Signs of justice?

More than a year ago, four young men – Naqeebullah Mehsud, Sabir, Nazir Jan and Ishaq – were gunned down by the police in Karachi on the pretext of being members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The staged encounter was led by then SSP Rao Anwar, a notorious cop who was implicated in the extrajudicial killings of more than 500 people. Hope that Anwar would be held accountable for his crimes had begun to recede as he first evaded capture and then seemed to be getting preferential treatment. It seemed that those who had protected him in the past had swung into action once again. Now, though, with his indictment by an anti-terrorism court in Karachi there is the possibility that he may finally have to answer for his actions. Rao is still pleading innocence even though investigations have held him responsible for the killings of Naqeebullah and the others, and he has not been able to produce a single piece of evidence that any of those killed had militant affiliations. The only way for justice to be done is through a fair and open trial. It is an open secret that Rao Anwar has had the backing of many influential figures within the state for years and it is not known if he still enjoys that support.

Moreover, as important as it is to hold accountable those who were responsible for the ‘encounter’ last January, there needs to be a genuine accounting of how law enforcement has essentially taken the law into its own hands on far too many occasions. It was hoped that the emergence of peaceful civil rights movements in the country in the wake of Naqeebullah’s killing would lead to some soul-searching about how the state treats people from the former Fata and other areas as guilty until proven innocent.

That has not happened. Since the Naqeebullah encounter, we saw four more innocent people, including a teenage girl, killed by officials of the Counter Terrorism Department in Sahiwal. Once again the terrorism rationale was trotted out. Extrajudicial killings have become the tool of choice of a system where police investigations are shoddy, prosecutors cannot be relied upon to build strong cases and witnesses are too afraid to speak in court. The answer to this is not for the police to go rogue but for the government to remedy the flaws in our system. Rao Anwar may have been the best known of the ‘encounter’ specialists but he was only the product of a system that is rotten to its core.