Should we fail to avenge

Should we fail to avenge
A friend remembers Assad Hameed, a journalist recently murdered in Rawalpindi
By Ahmer Kureishi
Assad Hameed -- Raja Assad for his many friends and me -- was not my brother. He was everyone's brother. Is it possible that some of his brothers in law-enforcement agencies are dwelling on his murder even as I write this?
He was killed at his doorstep as he returned from work on the evening of March 26, 2009. What was he thinking when it caught up with him? Did he think of his mother and two-year-old daughter he was so attached to? What did he feel when he realised he will never see his child again, that she will grow up in a chaotic, lawless world without him? Did he agonise over the sheer impossibility of it? She was feet away from him, right behind that door, in the arms of her mother, who was probably aware of the stopping car expecting anything. They were so close, yet he would never expose his fears to them. Did he at all see it coming? Is it possible he saw it coming for days, maybe weeks, months, or years?
Assad brought to journalism a law degree. He was a colleague at Online, the news service, for a brief period after which he moved on to cover the crime beat for the start-up Sun newspaper. But the friendship we found in those fleeting days lasted till his death.
Assad -- a journalist to the core and one of the more prominent journalists of the city -- was killed in cold blood and nothing seems to be coming of it. Call it hasty, false allegation and I will agree with you, prove me wrong and I will be thankful. But honestly, I do not see anything coming of this assassination. Have we not seen investigation into the murder of so many journalists get nowhere?
Where, for instance, has the investigation into the killing (March 22, 2008) of Tariq Malik Javed gone? What has become of the murder (February 18, 2008) of Musa Khankhel? Where has the probe into the murder (October 31, 2006) of Malik Muhammad Ismail gone?
The circumstances of these murders vary. Assad was gunned down at his doorstep; Javed was apparently killed by robbers; Khankhel was picked up from the middle of a crowd while reporting live at the peace rally of Sufi Muhammad and his bullet-riddled body was found by the wayside hours later; Malik Ismail was bludgeoned to death with a blunt weapon, his hands tied, according to the autopsy report.
On the face of it, all these murders are unrelated, and yet, there is one thing common -- all these murders seem to be going unpunished. Nor are these the only journalists to have been killed in recent times. In 2008 alone, nine journalists had been killed, four were kidnapped and two went missing, according to a recent HRCP report.
The Committee to Protect Journalists stated on March 23, 2009 that the already murderous conditions for the press in Pakistan deteriorated further in the past year, as it released its newly updated Impunity Index -- a list of countries where journalists are killed regularly while the governments fail to solve the issue. Nor are journalists the only people whose murders are going unpunished. Politicians, lawyers, social workers, doctors, diplomats, citizens, soldiers, policemen… the list is endless. The only pattern discernable is that in our country, people are being killed with impunity.
It is possible that I am oversimplifying, but I think this 'culture of murder' is a product of the mentality that the use of force can solve problems. At the root of all murder -- be it 'wholesale murder' by organised mobs, target killing by 'unknown assailants,' deliberate murder over a land dispute or impetuous killing over a verbal altercation -- is this murderous mentality that could not but flourish in a society bereft of rule of law and only in such a society.
We have made some progress towards rule of law in recent times. But have we moved back far enough from the brink to make it to safety? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, let the powerful among us remember that in a lawless society, no privilege is guaranteed. A society conditioned to condone any murder will condone any murder, there will be no exceptions. Nothing. Nothing will protect any of us unless the law protects all of us.
Should we fail to avenge
your fall
We fall, sure as death, one
and all
Sure as you have fallen,
we fall