Massacre ‘Pakistan’s September 11’
ACOMMANDO led me through the Pakistan school auditorium last Saturday where terrorists had interrupted students’ lessons with an indiscriminate barrage of bullets four days earlier. The floor had been scrubbed clean of students’ blood, but craters still marked the walls like augmented bee holes in a plank.
The officer, still visibly shaken, stared sombrely at the spots where he had seen the splattered brains of children during the military’s counter attack. Seven Taliban gunmen slaughtered 148 people— 132 of them children— before they were stopped.
Across the sprawling 8.5 hectare campus, the victims’ youthful faces smiled from photos placed on memorial wreaths. Amid the tributes to the children were handwritten messages promising retribution against Tehrik-e-Taliban, the group behind the massacre: ‘‘We will hang them,’’ ‘‘We will crush TTP,’’ ‘‘We will never forget you and make them pay’’.
Two days after the school attack, Pakistan ended its six-year unofficial ban on the death penalty in terror cases. Six terrorists convicted on previous terrorism charges have been hanged, and it appears the government is planning to execute hundreds more. Pakistanis, enraged by the child massacre, have widely supported the hangings, but the international community has been critical of the sudden move. Amnesty International called Pakistan’s lifting of the deathpenalty moratorium a ‘‘knee-jerk reaction that does not get at the heart of the problem.’’ Human Rights Watch said, ‘‘Pakistan’s government has chosen to indulge in vengeful blood-lust.’’
Pakistan has been victimised by the pain and horror of terrorism innumerable times. Churches, mosques, markets, airports— nothing has been spared. This time, the terrorists hit hard where it hurts most: our children. Militancy in Pakistan has reached its climax. The normal rules of the world do not apply.
Since the moratorium was put in place, terrorist attacks on civilians in Pakistan have increased. In 2012, a Taliban gunman shot activist Malala Yousafzai, then 15, on her way home from school. In September 2013, a twin suicide bomb attack on a church in Peshawar killed 127 Christians. The Pakistan government has attempted dialogues with the opposition to no avail. These are militants who play soccer with the heads of decapitated men. They storm schools and kill children point blank. The Taliban’s mindset is that of brutality.
The officer who walked me through the Army Public School in Peshawar said he has not been able to sleep since the siege. The images of children’s dismembered bodies haunt him.
As we stood in the auditorium, he slid a mobile phone out of his pocket. He scrolled through graphic photos, showing me the images he captured of the attack’s aftermath: Children were shot straight through their eyes. Shrapnel was buried in their flesh. Excessive blood blurred any distinction of one body from another.
Similar images shared on social media have fuelled outbursts of rage across Pakistan, unifying much of the country behind calls for public executions of terrorists.
A mother of three told me that knowing terrorists were being hanged helped her sleep at night. The retribution brings her solace.
We are at war with the Taliban, whose agenda is to destabilise Pakistan and create its own state that eschews international rules of logic and humanity. This school massacre is our September 11. This time, Pakistanis have come out galvanised to say we will ‘‘never forget.’’ Force has to be used and the government has now accelerated its attacks on militants.
Certainly, the executions will come with their own backlash. In 2013, the Taliban said it would consider government executions of its men on death row an act of war. There are fears that the Taliban could stage prison breaks and other attacks in retribution. But the government has taken steps to upgrade jail security substantially.
Calling off announced executions now would send the wrong message about Pakistan’s strength and resolve against its enemy. The government also must heed concerns that Pakistan’s flawed legal system will lead to the execution of innocents. Capital punishment should not be used indiscriminately, but rather only in cases against known terrorists.
For the first time, Taliban apologists have been marginalised. Opposition groups previously viewed as a softer arm of the Taliban have now united with the government, supporting the use of full force against these most brutal militants.
Pakistan is making no distinction between the good and bad Taliban. Hundreds of civilians have protested outside the Red Mosque in Islamabad, where the chief cleric, Abdul Aziz, has refused to condemn the massacre.
While the Pakistan government has responded swiftly with executions, it must also adopt a long-term approach that quashes the extremist ideology.
Many madrassas in Pakistan preach extreme forms of religion, inciting children with antiWestern propaganda. It will take decades to educate generations of brainwashed children.
Religious textbooks in schools and madrassas must be monitored for hate speech and extreme views. Tolerance of minority groups such as Christians and Ahmadis in the country will have to be inculcated from an early age.
