Source/Credit: Yahoo News | AFP
By AFP | April 14, 2011
SLAMABAD (AFP) – Religious minorities in Pakistan are increasingly under attack but political parties are unwilling to protect them, the country's leading human rights watchdog said Thursday.
"2010 has been a very bad year for minorities," said I.A. Rehman, secretary general for the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), unveiling its annual report at a news conference in Islamabad.
HRCP condemned a wave of unprecedented attacks on minorities, including members of the Ahmadi community, whom Muslims consider heretics and whom the Pakistani government has officially declared non-Muslim.
The commission said 418 people were killed last year in violence between rival Muslim communities, including 211 in suicide attacks.
Among those were 99 Ahmadis -- more than the total number of the minority group killed in the previous 14 years, it said.
"We had unprecedented killings of Ahmadis in 2010 and the government hasn't got the guts to console and sympathise with them," said Rehman.
The organisation also drew attention to discrimination suffered by the Christian minority -- which it said represented less than two percent of the roughly 170 million population -- notably through bias in the blasphemy laws.
"People have been killed for demanding changes in the procedures of the blasphemy law," said Rehman.
Liberal politician Salman Taseer and minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti, himself a Christian, were killed in the capital this year in connection with their criticism of the laws, which make blasphemy punishable by death.
"There is very little improvement in the condition of human rights prevailing in Pakistan," said HRCP president Mehdi Hasan.
The commission expressed concern about a growing number of targeted killings, more than 12,500 in 2010, and kidnappings, nearly 17,000, particularly in southwestern province Baluchistan, where government forces and rebels fighting for autonomy have been accused of abuses.
It underscored the troubling role played by powerful government security agencies, with Hasan saying: "Most of the violations of the human rights are from the government functionaries or the government agencies."
The HRCP condemned indifference on the part of the main political parties, including those in power, with regard to human rights violations.
"It is the duty of the government to protect," said Hasan.
"The problem is that our mainstream political parties do not have these things on their priority list or their political agenda."
Read original post here: Pakistan minorities 'under attack'
Analysts and officials said Punjab’s extreme poverty, as well as lack of education, makes people in the region more vulnerable to the lure of militancy. The militants in Punjab had a good infrastructure on the ground, with many organizations involved in various feuds, including sectarian violence. These militants are overwhelmingly members of banned organizations and all extremist organizations in Punjab are against religious minorities. In addition to media onslaught devoid of any ‘code of conduct’, the scope of violent behavior has widened manifold with drastically serious repercussions. Ironically, it is a common practice of the popular Urdu right wing media and it’s televangelist anchors and analysts to agitate against minorities.
ReplyDelete