Members of the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI) stopping trucks headed for Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Nov 29 2013 (IPS)

A blockade of NATO supplies to Afghanistan by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s party has ended up hitting Pakistan’s legal trade with its neighbour, say local traders and truckers.

They say the agitation by Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI) is hurting the common people of Afghanistan as the supply of food and other items through Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has come to a grinding halt.“PTI’s protest hasn’t really affected the NATO forces, it is local traders and the common people in Afghanistan who are at the receiving end."

“PTI’s protest hasn’t really affected the NATO forces, it is local traders and the common people in Afghanistan who are at the receiving end,” Naseem Shinwari, president of the All Pakistan Trucks and Trailers Association tells IPS.

On Nov. 23, PTI chairman Imran Khan announced a blockade of NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa – where the party is in power – to protest U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan that are targeted at militants but sometimes claim innocent lives.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is one of the two land routes in Pakistan – the other being Balochistan – used for transportation of supplies to the 100,000-strong NATO force in Afghanistan.

But it’s Pakistan’s regular trade with Afghanistan that has been hit.

Shinwari says the number of NATO trucks going to Afghanistan via Pakistan daily is only 500, of which 400 pass via the Chaman border in Balochistan.

“Every month 10,000-12,000 trucks pass through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Khyber Agency to Afghanistan carrying goods to commercial markets. These also include supplies allowed under the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement (ATTA),” Shinwari says.

Not only is the protest creating a shortage of goods and food supplies in war-ravaged Afghanistan but also threatening the jobs of about 50,000 drivers, assistants and loaders whose livelihoods depend on the trade.

Muhammad Rafi, a local driver, was allegedly roughed by PTI workers in Hayatabad, Peshawar on Nov. 24, the second day of anti-drone protest, despite possessing documents to show that his truck was not destined for NATO forces.

“I get 200 dollars a month for driving to and from Afghanistan, but this month the owner will pay me for just 20 days because our work has stopped,” he says.

PTI activists have been searching every vehicle at five transit points (Peshawar, Nowshera, Khairabad, Swabi and Dera Ismail Khan), forcing trucks loaded with commercial goods to stop, he says.

Under ATTA, over 20 items are allowed to be transported to Afghanistan via Pakistan. These items are loaded on trucks from two seaports in Karachi from where they are sent to different Afghan cities, traders say.

Jamal Khan Afridi, a customs agent for NATO trucks, says the situation could snowball into a major crisis as the blockade has led to a backlog of more than 20,000 trucks at the Karachi seaport.

“About 5,000 NATO trucks have been burnt by the Taliban in the past five years and now PTI’s workers are blocking us,” he tells IPS.

Shamsur Rehman, who owns five trucks that carry NATO supplies, has taken his vehicles off the road. “PTI activists forcibly stop trucks. They have placed barbed wires,” he says.

“There have been clashes between drivers and the demonstrators,” he tells IPS.

PTI’s Peshawar district leader Younas Zaheer Mohmand, however, says they were only stopping NATO trucks and allowing those carrying commercial supplies through.

“In four days, we stopped about two dozen trucks containing NATO supplies, while about 200 commercial trucks were allowed to cross the border everyday,” he says. “We are not stopping the supply of transit goods because these are legally supplied to our Afghan brethren.”

But traders present a different picture.

“More than 3,000 containers are waiting to cross over to Kabul via Peshawar, but the protesters are not allowing them. They are also clashing with drivers,” Zahidullah Shinwari, president of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chamber of Commerce and Industries tells IPS.

He explains that under ATTA, Pakistan is bound to facilitate the passage of trucks to the Afghan market. Afghanistan is a landlocked country and has no seaport of its own, which is why Pakistan allows supplies through its territory.

He says Afghan markets could run out of edible items and electronics if the protest continued.

But no immediate solution is in sight.

Ishtiaq Urmer, PTI’s spokesman in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, says the protest would continue till the U.S. halts drone strikes. “We are allowing all legal trade activities because we don’t want to take any unconstitutional step,” Urmer tells IPS.

“But the U.S. has no right to kill innocent people. We want to tell the international community that drone attacks are in violation of international law.”

