columns present in numbers the hurtling descent of Pakistan into the bloody quagmire.
I try not to look at these pages too often, those of us who work with words, be they readers and writers can be daunted by numerical realities.
Behind every click and column at this virtual stop there is tragedy; 2014 saw 380 bomb blasts, and the carnage the bombs unleashed took over 840 lives and left over 2100 injured. The blasts included the better known of catastrophes, the dead school children of Army Public School; and the Wagah Border catastrophe.
They also include the lesser known dead; blasts in Hazara Town and in the Tirah Valley, places for which the rest of the country just sighs and shrugs.
The portion of this year already passed promises little improvement. After mourning the little coffins of the children who died in Peshawar, announcing National Action Plans and a renewed zeal against terror, the powerful of the country seem to have (yet again) forgotten their promises.
It is the numbers that say so; the first three months of 2015, this third not yet concluded, have already seen 64 bomb blasts.
They were dotted all over the country from Karachi’s densely populated Gulshan-e-Iqbal Town and Saddar to Lori Adda in Mansehra and Hazara Town in Quetta.
Also read: Karachi: Mapping death across the metropolis
The most gruesome yet hit a place of worship; the Karbala Maula Imambargah in Sheikhupura killing at least 60 and injuring over 60.
Lesser ones, felled the unassuming, the innocent and the unfortunate in Rawalpindi and Peshawar and Lahore.
Deadliest year for doctors
Last year, the year of 380 bomb blasts was also noted for another reason. With 12 killed in targeted assassinations, it was the deadliest year for doctors in the country. With impunity and brazen bloodlust, doctors were gunned down in clinics, in hospitals, on streets and in mosques.
Dr Amir Mehdi was accosted by assailants on motorcycles; Dr Abdul Aziz was gunned down as he emerged from a mosque. Dr Manzoor Memon, the Medical Legal Officer of Karachi’s Jinnah Post-graduate medical center was brought down by bullets along with his driver. Dr Rubina Khalid, a senior Professor at the Dow University of Health Sciences was killed on University Road in Karachi.
As they do, the authorities in charge of investigation came up with excuses, it was sectarian, it was family enmity, it was political affiliation. There are it seems, so many reasons for which justice is not deserved by the dead and all of them are in use in Pakistan.
And as is the case of terrorist attacks in general, the proclamations of renewed vigour have failed to abet the tide of death that has swept over the country’s doctors.
In the small slice of 2015 that has passed, four doctors have been killed already.
The most recent death was of Dr. Shahid Nawaz a prominent cardiologist at the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences in Islamabad. He was shot in the head and died right outside the VIP ward of the hospital. Dr. Akbar Ali, another one of the four dead doctors was killed outside his clinic in Paposh Nagar in Karachi.
The list goes on, doctors and patients all dead and dying at a rate whose speed and interminability screams out from numbers in a way words cannot quite capture.
Kill for kill
In return, instead of accountability and abatement, organisation and transparency, the state has begun its own dance of death. Dug up from dark corners of prisons, supposed culprits, labeled terrorists are paraded before a death wearied public.
Here, too, there are numbers, 59 have been put to death as a panacea for the thousands that have perished.
With so much killing and so much death; the difference between vengeance and justice is lost — and killing, we are told, is supposed to end killing. Such is the arithmetic of despair; the numeric, wordless temperature of our times.
Rafia Zakaria is an attorney and human rights activist. She is a columnist for DAWN Pakistan and a regular contributor for Al Jazeera America, Dissent, Guernica and many other publications.
She is the author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon Press 2015). She tweets @rafiazakaria
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.
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