Yesterday’s speech by Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf to mark his country’s 55th anniversary was no ceremonial affair. With its bitter condemnation of extremists in the country and a strong cry of support for the struggle in Indian-ruled Kashmir, it was a ringing policy statement.
It is one that Musharraf hopes will be heard not just at home but around the world, especially in the US with whom he hopes to build a new relationship. Whether it will be heard there depends on a number of issues. Analysts fear that, with the battle for Afghanistan largely over, Washington may no longer regard Pakistan in its earlier uncritical way. It may even tend to sign up to India’s view of events in Kashmir, that Islamabad is to blame for the violence there because it will not reign in the militants. The murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl and the recent killings of Christians have further appalled the Americans.
In his speech, what Musharraf has tried to do is make a distinction between a principled belief — the right of the Kashmiris to be free — and a political necessity: the urgent need to bring law and order back to Pakistan by crushing the militants. His castigation of Delhi’s administration of part of the province as illegal and past Indian-organized elections there as farcical and rigged reiterates Pakistan’s long-held position. It is a position that unites the whole country.
Crushing militants who operate in the name of Islam, however, may be a different matter, even though they are, as Musharraf said, a small minority. No one with a rudimentary knowledge of Islam can refute his accusation that the militants have a severely misconceived view of Islam, and that they have dangerously damaged Pakistan’s image with it. What has been their contribution to Pakistani society? Do they provide medical help, social welfare, jobs or education for Pakistan’s impoverished millions? Of course not. They are not interested in the misery on their doorstep. They are motivated purely by hate.
What warped mind can think that Islam is aided or made attractive to non-Muslims by attacking a Christian children’s school and gunning down six members of the staff, all of them Pakistanis, or throwing grenades into a crowd of women leaving a hospital chapel in Taxila and killing three Pakistani nurses? When it is claimed, as Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh did, that all non-believers, Christians and Jews included, must be put to death, he is not speaking of the Islam we believe in. It is a perversion of the faith by the ignorant and downright wicked. It is not just Pakistan that they humiliate and shame by their foul deeds. Islam too is the victim. They provide the fuel that Islamophobes then use.
The problem is that they have the limelight at the moment: they are the extreme reaction to what is happening in Kashmir and in Palestine and what was happening in Afghanistan. Turbulent waters always produce such elements.
Musharraf needs to crush them. Pakistan cannot afford to become a cradle of hate. His problem, even though most Pakistanis want to rid themselves of this blight, is whether he can actually root them out.
