Raymond Davis, the man who was a nation...

Right under the daunting gaze of the monstrous Mugamma, in maydan-al-tahrir, the People of the Nile Valley have remained undaunted. And finally, they are winning their freedom. This is independence which should have happened  sixty years agon. But the fact is that it never happened. What happened instead was a dirty trick – actually, a long series of dirty tricks – which ended up further empowering that secular and modernizing fringe of society which the fleeing colonials themselves had fathered and through whom they found it so much easier to govern. In what should have been their moment of truth, what belonged to the vast body of the sha’b was robbed; they have since been struggling to find a footing in the resulting fiasco, even as the colonials went back home.

When the white men fled, he left behind his caricatures, these walking talking lies who are the white man’s revenge. For far too long, we have suffered them. Now, however, they are going, one by one. When Ben Ali fled Tunisia, he took his truck-loads of dollars with him. If only he had also taken his lies with him. Lies about a justice that never came, freedom which was rigged. The people of Tunisia and Egypt still have long battles ahead of them – a battle against the lies, and the walking talking lies. But the light that a man lit with his own life in Tunisia, has spread nonetheless to maydan-al-tahrir. And so far, against all odds, it only seems to spread, farther and wider. Grace has its moments and sacrifices are not all alike; some get acceptance, far and wide.

But here in the much less inspiring situation in Lahore, at the very mundane Mozang , we have just had our own fateful event – an even which tells a story, the gradually unfolding story of a tragic era.

Locked in a dungeon somewhere in Lahore, there is a murderer whose conduct bespeaks that ofhis country. I have been trained as a lawyer and hair-splitting, not generalization, is something close to my day-job. But I have my reasons for concluding that we have caught hold of a man who is a nation.

Raymond Davis’ undoing was his reliance on the doctrine of pre-emptive strike. He hit those two boys because he sensed that they had weapons which they intended to use against him. It’s not that they actually intended to do so. Nor is it that they had actually done anything to provoke him into thinking like this. It’s just that they had guns, and the white man happened to see them and he didn't particularly like it. The risk was small. But it was there. And since his own life was infinitely more precious than that of anyone else around, it was better to be on the safe side. So he shot them. Noot once, not twice. More than six times. It was 'pre-emptive' self-defence, American style.

Because Raymaond, as I said, is a man who is a nation. A nation which went to war against another much-smaller and poorer country on the other side of the globe, just because they thought that this little country had weapons of mass destruction which it might use. America also had weapons of mass destruction; but that didn’t matter because America  America and couldn't possibly ever use these weapons. Except in Hiroshima. And Nagasaki. But that's an old story. No, it wouldn't use its WMDs now. Now, it was Iraq which needed to be bombed and raided because it had WMDs which it just might use. Not against the US, of course. The US is way too far from Iraq. It might, and I stress the 'might' here, use them, if it has them, against Israel. The logic was perverse and contrived to begin with. But, as events unfolded, it would get even worse.

Under the shade of American flag, fire and death and hunger descended on Iraq and it have never really departed. The Americans went there looking for WMDs. And to dismantle a dictator whom they had propped just two decades ago, out of hatred from another familiar enemy - the Islamic revolutionary government in Iran. But this was a bonus they would give the Iraqis, the gift of freedom, in addition to cleaning the WMDs. The dictator was duly dislodged; but the WMDs were never found. They could not have been found because, actually, they had never been there. Instead, the Americans found something else to keep themselves busy: regime change.

They weren’t happy with just dismantling the dictator; they wanted to create an altogether new state, something  more democratic, more to their liking. It was a risky thing to do but the risk was mostly Iraqis’, so it was worth taking. Millions of Iraqis would be made guinea pigs in the experiment of cultivating ‘democracy in the Middle East'. Democracy was probably thought of as any form of government which would condone the Israelis exploitation of the Palestinians, and also keep selling cheap oil to the global market until the last drop ran out - something like, perhaps, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. To build this new kind of government, the Americans would need to perform the risky task of dismantling the existing state structure. And that is precisely what they now started doing. They fired the army. And they fired the police. And, on the sides, they stirred up ethnic issues. It was a recipe for disaster.

And very soon, all hell broke loose. On the Iraqis, that is.

Of course, also on the sides, the Americans were busy in a grand day-light robbery, stealing everything precious that Iraq could offer. Oil, ancient artifacts, what not.

