Is Pakistan now headed into a period of accentuated instability coupled with a danger that elements sympathetic to Al Qaeda and the Taliban can gain a foothold in the wake of the assassination of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer , one of the country’s leading advocates of tolerance?
It would appear so given the governments general instability and mixed reaction to the assassination. And the symbolism of the murder of one of the country’s most visible advocates of tolerance now takes on extra meaning with revelations that the killer had told others about his planned murders — and was still assigned to be Taseer’s bodyguard.
The Guardian offers an excellent take on the events, the crisis and the mood:
The slain governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, was buried in Lahore this morning amid tight security as Pakistanis struggled to come to terms with a killing that exposed a vein of deep-rooted extremism that has infected even the senior security forces.
Taseer was shot 27 times yesterday by one of his own bodyguards, who was reportedly enraged by Taseer’s opposition to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws.
This is an uneasy flashback to the October 31, 1984 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards to avenge the military attack on the Sikhism’s holiest shrine, Harmandir Sahib, during Operation Blue Star.
Mourners crowded into the sweeping grounds of the colonial-era governor’s residence in central Lahore for prayers before Taseer’s body was flown by helicopter to a nearby graveyard. Taseer’s three sons and a small crowd of mourners tossed rose petals over his coffin, watched by Punjab Rangers in fantail turbans who delivered a military salute.
A much larger crowd was prevented from entering the graveyard by soldiers and police amid fears of further violence by religious extremists.
A prominent group of Islamic scholars said that the funeral prayers should not be offered and warned that anyone who expressed grief for Taseer could suffer the same fate.
The Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan group represents scholars from the mainstream Barelvi sect of Sunni Muslims. Although considered moderate, they have led protests in favour of the blasphemy law.
“More than 500 scholars of the Jamaat-e-Ahl-e-Sunnat have advised Muslims not to offer the funeral prayers of Governor Punjab Salman Taseer, nor try to lead the prayers,” the group said.
“Also, there should be no expression of grief or sympathy on the death of the governor, as those who support blasphemy of the prophet are themselves indulging in blasphemy.”
In Islamabad, police and intelligence officials continued to question Mumtaz Qadri, the police guard who shot Taseer as he stepped into his car outside a shopping market in central Islamabad on Tuesday.
And here is the chilling detail:
A member of the Punjab Elite police force, Qadri yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he emptied two magazines of bullets into the outspoken politician. Photos taken after the shooting showed a calm-looking, curly-bearded man being driven away. In some images he was smiling.
Qadri, who surrendered immediately, said he killed the governor because of his support for reforms to Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy laws, which were recently used to condemn a Christian woman to death.
Time magazine’s Islamabad correspondent writes, in part:
Three years after former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in a gun-and-bomb attack, one of her most prominent supporters has been slain in equally brutal circumstances. Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was killed in the heart of Islamabad on Tuesday by one of his own armed guards. The assassin, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, a member of the police’s elite force, fired 26 rounds into Taseer before surrendering himself. “This is the punishment for a blasphemer,” the assassin said during interrogation, according to the authorities. From the back of a police wagon, Qadri smiled sinisterly, just as the Bali bomber did when his sentence was announced in an Indonesian court….
….Taseer was a vocal liberal politician, who was the first to speak out against the treatment of Aasia Noreen, a Christian farmhand who had been sentenced to death under Pakistan’s harsh blasphemy laws. “These laws are used to victimize Christians and other groups,” Taseer told TIME back in November. “They are a foul leftover from the military regime of General [Mohammed] Zia ul-Haq [which lasted from 1977 till his death in a plane crash in 1988].” The blasphemy laws have been condemned by human-rights groups for being so vaguely worded that they can be used as instruments of social and political coercion. The law says that anyone guilty of blaspheming against Islam and its Prophet will be handed a death sentence. Close examination of the many cases reveals the laws often being invoked to settle personal vendettas, or used by Islamist extremists as cover to persecute religious minorities. There was no evidence that Noreen, who is also referred to as Aasia Bibi, had committed blasphemy, according to lawyers familiar with the situation.
