No Excuse for Terror

Injustice can explain many things. It can produce anger, resentment and even rage. It can create demands for retribution and resistance. But no injustice, however deeply or genuinely perceived, can justify the cold-blooded murder of innocent people. Still less can it justify selecting those people for death simply because of their ethnicity. Four labourers working on an under-construction road in Pishin have now been murdered by armed men. The victims had reportedly travelled from Punjab in search of work. They were not soldiers or policymakers. They were labourers earning a living. Fake Doctors Such killings must be understood for what they are: naked terrorism. This realisation must accompany any discussion of the Baloch Liberation Army and the constellation of militant groups operating around it. The deliberate targeting of ordinary workers, passengers and civilians on ethnic grounds is not some unfortunate excess at the margins of a noble struggle. Ethnically targeted violence has repeatedly formed part of the militant campaign in Balochistan. Once a movement accepts that people may be killed merely for belonging to the “wrong” ethnicity, it adopts the same moral principle employed by ethnic cleansers and genocidaires. The difference becomes one of scale and capability, not principle. Beyond Contingency Pakistanis must reject this thinking completely. A country as diverse as ours cannot survive if every grievance becomes permission to collectively punish another ethnicity. That road leads only to cycles of retaliation in which ordinary people pay the price. Nor should apologists be allowed to disguise such violence behind the language of resistance. Grievances may demand justice. They do not confer a licence to murder. Whatever political argument militants claim to advance, the execution of labourers because they are Punjabi advances no cause worth defending. It is terrorism, plainly and simply, and it should be condemned without qualification. Lavish Lifestyles

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