Licence to kill

A gun is a tool for enforcing law and order for security forces. When it becomes a tool to victimize and kill people it becomes a murdering weapon. Such murderers become targets for security forces and law enforcement agencies to hound and catch. There is a manhunt for them, and for those evading the law, a list of most wanted with their photographs is published to warn the public. The pursuit for these criminals is continuous and can become global if required. However, what do you do when the man with the gun is a uniformed law officer? What do you do when the man with the gun has the power to pull the trigger on people "whom they classify as most wanted"? What do you do when the man with the gun has the power to stage-manage pursuits of criminals? What do you do if the man with the gun abuses his rank and office to force his team to pull triggers on non-criminals? What do you do when men who can hold these lawbreakers accountable are themselves masterminds of these licensed murderers?
These are the questions being raised for decades on the abuse of "police encounters" being carried out by these "brave policemen" that never reveal "who" was killed for "what crime". These are the questions that have become more disturbing after the latest killing of Naquibullah Mehsud. The details of this case are harrowing. These encounters are a norm and have rarely invited such uproar because no other encounter has been highlighted on the social media as this one. Coming at a time when police atrocities are a national debate due to the heinous crimes committed to minor girls like Zainab, this case has become legally, politically and socially central to public interest. The details of this case are horrendous. The story given by Naquib's friends reveal crimes and criminality of police. Police picking people off streets without warrants of arrest is abduction; people beaten and tortured in torture cells by police is terrorism; people forced to give a million rupees for letting go is ransom. This is state terrorism up close and front.
The tragedy is that police encounters are accepted as legal even if they are illegal. Most police officers, and even parts of disillusioned public, support extra judicial killings under the guise of police encounters. The logic behind these licensed killing sprees is that the judicial system of this country is a failure with the result that when we catch a criminal and send him for trial it is almost a certainty that he will escape. Examples of many cases like Shahrukh Jatoi, etc., are quoted to justify this argument. However, two wrongs never make a right, rather, it makes rights wrong. Just because law enforcement is faulty it does not make taking the law in your hand legal.
When you break the law for the larger good it eventually leads to larger wrongs, as facts reveal. In the last 20 years, ie, between 1997 and 2016 the number of police encounters recorded is 11,540 and number of suspects killed is 8,798. This means 577 encounters per year and 440 suspects killed yearly which according to most human right observers comprise mostly extra judicial killings. This is not just bad but traumatic. Karachi was in the grip of some of the worst violence in the country for decades and it was only when rangers were brought in that law and order improved. These facts show how taking the law into their own hand had made the city almost ungovernable.
SSP Rao Anwar represents how this political slavery has ruined police as an institution where the distinction between the crime committers and the crime stoppers has become indistinguishable. SSP Rao Anwar was an assistant Sub Inspector and his meteoric rise to the position definitely has something to do with an extraordinary skill that made him jump up the ladder of success. It is now revealed that it is his unique ability to spot "political deviants" of political influentials, follow them, harass them, brand them as terrorists and then kill them which earned him this key position.
These incognito legal murders have taken the lid off these encounters. Many CCTV camera footages show gruesome details of similar trigger-happy murders. In Sheikhupura, a man, Asif Sardar, was shot at point blank distance by the police. The footage showed a police officer in Faisalabad pumping bullets into the visibly surrendered body of a man. The police version of the incident was that the victim, Asif Sardar, had fired at a motorcycle squad of the Gulberg police when he and his 'accomplice' were asked to stop. However, the video showed him in a state of surrender at point blank distance. Such is the arrogance and utter indifference of those who have the license to shoot.
The Naquibullah case has revealed some interesting facts. Firstly, the benefits of social media. Pashtoons in Karachi have been a victim of such staged encounters but they have never become a topic of debate - primarily because Naquib had prominent Facebook presence and he was not a typical tribal Mehsud. Many encounters with youngsters with similar names but a more conservative outlook and appearance would be accepted by our public and civil society as potential terrorists and thus not probed further. Since Naquib was more of an urban guy with an extrovert personage he was easy to identify and stand for. However, many more people with his background but a dissimilar personality have been victims of these targeted encounters. All such killings should be investigated, prosecuted and punished to stop this cruel and inhuman daylight carnage by terrorists in disguise. As Percy Shelley says, "Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder".
(The writer is a columnist and can be reached at andleeb.abbas1@gmail,com. She tweets at @AndleebAbbas)