30/09/2013
Fernando de Haro is the author of Cristianos y Leones and journalist.
For a moment, silence was shattered. The attack on a church in Peshawar, which left nearly 100 dead on 22 September, has set the situation of the Christian community in Pakistan momentarily at the centre of international news. For decades, the Christians of that great giant, the second country with the largest Muslim majority, have suffered a persecution often ignored in the West. It has been the worst attack on the baptised but the story had already begun long ago.
Nawaz Sharrif, who has returned to power with the Muslim League after the May elections, has been unable to reduce religious and sectarian terrorism. The summer has been particularly bloody and it doesn't seem that the announcement of a dialogue with the Taliban is yielding any good results. Sharrif is leading a country with 180 million inhabitants, geostrategically crucial as it stands as the door to the Middle East and the rest of Asia. In conflict with India since its inception, Peshawar has suffered for decades a policy supporting Islamist madrassas, controlled in the shadows by the military and destabilised by the Taliban.
All these contradictions added together have particularly hit the Christian minority, one per cent of the population. The army has encouraged political Islamisation from the 70s, to reinforce the nationalist sentiment. The blasphemy law, enacted by General Zia-Ul-Haq in 1986 has been one of the tools of this policy and has become a nightmare for Christians. None of the democratic governments has abolished it.
The blasphemy law is an instrument to curtail freedom because, in reality, basic legal safeguards are only very rarely applied. Between 1986 and 2010 more than 900 people have been accused under this law, most without a shred of evidence. It is no wonder that some of those arrested or charged have been killed in the streets, in prisons or in the courts by the exalted mobs, before any judgement has been given. The judges do not offer many guarantees either. Opposition to the blasphemy law caused the assassination in 2011 of the Punjab governor, Salman Taseer and of the Christian Minister for Religious Minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti. A peasant, Asia Bibi, has been held in prison since 2009 for the offence of not recanting her baptism.
It seems that after the tension brought by how bin Laden died, the Secretary of State of the United States wants to mend relations with Pakistan. It would be desirable that the freedom of Christians were in that agenda. The West national reconstruction strategies in the Middle East have been made without taking into account the critical role played by Christian minorities in the development of a truly pluralist democracy. For that reason, and because the international community cannot tackle the right to religious freedom as a minor right, the attack of General Zia-Ul-Haq cannot be forgotten. It is one of many.