DECLARATION BY THE TEHRIK-I TALIBAN-I PAKISTAN ON ATROCITIES IN ISLAMABAD (Translated into English by Burzine Waghmar)

By: Burzine Waghmar 

Muhammad Khurasani

Spokesperson of the Tehrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan [TTP]

In the Name of Allah, the Most Compassionate and Merciful!

DECLARATION BY THE TEHRIK-I TALIBAN-I PAKISTAN ON ATROCITIES IN ISLAMABAD

27 November 2024/24 Jumada-al Awwal 1446 Hijri

 During the past three days, the ‘Royal Indian Army’¹ security establishment lording over Pakistan furnished proof of its ‘pharaonic’² tyranny by indiscriminately firing on demonstrators assembled at a peaceful Pakistan Tehrik-i Insaf (PTI) rally last night in Islamabad. A marketplace of oppression and persecution was made manifest, and per informed sources, scores have been slain and hundreds injured.

It is a given that communities [endure] problems and difficulties at the hands of cruel and coercive law enforcers in their daily lives. But resourceful people do expeditiously adopt effective measures to extricate themselves from hardships. One must regretfully declare [otherwise] about our naive citizenry, whether Sindhi, Panjabi, Baloch, or Pashtun,³ [who may be] gathering up 10,000 corpses felled in the environs of Lahore’s Mall Road, or female children being blitzed by phosphorus bombs at [Islamabad’s] Red Mosque. And there are no words to describe the attitude of Pakistani generals towards the Pashtuns and Balochs.⁴

Just how long will the peoples of Pakistan continue picking up blood-drenched bodies strewn across every square and crossroad? Those who raise cries of liberation ought to contemplate if mere demagoguery in the face of [uniformed], armed rogues will incite a revolution? 

These roguish generals are long habituated to sucking the blood of the nation. If bloodletting is to their taste, then there is a path [available], one adopted by the Tehrik-i Taliban-i Pakistan.

We not only extend our empathy to the Pakistani nation at this time but also invite them to [realising] that no panacea can be sought by peaceful efforts. It is only in taking up arms against the security establishment and expelling them from the country that we will defend our lives, property, self-esteem, and honour. 

Complain not to your Lord but struggle harder!

 No cage was ever shattered by wailing!

COMMENTARY

1. ‘Royal Indian Army’ is a constant jibe levelled by the TTP towards the Pakistan armed forces in its declaratives issued on the social media and instant messaging service, Telegram. It is to drive home the fact that the military is merely a hangover of golf-playing, whisky-swilling, pseudo-anglicised generals who have replaced the British as new colonialists. The implication is that Pakistan neither truly achieved independence in 1947 nor is it an Islamic polity it purports to be. To be truly Islamic demands a hearts-and-mind revolution which would only come about through a grassroots movement preferably led by the TTP in collaboration with the PTI. Imran Khan’s apologetics, when in office, about obscurantist, misogynistic Muslim outfits explains why the PTI, unlike other political parties, is not vilified by the TTP.

2. ‘Pharaonic’ tyranny is a long-standing refrain in the lexicon of Islamists, whose antecedents are Qur’anic for the Egyptian pharaoh, in the Islamic tradition, was an oppressive tyrant with pretensions of divinity. An occidental audience was first exposed to this when Egyptian President, Anwar Sadat, was assassinated by Lt. Khaled al-Islambouli at a military parade in October 1981. No sooner he did so than he defiantly exclaimed, ‘I have killed Pharaoh and I do not fear death.’ Sadat, for him and other radicals, then and now, did the unforgivable by visiting Jerusalem in 1977 and signing a peace treaty with Israel two years later. 

3. The TTP refers to Pashto-speaking inhabitants domiciled in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, NWFP (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa since 2010) as Pashtuns. The (default) ethnonym Pashtun is synonymous with Pakhtun. Both denote the same despite a dialectal difference: speakers of northern (‘hard’) Pashto in the Kabul, Jalalabad, Peshawar regions pronounce it as velar fricative, /kh/, whereas for southern (‘soft’) speakers, around Quetta and Kandahar, it is a sibilant, /sh/, thus Pashtuns.

4. The TTP’s public sympathy for Baloch dissidents is predictable given that the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has now taken recourse to suicide bombing, something hitherto unknown in Pakistan’s largest, least populated, and most impoverished province. Questions of Balochistan’s accession go back, like Kashmir, to 1948. Summing up seven decades of partition, Max Rodenbeck, ‘Hissing Cousins: Special Report on India and Pakistan’, The Economist, 22-28 July 2017, noted:  

Whereas India’s men in uniform face intense scrutiny in Kashmir, Pakistan enjoys a far freer hand. In trying to stamp out terrorism along its north-west frontier, its army has demolished whole villages. Balochistan, a province of rugged deserts that takes up 43% of Pakistan’s area, has been in sporadic revolt since independence; one local NGO estimates the number of suspected separatists kidnapped by security forces there from the high hundreds up to 18,000. In 2016 alone, 728 people across Pakistan suffered “enforced disappearance”, as counted by the commission of inquiry that investigates them. Some reappear alive and well, others as roadside corpses. The state flatly denies any unpleasantness.

Disclaimer: This paper is the author's individual scholastic contribution and does not necessarily reflect the organization's viewpoint. 

Burzine Waghmar is a Senior Fellow at Usanas Foundation