Posters and billboards have been posted by Pakistan Tehreek Insaf workers on University Road in Peshawar to urge people to attend their Nov. 23 anti-drone protest. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

Upping the ante against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan, celebrated cricketer-turned-political leader Imran Khan has threatened to block NATO supplies to Afghanistan through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where his party leads a coalition government.

“We are holding the biggest ever anti-drone protest in Peshawar, where we could decide to block NATO supplies permanently,” Khan, who leads the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), told IPS ahead of massive protests planned by the party for Nov. 23.

“We don’t want to start a fight with the U.S. but we have every right to protest these illegal assaults which kill innocent people,” Khan said, calling the attacks a breach of international law and a violation of human rights.

His party is enraged over a U.S. drone strike at a madrassa or religious seminary that killed at least eight people in Hangu district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in northwestern Pakistan, on Nov. 20.

The PTI leads the coalition government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is one of two key routes used by NATO to move supplies in and out of neighbouring Afghanistan and is strategically important as U.S.-led forces prepare to withdraw from the war-torn country in 2014.

“More than 200,000 political activists will gather here to send a very loud and clear message,” Khan said about the Nov. 23 demonstrations. “On the same day, a similar anti-drone protest will take place in the UK.”

When the party had organised a major two-day protest on Apr. 23-24, 2010, NATO supplies were suspended.

The PTI has staunchly opposed drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), adjacent to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The strikes target Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders who have taken refuge in FATA along a 2,400-km porous border with Afghanistan after being evicted from Kabul by U.S.-led forces towards the end of 2001.

FATA, which is directly ruled by the federal government, is teeming with militants, some of them with huge bounties on their heads as they are aggressively pursued by the U.S. for alleged involvement in the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks. Many high-profile Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed in the drone strikes.

Khan said his party wants to convey to the world that the U.S. government is killing innocent people in the garb of targeting militants.

“Even if those targeted in these strikes are supposed militants, the U.S. has no right to kill them without taking the Pakistan government into confidence,” Khan said.

Besides, while most drone attacks have taken place in FATA, the Nov. 20 strike was in the PTI’s stronghold of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

“We won’t allow drone strikes on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa soil,” Khan said.

He had earlier stated that they would stop NATO supplies even if it meant his party losing its place in the provincial government. But he later stressed that only his party workers would take part in the protest.

“The PTI government in the province will stay away from the protest because we don’t want to take any illegal steps,” Khan said.

The PTI has been accusing Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of failing to raise the concerns of Pakistani citizens about drone strikes with President Barack Obama.

“We were the first to point out that these strikes were in total contravention of U.N. and other international law that guarantees the sovereignty of any country,” he said.

He said the U.S. had sabotaged the government’s proposed peace talks with the Tehreek Taliban Pakistan by killing its leader Hakimullah Mehsud in a Nov. 1 drone attack.

“Targeting a madrassa with missiles from a drone, killing our citizens, is a clear violation of the province’s territorial rights,” Muhammad Junaid, a PTI worker, told IPS. The shopkeeper from the militancy-hit Swabi district said drone strikes kill innocent people, including women and children, and should not be permitted by any country.

“We have the right to protest,” said Junaid. “We are ready to join Imran Khan, our leader, in stopping supplies to NATO forces in Afghanistan.”

The Jamaat Islami Party and Awami Jamhoori Ittehad, the PTI’s allies in the provincial government, are on the same page.

“Upwards of 150,000 protestors will take part in the protest against drone strikes and over the continuation of NATO supplies,” Jamaat Islami chief Syed Munnawar Hassan said.

“We can stop them [NATO supplies] permanently,” he said.

Members of the PTI party protest the U.S. operation in Abbottabad that killed Osama Bin Laden. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan , Jun 13 2013 (IPS)

Though the constant hum of unmanned aerial vehicles flying overhead makes a strong case for staying indoors, residents of Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency are emerging in droves from their humble homes, some no bigger than huts constructed from mud and stones.

They have come out to protest the drone strikes on this devastated region, a hotbed of militant activity located on Pakistan’s northern border with Afghanistan, which is quickly becoming ground zero in the United States’ ‘War on Terror’.

