On August 16, a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Rimsha Masih, was arrested in Islamabad for having allegedly burned pages from the Quran. She was found carrying a plastic bag containing several singed papers inscribed in Arabic. It was then unclear whether the leaves had come from the Quran; but an incensed mob, tipped off by the local imam, had converged at her door, threatening to torch the house.

300 Christian families fled in the incident’s wake for fear that they, as minorities, would be made scapegoats – as has happened in previous infringements of Pakistan’s unforgiving blasphemy laws. As investigations ensued, however, authorities’ perusal of Rimsha’s medical reports revealed she had been born with Down’s Syndrome and that her mental age was several years shy of her real age. A game-changing revelation rocked the case when a month later, Khalid Jadoon, the religious leader who had initially called the police, was arrested on suspicion of having planted the burned papers.

In an interview with ABC News the day before his arrest, Jadoon stoically declared that Rimsha had confessed to the burning of the pages. “It’s a matter of my religion. If there’s a threat to Islam, if our government doesn’t stand up to that person, then the people will. I’ll be the first of them.”

What Jadoon had really meant by “threat” became clear when two witnesses and Jadoon’s deputy, Hafiz Muhammad Zubair, brought evidence against him. Zubair had seen several people handing Jadoon some burnt papers. To this pile Jadoon had added additional pages of the Quran. “I asked him what he was doing,” Zubair told a television station, “and he said, ‘This is the evidence against them (the local Christians) and this how we can get them out from this area.’”

Religious tension as just one factor

Rimsha’s arrest had been at the nucleus of a larger scheme to evict Christian families from the neighborhood. “I have known for the last three months that some people in this area wanted the Christian community to leave so they could build a madrasa (on their land),” Hafiz Mohammad Ashrafi, Chairman of the All Pakistan Ulema Council, a body of senior muslim clerics, reportedly said. “Our heads are bowed with shame for what [Jadoon] did.”

Breaking the political code of simply glossing over religious tensions, Paul Bhatti, the minister for national harmony, conceded, “It is not just a religious problem. It’s a caste factor, because (the victims) belong to the poorest and most marginalized people. Unfortunately, they are Christians, and this caste system creates lots of problems.” The Muslim-Christian animosity predates the British occupation of Pakistan, stemming from a Hinduism-instilled social hierarchy that demoted the Christians to the most menial and despised rank.

Rimsha was acquitted and released from a prison in Rawalpindi on September 8, from where she was flown in a military helicopter to meet her family in an undisclosed location. Rimsha’s neighbors told ABC News reporters they do not believe she and her family will ever return to her village.

Implications for the future

Despite the exonerating evidence, Rimsha’s acquittal is a miracle in a country where those convicted of defiling the Quran face life in prison. The family is living in protective custody, in constant fear of assassination by vigilantes and Islamic hardliners who side with the tunnel-vision judiciary.

Critics of the blasphemy law, however, nurture a cautious hope that the court’s decision bodes a revision of the laws, as the case has highlighted how the stringency of the laws can invite people to misuse them for their own advantage. “The decision by a Pakistan court to grant bail to Rimsha Masih is an encouraging step, but the Pakistan government must urgently reform its blasphemy laws to prevent similar cases in future,” said a spokesman from Amnesty International. “In the recent past individuals accused of blasphemy have been killed by members of the public, often in incidents where the victim has not been formally charged by the authorities,” he continued. He then went on to stress the importance of “legal, policy and social reforms” to address “vilification on the basis of religion that has lead to almost daily intimidation and deadly attacks.”

Dr. Nazir S. Bhatti, President of Pakistan Christian Congress (PCC) has demanded reinvestigation in all cases lodged against Christians, Ahmaddiya and Muslims under charges of blasphemy.

Image Courtesy of   Mikhail Levit / Shutterstock.com

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The Sri Lankan government report by the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission does not take into account the worst abuses perpetrated by government forces and does not advance accountability for the people victimized by Sri Lanka’s civil armed conflict, said the Human Rights Watch.

The report is 388 pages long and was posted on the government’s website on December 16, 2011. The report, while long-awaited, was unsatisfactory and gave very little new information on accountability that could not have previously been enforced by the government. Its shortcomings bring to light a need for an international investigative power, which was suggested by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts last April.

Though the UN Panel of Experts recommended establishing an independent international power to perform investigations into the suspected violations, the Sri Lankan government report shows no realistic way to make the military and government officials that were implicated in serious abuses accountable for their actions. “Governments and UN bodies have held back for the past 18 months to allow the Sri Lankan commission to make progress on accountability,” stated Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The commission’s failure to provide a road map for investigating and prosecuting wartime perpetrators shows the dire need for an independent, international commission.”

The report’s findings mainly exonerated government forces for laws-of-war violations. This is in stark contrast to the findings of the UN Panel of Experts, who concluded that the Sri Lankan government forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam both conducted military operations “with flagrant disregard for the protection, rights, welfare, and lives of civilians and failed to respect the norms of international law.”

Due to a large amount of evidence, the report did admit that there were “considerable civilian causalities” during the last stages of fighting and that hospitals had been shelled, resulting in damage and civilian deaths. “It is important that a government-appointed body has laid to rest the bizarre claims of the government that its forces caused no civilian casualties,” Adams said. “Yet, the commission shockingly fails to call for any criminal investigations into artillery shelling of crowded areas in which tens of thousands of civilians died.”

The report failed to inspect the use of heavy artillery against civilian areas as well, and sexual violence was not talked about in the report, which is probably because the commission lacks any form of witness protection. It also failed to mention the torture of detainees, the months-long detention of hundreds of thousands of people that were displaced by the fighting, or the refusal of due process rights for the detainees in the so-called rehabilitation centers.

“It is clear that justice for conflict-related abuses is not going to happen within Sri Lanka’s domestic institutions,” Adams alleged. “The government has been playing for time by appointing the LLRC. That time has now run out.”

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