“To be liberal and outspoken in the Pakistan of today is tantamount to painting a target in the middle of your forehead,” said one newspaper in Pakistan, about the >killing of Sabeen Mahmud , activist and owner of a Karachi coffee-house, who was gunned down at a traffic light as she drove home. Ms. Mahmud’s killing didn’t come without warning, however. Each time a journalist or activist is killed in Pakistan it is a warning to others to hold off speaking on issues that are inconvenient to its religious and extremist establishment inside and outside power. The attack by gunmen on Geo TV anchor Hamid Mir in Karachi a year ago came after threats were issued over his reports on extrajudicial killings in Balochistan. The killing of journalist Saleem Shahzad in 2011 followed his article about radicalisation within the military, and the killing of journalist Raza Rumi’s driver in an attack where he himself escaped came after Mr. Rumi’s TV programmes against the killing of religious minorities over blasphemy charges were aired. Ms. Sabeen, who had crossed swords with these groups, had been sent a threat letter just a week prior to her killing for her decision to hold a discussion on human rights violations in Balochistan at her coffee-house. The message is as brutal as the bullets pumped into the two: if you want to remain alive in Pakistan, stay away from criticising its powerful religious terrorist groups and their patrons within the government and the military. Ms. Mahmud may not have been a journalist in the traditional sense of the term, but her widely acclaimed efforts for free speech and online popularity made her as dangerous to those groups as any of the others targeted. In 2012, UNESCO named Pakistan the second most dangerous place for journalists, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has criticised the government for lack of progress in handling attacks against the media.
What makes Ms. Mahmud’s killing truly ironic is that it comes at a time when Pakistan has launched a National Action Plan to counter terrorism and extremism, and weeks after the Army launched operations to counter crime and violence in Karachi. Both efforts seem to ring hollow when an unarmed woman and her mother can be surrounded at a busy traffic intersection and shot multiple times in cold blood. As the outcry against Pakistan’s establishment over the killing mounted, the services, ISPR, put out an unusual statement condemning the killing and promising a full inquiry. As journalists and activists who gathered to mourn yet another member of their tribe said, this is fitting, as even if they weren’t responsible for the killing, it is hard to believe “the all powerful intelligence can’t find out who is.”
