The Violence Within Or How Not To Think About The Sialkot Incident
Posted: August 25, 2010 Filed under: Political | Tags: Haneke, Media, Pakistan, Terrorism, Violence 11 Comments »This post has been originally submitted to Viewpoint magazine.
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Last weekend on a warm, humid Saturday afternoon, a fresh spate of ethnic violence was playing out in Karachi. A man accompanied by an 8-year-old child was driving by Orangi town where an angry mob had to protest killings that had happened the night before. The man stopped his car and asked some of the men standing nearby what the fuss all about. To his utter shock and horror, he was forcefully removed from his car and the mob proceeded to slit his throat. Apparently, the mob was antagonised after realising he was a Pathan just from his Pashtun accented Urdu.
Two major national newspapers buried the incident deep while reporting the overall story of the target killings here and here. One of these newspapers went on to say that the man did not die but was taken to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital. However, one Express 24/7 reporter from Karachi who saw the video with his own eyes tweeted “Just saw the most disgusting footage of a man in Orangi Town who had his throat slit…basically because he was Pathan.” When the journalist present there insisted he be taken to a hospital, the man was only put in the ambulance under the condition that he would be taken to Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, a hospital particularly far away from Orangi Town. The Pashtun man did, in fact, die. The 8-year-old child accompanying him has been missing since.
On the same weekend, several hundred miles north of Karachi, two brothers aged 16 and 18, were beaten to death with sticks by a livid, bloodthirsty mob in Sialkot. This mob, not satisfied even after the teenagers had died a brutal, horrific death, proceeded to hang their bodies on poles for public display. The police stood around nearby, not too keen on getting involved in what was clearly vigilante justice. The brothers, however, were not really guilty of any crime; the motivation behind their cold-blooded murder still ambiguous and unverified.
Someone recorded the brazen attack with their mobile phone and the video went viral. TV channels played the video on loop and opinion writers in national dailies were waxing lyrical about how exasperated and disappointed they were. There was a national outcry on the sadistic nature of Sialkotis by people who were flabbergasted that this happened in Ramzan, the blessed Islamic month for fasting and praying, or that it happened while the whole country was devastated from the worst natural disasters in its history. People were incensed, and understandably so.
Some people like George Fulton feel this incident occurred because “We are, and have always been, a barbaric, degenerate nation reveling in bloodlust.” Keeping in mind that he has only lived in Pakistan for some years, his benevolent racism and obvious Orientalist attitude towards a country he has come to call home, is nefarious but unsurprising. Many Pakistanis, in fact, believe in essentialist notions that suggest that barbarism, terrorism, uncivilized behaviour is a product of Pakistan’s culture and history. One has to have a perfunctory glance at European colonial history, a region where this author hails from, or read up a summary of how the West fights its wars all over the world, to realize, to know that this is simply not true. Violence is something we share as humans; it is deeply embedded in our anthropology. To assign it as representative of any one culture is a cop-out, not to mention outstandingly racist.
This is not a comment on selective media reporting of two possibly equally repulsive incidents in different parts of Pakistan. This is not a tirade against the intellectually lazy moral outrage of well-intentioned folks everywhere, either. This is, however, the result of a state that has failed to protect its citizens from violent atrocities that are not necessarily unique to Pakistani culture. This is also a failure on our part to think about it in a nuanced way giving it the complexity it demands.
A state’s police and law enforcement agencies are supposed to be the foremost line of defense against any threat to its civilians. In Pakistan, a place riddled with economic strife and currently hampered by catastrophic floods that no state could have efficiently coped with, the police infrastructure is one of Pakistan’s most poorly managed organisations. A Belfer Center Institute of Social Policy and Understanding report describes Pakistan’s police department as “ill-equipped, poorly trained, deeply politicized, and chronically corrupt.”
Within this context, it is not unexpected if police officers do not get involved in a crazed mob when they are either outnumbered or fear the political backlash will affect their position and/or earnings. This does not mean the police officers were particularly wretched members of the human race who derive orgasmic pleasure out of participating in violence. It is, however, telling of the complexities of being a working class Pakistani with little to no power over the decisions one has to end up taking. This isn’t to say that police officers are relieved of the duty they have to perform just because they may not be able to influence how the decisions play out, but it is important to recognize that it is never such a black and white narrative of good people condemning crimes of evil people.
An excessive exposure to violence in an almost pornographic manner on TV has several affects on a society, most of which can perpetuate it. Moreover, we do not get to see how the violence plays out on ground in the war that we have come to allow on our own people. We do not even visually experience how our own State colludes to slaughter its dissenters whilst courageous soldiers stand witness in groups. Therefore, we end up analysing horrific crimes as isolated acts by barbaric savages who cannot be one of us. One has to wonder if reactions would be similar if there were videos on national television showing how army murders a people or how drones sear flesh of women and children.
“Each of us is capable of anything. It just takes being in the right situation” – Michael Haneke, filmmaker.
The White Ribbon Of Innocence And Purity
Posted: January 27, 2010 Filed under: Art | Tags: Film, Haneke 4 Comments »
“It is not a measure of good health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society” – J Krishnamurthi
The very first scene in The White Ribbon (Das weisse Band) by Michael Haneke tells us that the film will be narrated by a man and we should not trust everything he tells us because it is but one perspective of what happened and he will recall the events as he remembers them. We do not know if this is the narrator’s voice or Haneke’s disclaimer, but it sets the underlying premise of the film: there is no singular truth to a story and what is presented is just one version of reality. From this we can infer that there will be no obvious clues and the conclusion will be far from neat. Haneke is not appeasing our appetite of whodunnit and has no interest in perpetuating the idea that evil exists outside of us or that a conspicuous meme of a villain must be discerned for us to simplify and categorize who we need to condemn and who we need to root for in a film. Haneke gives us no one to root for.
There is a lot of evil that happens in the film but true to his style, all the violence is off-screen and vague. What is not vague is that the violence is very, very cruel. This is not told to us but we know this thanks to our own imagination. In this sense, Haneke is the anti-Tarantino. Based purely on the visuals and the dialogue, one can just as well conclude that nothing terrible happened.
But what is Haneke trying to tell us by tapping into our imagination? One theory is that we as audience have consumed so much graphic violence and have been exposed to so much physical treachery in visual media that we no longer need things to happen in front of us to recognize evil. We are capable of fashioning the goriest images by ourselves without needing a filmmaker to spoon feed them to us. I suppose that is a victory of sorts for the likes of Tarantino and Scorcese.
I am reminded of a recent post by Johann Hari where he argues that it is barbaric to be hateful towards children who become killers. He goes on to say:
“It is strangely comforting to see evil as a primordial external force, something alien that can be hunted down & confined to cages. We all have the capacity for terrible cruelty and sadism, especially if we are subjected to horror ourselves. We want a black-and-white world that tells us: no, it couldn’t have been you; this crime belongs to a different species.”
The idea that children are not the embodiment of innocence and purity and just as capable of wretched violence is a troubling one. I’m struggling with what all this means when placed in the context of crime and punishment. To what extent are we willing to punish children for the crimes committed? Where does the blame lie? Parents? Society? With the children themselves who in the case of White Ribbon go on become the Nazi generation when they grow up? There is no clear answer. That is ultimately what I take away from Haneke’s film.