"We watch the drones all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.” -- Rasool Bacha
Since 2004, 355 drone strikes have killed 3,336 people and injured scores more, according to a conservative estimate by the U.S.–based New America Foundation.

But while the U.S. government claims to be singling out militants and “Al Qaeda affiliates” for attack by remote-controlled aircraft capable of raining missiles down from a height of 10,000 feet, residents of this mountainous province say that civilians are taking a bigger hit.

Imad Ali, who has lived in North Waziristan his whole life, lost two sons in a drone attack. He told IPS that the pilotless planes appear unable to distinguish between civil and military targets, and called the strikes “indiscriminate and unacceptable.”

Now Ali, like many others in this Agency of 30,000, is joining mass rallies spearheaded by the Pakistan Tehreek Insaf (PTI), a major opposition party under the leadership of former cricket legend Imran Khan, to call for an end to strikes on unsuspecting non-combatants.

“I lost my wife and elder daughter to drone attacks in February,” Muhammad Rafiq, a schoolteacher in South Waziristan, told IPS, adding that civilian opposition to the attacks will keep growing as long as innocent people are losing their lives.

Victim of a drone strike lies in a hospital bed in Pakistan’s North Waziristan Agency. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

“We pass sleepless nights due to the looming threat of drone strikes. The situation is especially difficult for children who fear they could be killed at any minute,” he added.

With so many people busy counting the dead, the injured often get relegated to the footnotes of this story; like Rasool Bacha, who was fast asleep in his home in Dattakhlel, a small village close to the Afghan border, when he was struck by shrapnel from a drone attack this past January.

“Later in the morning I discovered that the strike had also killed four of my neighbours,” Bacha told IPS in the hospital where he is currently undergoing physiotherapy after surgery.

“All the victims were poor farmers,” he added, “and had no relation to the militants. It is simply not true that the drones kill only militants – when they rain down they destroy everything that comes in their way.”

Every day, eight to 12 unmanned aircrafts hover in the sky, he said. “We watch them all day long in fear, even though we know that most attacks happen after sunset.”

Enter the politicians

While residents are mainly concerned with the immediate threat to their daily lives, political parties have seized on widespread discontent to advance their position that the attacks constitute an assault on national sovereignty.

Following the latest series of strikes – that killed the deputy chief of the outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Waliur Rehman, on May 29 in North Waziristan – Pakistan’s newly elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif labeled the attack “a violation of international law” and urged the United States to “respect the sovereignty of other countries.”

On Jun. 4, the PTI – which formed a coalition in Pakistan’s northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province after winning a landslide victory in the May 11 general elections here – submitted a resolution to the KP assembly condemning, and calling for an immediate cessation of, the attacks.

Echoing Sharif’s words on sovereignty, PTI Spokesperson Shaukat Ali Yousafzai was quick to point out that his party was the first to take up the issue as far back as May 21, 2011 following a strike that halted a NATO convoy heading for Afghanistan through the KP.

He told IPS his party also held a rally in Waziristan, whose population has borne the lion’s share of the attacks.

As elections draw nearer, other parties keen to “exploit anti-American sentiments and muster electoral support” are also stepping up opposition to the U.S. strikes and a planned operation to cleanse border areas of militants, according to Muhammad Azeem, former mayor of Mardan, one of 25 districts that comprise the troubled KP province.

He told IPS that the political grouping Muttahida Majlis e-Amal (MMA), which gathered various religious parties under one banner to win a sweeping victory in the 2003 elections, governed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southeastern Balochistan province until it fell out of favour with the Taliban in 2008.

Now, parties like the Jamaat Islam (JI) and Jamiat Ulemai Islam (JUI) have taken up the cudgels on behalf of civilians living in terror of drone strikes, and have promised to guard tribal populations from a military offensive by the government.

But as political analyst Javid Hussain pointed out, this military operation against which parties are now crying foul has been ongoing in all seven agencies of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2005, leaving 300,000 of the region’s 5.8 million people homeless.

