COMMEMORATING THE PESHAWAR SCHOOL MASSACRE

Peerzada Muzamil

THOUGHTS

     "It was the day when children went to acquire the light of knowledge and faded to the eternity of grim darkness; when teachers were giving lessons and received bullets in wage"

It was one of the darkest hours of the human history. It was the hour which broke our hearts, which made the entire world aghast. It was the hour of disgrace which gave a chill to the nerves of humanity. It was the winter of bloodbath. And it all began that morning – morning of that December, the winter of which was less harsh than what it was going to witness; when the kids left their homes for school and never returned. It was the day when children went to acquire the light of knowledge and faded into the eternity of grim darkness; when teachers were giving lessons and received bullets in wage. It all began the morning when a bunch of terrorists, laden with lethal arms, misled by their distorted religious ideologies, committed the ferocious atrocity that claimed the lives of the buds which were yet to bloom.

 

Around 10:30 in the morning, on the 16^th of December, seven heavily armed men in the guise of Pakistani Paramilitary Forces entered the premises of Army Public School in Peshawar. With the aim of inflicting maximum casualties, they opened fire on the innocent children and their teachers in the school auditorium. The incessant firing left over 150 dead among which 132 were students and remaining were the staff members. The spectacle aftermath was heart-throttling – the bodies of innocent children lying dead and cold, their notebooks besmeared with innocent blood, the air smelling injustice and echoing the shuddering shrills of bewildered children who were injured. The students who luckily made the narrow escape from the bullets were catatonic. The entire world was shipwrecked in the ocean of grief and agony.

Gunmen were killed and some children managed to get evacuated in the joint operation conducted by Pakistani Army and Police. While everybody was mourning over the massacre, TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan) claimed the responsibility and termed it as the revenge against the Pakistan Army. Giving a thought to it, the sound conclusion is inevitable – if Pakistani Army launches an operation against the terrorism in order to make peace and security prevail in the state, in order to make churches safe for Christians and Mosques safe for Shia Muslims, in order to make markets safe for public and on and on. The question is why would TTP kill innocent children and justify their vindictive ingression into a school by calling it a righteous vengeance? Had those school children to do anything with this? No.

This is not Jihad, and certainly not what Islam teaches. This is not what Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) taught. This is outright inhumane and the perpetrators of such brutal and outré ferocities are not human beings at all. The notions of such tyrannical people are irreconcilable with rationale and their actions are against Morals and humanity. If we keep chopping off arm for an arm, just in the name of religion, we would get, in the end a human civilization too feeble to nurture love and too gaunt to be called social beings. The bloodbath confronted by innocent people has always been a part of it and a result of ill minded and irreligious extremists and their filthy political wiles. Histories have kept on warning the human civilization about such instances; and as the stacks of histories testify the fact that such sparks in the end burn the entire civilizations alive and in such mighty bonfires,  it is the class of the ‘Innocents’ that suffers the most.

The children, who had left their homes to learn, left this world by inscribing in our hearts the saddest of memories. The Peshawar School Massacre was the massacre of future, hope, knowledge and truth. It was the massacre of spring. It was the massacre of humanity.  Coffins of the children were resting on the people’s shoulders – the children upon whose shoulders their nation was hoping to stand. It was the funeral of despair and those were the smallest of coffins, and someone has rightly said: “Smallest coffins are the Heaviest” May their souls rest in Heavens and may Almighty bestow their Parents an everlasting strength. Amen. 

[The article was also published by Greater Kashmir - although it was abridged - on 16th of December 2016 - Click here to read the abridged version on Greater Kashmir ]