But in the short-term, executions are being fast-tracked to combat the greatest terrorist threat that Pakistan has ever encountered. Brutal acts of warfare cannot be combated with diplomacy.
We must act now.
THE Government says it is putting poverty on the agenda. That’s good, but the big question is: can it make a real difference without significantly raising incomes?
According to its announcements, its actions will be limited tightly to the harshest poverty, cover only housing, transport, childcare costs and loan-shark debt, and rather than provide new resources, will largely rearrange current spending.
This combination of poverty traps and small steps forward will fall well short of addressing much wider problems of poverty and high income inequality.
People may not realise that benefits are now among the lowest in the OECD relative to average wages. They could be raised by a quarter and still be no higher relative to wages than they were straight after being slashed in the 1991 Budget.
This matters for wage and salary earners as well as beneficiaries because it is about wage as well as benefit levels and is not only about people in poverty.
Recent OECD research which found that higher inequality reduces economic growth said that poverty is only the extreme end of a problem that reaches much further up the income scale. It affirmed that higher welfare benefits and more progressive taxation were a part of the solution.
Restoring the value of Working for Families would be a start. Its real value has been falling since 2010 according to Treasury figures, accelerated by 2011 Budget changes.
But it also said better ‘‘predistribution’’ is needed to reduce inequality. For most families that means raising wages. According to the Ministry of Social Development’s Household Incomes Report, half of the children in hardship are in working families. For two-parent families, wage rates and hours worked are the most important factors affecting their incomes.
Raising wages requires employment law changes to strengthen collective bargaining, raising the minimum wage, more money for education and training, stronger controls on immigration, and rules to ensure vocational training is rewarded by higher wages. But the fact remains that being born into a family reliant on a benefit is close to a guarantee of poverty.
Benefit levels matter for wage and salary earners too. When a crisis strikes, such as redundancy, ill-health or relationship breakup, ‘‘replacement income’’ from benefits is crucial for many people – especially with New Zealand’s high job turnover. If replacement income is low, people may be forced to accept lower wages or a job that doesn’t match their skills and experience.
Desperate job-hunters lower pay rates, affecting the incomes of many others.
From an economic viewpoint, if some job turnover is necessary to upgrade low productivity firms, their employees should not shoulder the cost. Society benefits from higher productivity and so has a responsibility to help workers through these times without significant financial penalty.
For injury, ACC’s replacement income rate is 80 per cent of our usual incomes. Why should it be so much lower if we lose our jobs?
The Government says increasing benefits might reduce the incentive to work. But there is an incentive to work if benefits are only moderately less than what people earn in their jobs (as for ACC). Benefits don’t have to be at poverty level.
In fact the gap between benefits and wages, greatly widened in 1991, has been growing steadily ever since, according to the Household Incomes Report. Benefits have been adjusted only by inflation while wages, though rising more slowly than the economy could afford, still rose faster than inflation.
Whereas in 1990 the Domestic Purposes Benefit for a parent with two children was 76 per cent of the net average ordinary time weekly wage, the 1991 Budget slashed it to 66 per cent and by 2014 it was 53 per cent. The single unemployment benefit fell from 38 per cent of the average wage to 31 per cent after the benefit cuts and 24 per cent in 2014.
Even lifting the equivalent of the Domestic Purposes Benefit by a quarter would provide a replacement income rate no higher than after the 1991 cuts. Lifting it 45 per cent would take it to 1990 levels. For the unemployment benefit, a lift by one third would take it back to 1991 and almost 60 per cent would be needed to restore the 1990 level. If National thought the lower benefits it set in 1991 were enough to ‘‘incentivise’’ employment, then it should find a substantial rise in current benefits acceptable. Higher replacement income rates before the 1980s co-existed with much lower unemployment rates than since the 1990s.
A single parent with two children in New Zealand receives 54 per cent of the average wage according to OECD data comparing 2012 benefits during the first years of unemployment. The OECD median is 70 per cent, Denmark pays 77 per cent and Canada 84 per cent. New Zealand benefits rank 25 to 28 out of 33 OECD countries for this family – and bottom for some two-earner couples with two children. The ‘incentives’’ argument is a crock.
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Mina Sohail is a freelance journalist based in Islamabad.
Bill Rosenberg is an economist with the Council of Trade Unions.