Some of the mystery surrounding the Lal Masjid tragedy is about to be unravelled. On Thursday, the Supreme Court ordered that the report of the one-man commission it had constituted last December to investigate the army operation - in which a large but unspecified number of people, including children, were killed - be made public.
As per the terms of reference of the commission, comprising a senior judge of the Federal Shariat Court, Justice Shehzado Shaikh, it was to ascertain whether the government had paid compensation to the heirs of those killed in the operation; whether the dead had been identified and their bodies handed to their next of kin; whether any action had been taken against those responsible for the tragedy; and whether those responsible could be identified on the basis of evidence. Satisfactory answers to all these questions are important so the affected families have a proper closure.
It is equally important to establish why matters came to such a pass. The fact of the matter is that the blame for the July 2007 Lal Masjid carnage is shared both by its clerics and the establishment which patronised the place and its proprietors as valuable 'assets', liberally doling them out state lands and other favours. Slowly but surely, those running the mosque and its attached seminary, Jamia Hafsa, felt emboldened enough to establish their own state within the state. They forcibly occupied a public library building, following up with a drive against all "immoral activities" in the capital. As part of that 'morality drive' armed vigilantes, including baton-wielding burqa-clad females, abducted Chinese nationals working in health clinics, even policemen trying to protect the victims, creating general harassment in the heart of the nation's capital. Then an announcement was made for the setting up of a parallel justice system to punish alleged offenders. This went on while the state kept looking the other way. The situation came to a head when the chief cleric, Mohammad Abdul Aziz, issued a fatwa declaring that soldiers killed fighting the Taliban could not be called shaheed, and did not deserve Islamic funeral. Still, the government waited until armed men openly started challenging the writ of the state from the mosque premises, leading to the tragic end. Clearly, things would be different, had the Lal Masjid clerics restricted themselves to religious activities.
Sadly, hardly any lesson seems to have been learnt from the bloody disaster. The students/activists of Jamia Hafsa - up and running, again, at a different location - continue to demonstrate their old preference for aggressive behaviour. The other day, they came out to vent their anger against General Musharraf who ordered the Lal Masjid operation. It would have been understandable had they torn up his campaign posters, but the manner in which burqa-clad women from the seminary, chaperoned by gun-toting men, used daggers to do the job came as a rude reminder of the violent intimidation tactics Jamia Hafsa's 'morality brigades' had taken to employ to get their way. Unless such elements' proclivity for violence and control is checked effectively another Lal Masjid would be waiting to happen.