“None of the political leaders bothered about it until now,” he told IPS, adding that politicians are only interested in the issue of drones insofar as they pay dividends in the election.

Earlier this month, the Peshawar High Court declared drone strikes illegal and asked the government to move a resolution against the use of drones in the United Nations, Muhammad Arif, political science lecturer at the Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, told IPS.

The court made its announcement in response to a legal petition filed last year by the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, an Islamabad-based legal charity, on behalf of the families of up to 50 people killed when missiles stuck a tribal gathering, or jirga, in March 2011.

“The National Assembly has passed several resolutions terming these aerial attacks unlawful, and demanding that they be stopped, but they continue unabated,” Wali Khan said.

On May 23, the tribal population was further disappointed when U.S. President Barack Obama made it categorically clear that drones will continue to target “Al Qaeda and its affiliates” because they killed U.S. citizens.

Some voters waited in line for up to eight hours to cast their ballots on May 11. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim, Irfan Ahmed, and Ashfaq Yusufzai
LAHORE, May 13 2013 (IPS)

Flanked by loyalists, friends, journalists and excited family members, former Pakistani premier Mian Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N), seemed relaxed on the night of the May 11 general elections.

With a remote control in his hand, he sat back on a soft leather sofa in the heavily guarded executive room of the party’s headquarters in Model Town, Lahore, and scanned TV channels to find the most current results.

Outside, hundreds of raucous PML-N supporters, crowded around giant screens erected for the public, cheered loudly every time a favourable result was announced.

The party and its loyalists had good reason to celebrate. Before the night was over, it was clear that the PML-N had won an overwhelming number of votes in Punjab, the country’s most populous province, which accounts for 148 out of 272 National Assembly seats.

By Monday morning, though several provinces’ votes had yet to be counted, congratulations for the prime minister-in-waiting had already come in from neighbouring India, and from Pakistan’s closest western ally, the United States.

Watershed moment

This past weekend’s elections marked a watershed moment in Pakistan’s history. Accustomed to long periods of military rule, generally imposed via coup d’état, the country has not experienced a proper democratic transition since 1962.

This year, fears were running high that the Taliban would follow through on its May 1 warning that it would bomb all the polling stations to prove its disdain for the “system of infidels, which is called democracy.”

The lead-up to Election Day was marred by violence, with 121 people lying dead by the time campaigning closed 48 hours ahead of voting.

In Karachi, tensions between rival groups like the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), led by former cricket legend Imran Khan, hung thick in the air, with analysts predicting bloody skirmishes at polling stations.

The caretaker government, meanwhile, dispatched over 70,000 troops onto the streets to ensure that peace and order prevailed.

The day began with a bomb blast in eastern Karachi’s Landhi area, killing 11 and injuring over 40. Despite this initial tragedy, it quickly became clear that the mood among the people was not one of violence and terror, but of enthusiasm and camaraderie.

Defying all threats by the Taliban and intimidation by armed political activists, voters came out in droves, determined to cast their ballots.

The Election Commission of Pakistan reported a voter turnout of 62 to 70 percent, the highest ever in this country of over 170 million.

Heartening sights such as a man being carried into a polling booth on a stretcher caused people to “burst out in applause,” tweeted Kamal Siddiqi, editor of the English daily ‘Express Tribune’.

Indeed, many of those out on the streets said they were casting the vote for the very first time. “I had never bothered before; but this time I am completely mobilised,” a woman in her early fifties, waiting patiently in a long queue in a school-turned-polling station in the affluent Clifton area, told IPS.

Not far away, in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority, 48-year old homemaker Tarrannum Lakda was frustrated by the eight-hour wait to cast her vote but she refused to call it a day – she wanted her voice to be counted in this historic election, she told IPS.

Still, the voting process was not without its flaws.

As Lakda stood in the sun, the presiding election officer ventured out to inform the waiting citizens that the ballot papers, boxes, voter lists and stamps had still not arrived.

Similar hold-ups were experienced across the city. Analysts and election observers have blamed the MQM for engineering delays in a bid to deter the PTI’s urban youth base, many of them first-time voters, drawn to Khan’s condemnation of drone strikes in the country’s tribal belt and his vow to end corruption.