AND:
The assassination has plunged Pakistan into deeper instability, coming amid a growing political crisis in which the ruling coalition has lost its majority after junior partners left the cabinet and joined the opposition. While underscoring the parlous state of Pakistan, where even the powerful are vulnerable, Taseer’s death also highlights how religious extremism has pervaded deep into the ranks of the very men who are supposed to be fighting it. And it represents a severe blow to those Pakistanis who have been defying the rise of Islamist militants who have ravaged their country.
Pakistan’s DAWN reports that “thousands of Pakistanis braved high security to attend Taseer’s funeral [in Lahore], following the country’s most high-profile assassination in three years.”
DAWN also writes that the guard who witnesses said shot the Punjab governor has been charged with the murder, and that “hundreds of Facebook users [have] welcomed the killing of liberal Pakistani politician Salman Taseer as a strike against reformers of the country’s tight blasphemy laws.”
The BBC notes there has been mixed reaction to his death in Pakistan’s press.
The Australian’s blog notes the context of the brutal murder: how it came amid signs of increasing divisions and inroads by extremist elements in Pakistan:
As a symbol of the religious extremism engulfing Pakistan, the assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer could not be more significant. Inevitably, there will be grave fears for the survival of the nuclear-armed nation’s nascent democracy. Taseer, a liberal man in every sense of the word, incurred the wrath of religious fanatics over his bold defence of Aasia Bibi, the 45-year-old Christian mother of five sentenced to death by hanging for alleged blasphemy under the Islamic laws introduced by previous military dictator General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Bibi clashed with fellow labourers while working in a field over their reluctance to share a water bowl with a Christian. Words were exchanged in which, it is claimed, she insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Taseer, who was tortured unmercifully when he bravely campaigned to save Zulfikar Ali Bhutto from Zia-ul-Haq’s executioners, was outraged by the sentence imposed on Bibi. He used his office to campaign for the blasphemy laws to be repealed.
It was an audacious move. Last week’s nationwide strike in support of the blasphemy laws showed religious zealots in the ascendant as never before,,,
…Pakistan, which even more than Afghanistan, is pivotal to Western security, is in dire straits, with riots over petrol prices and the shortage of commodities. The IMF has just stopped payment on a massive loan because of the failure of the government. The religious zealots believe they have the wind with them. The dreams of liberal democracy held by Taseer and others when the Musharraf dictatorship was overthrown are in ruins and the outlook is bleak as the world seeks to deal with al-Qa’ida and the Taliban.
But the story now gets even more ominous.
It now turns out that the assassin told others of his murder plans — and was still assigned to the Governor’s details. Which means the word “plot” can be used. The Wall Street Journal:
The killing of a senior politician who spoke out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws was widely lauded by Islamist groups and sympathizers Wednesday and it emerged that the assassin, a member of an elite police force, had told others about the pending attack but had still been assigned to his victim’s detail….
…..Mr. Qadri had previously been removed from a branch of the police dealing with counterterrorism due to concerns about his Islamist leanings, and had himself come forward to ask to guard Mr. Taseer, a senior police official said.
Preliminary investigations also have revealed that Mr. Qadri informed other police officers of his plans, the official said. Police have detained a dozen other people, including six police officers who were also on guard duty and failed to stop the shooting of Mr. Taseer.
Investigations are focusing on Mr. Qadri’s links with Dawat-i-Islami, a radical Islamist group that has been at the forefront of protests in recent weeks against efforts to change the blasphemy laws, the police official said. Mr. Taseer’s death has exposed a deep fissure in Pakistan society between liberal politicians with Western lifestyles and religious leaders who hew to an Islamist view of the world and are gaining power…
WHERE is liberal Pakistan? Its fading light may have been snuffed out by the assassination of a leading progressive politician and critic of extremism, Salman Taseer..
….The murder will certainly cow and intimidate Pakistan’s political leadership, which had taken fright at Mr Taseer’s stance well before his murder. Indeed, Mr Taseer’s own Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), which leads the government, had not backed his call for the blasphemy law to be repealed.
The PPP government, which was already weak, lost a key coalition partner over the weekend, leaving it as a minority administration. The party has been badly shaken by the murder, which recalls the assassination of the PPP’s leader, Benazir Bhutto, in 2007. Though its manifesto committed it to seek reform of the statute, the party is too busy with its struggle for political survival to pick a fight over the blasphemy law. Pakistan’s other pressing problems, including an economy in a tailspin and a raging Islamist insurgency, will also have to wait.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.