Pity The Nation

By Fatima Bhutto

In Iran Ashura is a time for people to come together. Nobody cooks during the two days of mourning; food is served on the streets and handed out to those who pass. Tea, sherbet, and cooked goods such as rice and meat are donated to the hungry and the pious. Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians are also welcomed; they are welcomed to witness the mercy and kindness of the religion and its people. Passion plays, re-enacting the massacre at Karbala are carried out on street corners and beautifully haunting mourning music is played on the airwaves and wafts out of people's houses.

On the ninth and tenth of Muharram, mourners also gather in the streets of Beirut, Lebanon. A peaceful procession is carried out and believers wearing black, both Sunni and Shiite alike, collect to mark the seventh century martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the Prophet's grandson, who was slain at Karbala. This year operas written in Arabic were staged for Ashura. Men, women, and children were all present and after the operas they listened to speakers such as Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, address the crowd which numbered into the tens of thousands. Violent matam has been banned in Lebanon; no blood was spilt on Ashura. Rather the lives of those lost during the summer war, a thousand Lebanese -- mainly civilians -- were remembered. This Ashura in Lebanon was marked with calm, defiance, and the promise of continued strength for the year to come. Nasrallah, no longer in hiding, lashed out against the violence in the region "George Bush wants to punish you because you resisted, he wants to punish you because you won". Here, however, we seem quite adept at punishing ourselves.

Why is it that in Pakistan we mark a bloody and shameful historical event with more blood? Why are Pakistan's Shiites targeted with a violence and hatred second only to those in Iraq?

On January 26 a suicide bomber attacked the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad, killing himself and a guard. Reports of the bombing failed to identify the target of the attack, but it was too close to Ashura to ignore, and too familiar a scene to excuse as some Jihadi's genocidal fantasy.

On January 27 fourteen people were massacred in Peshawar. Another thirty believers were injured after a bomb exploded near a procession of Shiites whose only crime had been to mark Ashura in their country. Talking heads and officials were quick to point out that the bomb may have been planted to kill policemen; two senior police officers were among the dead. It might not have been a sectarian killing, it might not have, but it probably was.

On January 29 another suicide bomber hit a Shiite march, killing himself and two others, in Dera Ismail Khan in the NWFP. Nearby, in Bannu, another 11 people were injured as a rocket landed near a Shiite mosque.

On the night of Ashura, January 30, the town of Hangu in the NWFP was placed under a curfew. The reason? A rocket and mortar attack on a Shiite mosque. Last year, 37 people were killed in Hangu. A suicide bomber blew himself up during an Ashura procession on the main Hangu-Thal road. Close to a hundred mourners were injured. The violence sparked riots and some hundred rockets were fired along with rounds and rounds of gunfire. The mourners had only sticks to protect themselves with. They carried them to use during matam, against themselves, not against others. Those killed in Hangu last February were not buried immediately by their relatives, they couldn't be -- the fighting was too intense.

In 2004, 40 Ashura pilgrims were killed in Quetta as a deranged gunman opened fire and tossed hand grenades into a throng of Shiites. And it goes on and on exactly like this.

According to the International Crisis Group religious violence between Sunnis and Shias in Pakistan has cost more than 2,000 lives over the past 20 years. It is not enough to say that Pakistan has a history of sectarian violence, or that Pakistan's political divide between Sunnis and Shiites is a manipulation of Ziaul Haq's Wahabi throwback in the 1980s. It is not enough to pretend that this bloodlust is the work of foreign agents. It is not enough to say that this happens all over the world, it doesn't.

It happens in Iraq, yes, some 40 Shiite mourners were killed this Ashura in Baladruz, Khanaqin, and Adhamiyah. But Iraq is a country under occupation and the bombs that ripped through processions of people killed Iraqis, not just Shiites. Iraq is a country beset by civil war and the daily body count is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with.

So then, as a country neither under (overt) occupation nor torn apart (yet) by civil war -- what is Pakistan's excuse? What do we owe this festival of fraternal killings to? Perhaps this column is no more than a soliloquy for the dead, for I do not have answers to these questions.

We all know the frequency of these killings and maybe we need a little help recounting the number of the dead, but is this how we must mark Ashura? It is not often my country makes me sick, sad often, but sick rarely. This week I do not know what else to do in the face of this complete and senseless bloodshed, but raise a poem for the dead.

In a poem made famous by its use in uber war reporter Robert Fisk's book Pity the Nation Khalil Gibran wrote:

"Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion,

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not from its own wine-press,

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful…

Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block".

Source: A hundred beats