Various sources told IPS that pre-poll rigging had begun the night before.

“My mother is a government teacher in a school in Bufferzone (an MQM stronghold) who was appointed to report for election duty,” a youth living in the area told IPS under condition of anonymity. “But on Election Day she was informed not to report for duty as she would be replaced by someone else.”

Other anomalies included MQM members entering the Nazimabad area and confiscating students’ identity cards, or “forcing residents to vote for them”, a local student who did not want to be named told IPS.

Five religious parties – the Jamaat-i-Islami, Sunni Tehrik, Jamiat Ulema-i-Pakistan, the Sunni Ittehad Council and the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (Haqiqi) – pulled out of the race on Saturday, alluding to “irregularities and poll rigging” in Karachi. For its part, the MQM also “boycotted” the polls in a few constituencies, citing the very same reasons.

Across Pakistan, election violence claimed a total of 38 lives, with over 150 injured.

Taliban stronghold takes a turn

While rival parties battled it out in the southern Sindh province, and Sharif and his supporters basked in their glory in the eastern Punjab province, it was the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province that really expressed a desire for change.

Devastated by the ongoing militancy and fed up with living under the Taliban’s boot, KP residents turned out in droves, buoyed by the presence of scores of PTI workers on the streets, monitoring the poll stations, encouraging voters to come out of their homes, and generally livening up a process that had promised to be, at best, dull and at worst deadly.

Unlike in previous election years, plenty of women were seen at polling stations in cities like Mardan and Peshawar.

By the end of the day the PTI had bagged 32 out of a total of 124 seats, becoming the largest political party in the province. Many senior politicians like ANP Chief Asfandyar Wali Khan, former KP Chief Minister Ameer Khan Hoti and former Federal Minister Ameer Madam lost to new candidates fielded by the PTI.

Though the party suffered huge defeats in Pakistan’s three other provinces and at the federal level, PTI activists flooded the streets and held processions in KP’s capital Peshawar to celebrate their victory in the north.

The climate was much less joyful in the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where most people failed to cast votes for the region’s 12 National Assembly seats.

The PTI is now poised to form a provincial government in the violence-wracked northwest with the Jamaat-i-Islam, though Khan has announced his intention to go into opposition at a national level.

According to Al Jazeera English, Khan said Sunday that the mark of a strong democracy is a “strong opposition”, which has been missing in Pakistan for ten years.

Looking ahead

Analysts say Pakistan must now look beyond the elections, and its prime minister-in-waiting must set his eyes on the many challenges that lie ahead, such as tackling terrorism and solving the energy crisis that has crippled the country: according to some estimates, Pakistan faces a shortfall of more than 7,000 megwatts, or 40 percent of total electricity demand.

Salman Abid, a political analyst based in Lahore, told IPS that relations with the United States and Afghanistan in the context of NATO’s withdrawal in 2014, peace talks with the Taliban, relations with India, increasing foreign investment and solving unemployment will be the new government’s priorities.

“The victory in elections may be a milestone,” he said, but the party has a long way to go before reaching its desired destination.

Tanvir Shahzad, a Lahore-based journalist, stressed that the PML-N must not fail to deliver its promises on incorporating youth into the country’s development, reducing poverty and ending load shedding.

*Irfan Ahmed contributed to this report from Lahore, Zofeen Ebrahim from Karachi and Ashfaq Yusufzai from Peshawar.

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Mar 23 2013 (IPS)

Fifty-six-year-old Perween Rehman had dedicated her life to humanitarian work. As head of the Orangi Pilot Project’s Research and Training Institute (OPP-RTI), she spent years working in one of the largest informal settlements in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi, helping to overhaul a primitive sanitation system that was expected to serve Orangi’s 1.5 million inhabitants.

Though many have lauded her efforts in overseeing a successful community-driven sanitation programme, which is being replicated in parts of South Africa, Central Asia, Nepal and Sri Lanka, others felt her work was more deserving of punishment than praise: on Mar. 13, she was gunned down in a killing that, to date, no armed group has claimed responsibility for.