And here’s the worst bit. While the Americans has arrived there as the global champions of human rights and democracy, their soldiers were having a field day with innocent Iraqi prisoners. Supposedly freedom-loving and rights-respecting Westerners were teaching some lessons in modernity to their innocent Muslim captives. I use this epithet, “Muslim” not to evoke the feeling of comity which you may have with others in the ummah. That you should have, but it is a separate matter. Here I use the term innocent Muslim captives, because the soldiers who were torturing them were guided by official manuals and guide-books steeped in the worst form of prejudice directed against Muslims. The venom long incubated by orientalists against the followers of the Gracious Prophet was now finding its way directly into the field of combat. And its face was so ugly, everyone could immediately see it for what it is.

Even today, a mere look at the pictures from Abu Gharaib confronts us with another disturbing thought: if this is the fraction which spilled out, just how much ugliness must its perpetrators be harbouring in their hearts. The scenes from Abu Gharaib are a grim reflection on the human condition in desacralized modernity. When we lose our sense of the divine, and the element of the divine in each human being, the crux of essential sanctity which is the guarantor of rights, also dissolves. And without that appreciation, the remaining shell of human rights can easily collapse.

I refuse to believe that individuals such as Private Lynndie England and her collaborators represent a Christian conspiracy against the Islamic world. I am not Christian. But I’m even more adamant in my belief anyone who has even the remotest but real connection with Jesus Christ simply cannot do what they did to us in Abu Gharaib. These criminals are post-Christians – their spiritual condition has falled to this sad and sorry stage, centuries after Christianity lost its battle for the hearts and minds in its own heartlands.

It was bad what they did. But they didn’t stop there. What hurts more is that they also took photographs of it. And they didn’t even take much care to keep those photographs private. Perhaps they wanted to share this preserved evidence of their evil with other communities of evil.

But all of this brings me back to Raymond, the man who is a nation.

Raymond too killed his victims in what he believed was a pre-emptive strike. In his arrogance, he murdered Pakistanis who had no intention to kill him. That’s cruel enough. But he didn’t stop there and he didn’t flee. It seems that something about our prior conduct inspired in him the belief that we wouldn’t care; he could take as many of us down as he wished. So he went on to take photographs of his victims. It was on a busy road and it was mid-day. But it seems that he couldn’t care less.

It was only later that he attempted to flee. And this time, his fellows ran another Pakistan over. And again, they didn’t stop. They went on, dragging the dead body of the victim along with the car. You can never imagine what a Pakistani mother feels like when she’s told that white people have desacralized the dead body of her twenty-one years old in the very streets of her beloved Lahore. Only the sobs of one such mother give us some idea. What sort of a person could be so callous as to do this. Raymond, the man who is a nation.

The death of innocent Pakistanis at the hand of a murderer is in itself a human tragedy. And his trial should now take its due course, right here on our soil. But that is not what we, all one hundred and seventy million of us, need to reflect on.

Of all the questions before us, the one about his personal guilt or innocence, is about the least important. Raymond is just one of many. And, in one sense, his conduct reflect that of his country. The real questions which seriously need our collective attention are: Who does Raymond really work for? Why does he treat us the way he does and what have we done to deserve this? To how many more such people has our government granted visas? How many houses have they hired in Islamabad and elsewhere? Why are they doing all this? Why does our government let them do all of this, even as they function right under its own nose? Where is the Army which is supposed to keep ‘armed enemy combatants’(isn’t Raymond one?) out of our beloved homeland? General Kiyani, keeping in view all the unaccounted-for billions that we and our ancestors have put together to feed your establishment, is this not your failure? Or, for that matter, where is the ISI which was supposed to make sure that armed spies of other countries do not terrorize Pakistanis?

Just as the ugly face of the Iraq war should have been obvious well before the pictures from Abu Gharaib came out, these questions should have been vociferously raised much earlier. But Raymond, the man is a nation, has given us yet another chance to re-examine what we have become and how we are being treated.

Now, when so many of our brethren across the Nile have come together ask the right questions, the time is ripe. The moment is opportune. While Raymond should stay in the jail, his kin should pack up and leave, all of them. We should never have let them come here and take root. We should never have tolerated them in our cities, our neighborhoods and our roads. But even now, when change is everywhere in the air, may we have the courage to rid ourselves of them. May the hand that drives all affirm us in this endeavour. And may He give us the courage to lose what it takes to win, ultimately.