As Karachi’s 18 million residents struggle to survive a wave of violence, extremism and targeted killings, a new and terrifying pattern is emerging — those engaged in humanitarian work are now considered fair game.

Few believe the authorities’ claim that the chief suspect involved in Rehman’s murder  was killed in a police “encounter”.

Those close to her suspect she was killed by one of Karachi’s many powerful land-grabbing groups who have a vested interest in acquiring state land on which informal settlements have cropped up.

Prior to her death, Rehman had received death threats for her attempts to document the land mafia’s practice of illegally annexing land, in collusion with political parties, then selling it to Karachi’s millions of  people in need of housing, thus creating a dependent and destitute voter constituency.

Calling Rehman a “true heroine”, Hoodbhoy added, “In a country awash in weapons, and with a state machinery that is precariously weak, a grab for resources (land) will surely result in such atrocities occurring again and again.” Indeed, almost 60 percent of Karachi is comprised of informal settlements that lack basic services.

Senior journalist Najma Sadeque believes Rehman “stepped on the toes of powerful criminal elements”.

“Where big money is at stake, such as real estate, there is danger. I was surprised that she spoke openly about the problem — perhaps she never saw herself as a threat,” Sadeque told IPS. “There are too many groups involved, internal and external, confusing the situation.”

In December, militants shot dead five female workers vaccinating children against polio, forcing the government to suspend the vaccination drive here.

Police say 2012 was the worst year as far as the body count is concerned, with over 2,000 people dead in targeted killings and bombings in Karachi.

But the violence is not just restricted to this city — across Pakistan, aid workers are attacked, polio teams hunted down and teachers killed.

Earlier this year, gunmen killed seven teachers and health workers, six of them women, in the Swabi district of Pakistan’s north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“On one side are crazed religious fundamentalists with guns, driven into a state of madness by mullahs using mosque loudspeakers and televisions. They kill women administering the polio vaccine and shoot schoolgirls for wanting to study,” Hoodbhoy told IPS. “On the other hand, there is the…equally diabolical murder of (humanitarian workers) like Perween Rahman.”

With Pakistan ranked among the top five most dangerous countries in the world for aid workers, according to a 2012 report by the group Humanitarian Outcomes, many see the space for good Samaritan shrinking rapidly in Pakistan.

Attacks on aid workers worldwide climbed to 150 in 2012, up from 129 in 2010; 308 aid workers were killed. A vast majority of the attacks — over 72 percent — took place in just five countries: Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Pakistan.

“It is sad that people who can make a difference and who can help bring about change in Pakistan, are being removed,” said Nuzhat Lotia, a Pakistani development expert.

Using the hastag #ParweenRehman, various prominent personalities in Pakistan expressed similar sentiments. Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan Director of Human Right Watch, tweeted: “Slowly but surely, everyone and everything good in our country is being targeted and killed.”

“A selfish thought tonight,” tweeted Cyril Almeida, a correspondent for the daily Dawn newspaper. “I am sick at the thought of the growing number of (people) in my phone book who have been cut down. Too much death.”

Former cricket star and Pakistani politician Imran Khan tweeted that he was “Saddened to see what we are turning into”.

The situation for foreign aid workers is no better. In its December 2012 issue, The Economist wrote, “The climate for humanitarian workers has not been improved by the authorities. They have harassed aid professionals, restricting their movements and limiting visas, fearing that spies lurk among them”.

Last year, the Red Cross suspended much of its work in Pakistan after a British doctor was kidnapped and beheaded in the western city of Quetta.

Lotia is sceptical about whether things will ever improve. “The youth are losing important role models and violence is seen as the norm as that is what they are exposed to and hear about day in and day out,” she lamented.

Although the Pakistan People’s Party-led government completed its five-year term this month and will officially pass off power to an interim government until the general elections scheduled for May 11, Sadeque believes “the trend will continue” because all political parties have self-serving interests.

While despair seems to have snuck into the thoughts of even the most resilient and optimistic members of Pakistan’s civil society, Hoodbhoy urged those committed to creating a better society not to “run away”.

“We owe it to our future generations to keep telling the truth, to keep suggesting solutions, and to keep fighting,” he said.

(END)