Peshawar basked in the sun on February 9th as a friend, zigzagging through the busy streets, drove me to the Army Public School (APS). A contingent of immaculately dressed, gun toting, army men was alerted as I stepped from the car and strolled toward the school-gate. The face of the mustached captain of the contingent relaxed when he recognized my friend, himself a military man.

The heavily guarded campus is practically out of bounds for journalists nowadays. Official permission from the military public relations department (ISPR) to visit the school would have taken days to obtain. On a tight leash during my ten-day stay in Pakistan, I could not wait. I decided to get around long and cumbersome bureaucratic formalities by using journalistic connections. Besides gaining me immediate access to the school, it also allowed me a friendly welcome by the security contingent at the campus, as well as access to students and teachers. ‘But make sure you do not misreport anything that brings a bad name to Pakistan,’ my friend intermittently reminded me.

After shaking hands with the soldiers who manned the gate, I stepped into an empty space spreading over three acres. The walls all around were plastered with pictures of school children and staff who were gunned down by the Taliban on December 16.

Everybody I spoke to in Peshawar reverentially refers to these children as martyrs. In the centre of the grounds, I noticed a podium littered with bouquets of flowers. This is the projected site for a would-be memorial (Yadgar), to be built in honour of the martyred children. Walking past the Yadgar, I headed for another gate that ushered me into the main campus. On watching the building of the Auditorium, the scene of major bloodshed, familiarized through the media, I froze as a shiver ran down my spine.  For a while, it felt as if I was watching Taliban ghosts running all around. The traffic hum from the closeby street sounded like screams.

For a while, owing to a constant heavy presence of military squads at the main campus, it felt both scary as well as reassuring. I was shown the wall ‘they’ scaled to enter the campus. I refused to visit the Auditorium. Construction workers were busy repairing the interior and giving a facelift to the Auditorium’s façade. Teenage students were playing football and a few gathered at the nearby school canteen. Unlike most schoolchildren, they were not noisy. Gloom hung in the air.

For the first time in my journalistic career, I lacked the courage to ask questions. Since the horrible attack, traumatized children have been pushed under the gaze of the media and visited by a host of Pakistani celebrities. They have been endlessly quizzed in an irritating manner by the mainstream commercial media. They don’t find it pleasant to talk to journalists anymore.

I shook hands with a few of them. But my tongue stuck somewhere on my palate. Noticing the awkward look on my face, the students silently moved away. A teacher, Andleeb Aftab, agreed to speak to me after school at her home in Hayatabad, a middle-class neighbourhood off the Jamrood Road that leads to Afghanistan.

I had couple of hours to loiter in the city streets and catch up with old friends in Peshwar, a town ravaged by terrorism since 9/11. Narrating Peshwar’s tragedy, a journalist friend told me: ‘the biggest furniture-making factory has literally turned to another business. Now they make coffins as coffins sell more than furniture items’. I did not believe him until recently when BBC Urdu ran a report on this factory.

(II)

Frequent remote-control bombings and Fidai missions have claimed over 70000 lives in Pakistan since 9/11. Horrible videos depicting beheadings by the Taliban have emerged intermittently over the years. In one gory piece of footage, the Taliban are seen literally playing football with the severed heads of Pakistani soldiers. In an otherwise desensitized Pakistan, such horrors failed to spur on an anti-Taliban outrage. However, last year’s December 16 attack on the Army Public School (APS) in Peshawar, where a battalion of nine Taliban gunned down 146 students and teachers, rudely shook Pakistan out of an anesthetized state.

A month later, on January 16, a four thousand strong anti-Taliban rally, the first of its kind, was held in Lahore. Fear of suicide attacks often scares people away from public demonstrations. The demonstration in Lahore was egged on by a flurry of protests by a handful of activists outside of the Red Mosque in the federal capital of Islamabad.

Nasir Jibran, a Karachi-based social activist, was in Islamabad when the Taliban terror was unleashed on the Peshawar school. On the next day Mullah Abdul Aziz, Imam at the Islamabad’s (in)famous Red Mosque and a Taliban sympathizer, refused on a TV talk show to condemn the attack on the school.

In an online appeal Nasir asked civil society activists to gather outside of the Red Mosque and demand an apology from Mullah Aziz. The Mullah issued threats on Nasir’s life.  The next day, a Taliban spokesperson telephoned Nasir, again threatening him with dire consequences. Undaunted, Nasir and his comrades instead of cowing down, registered a case against the Mullah. Initially, the police, too scared to annoy a pro-Taliban mullah, refused to lodge the complaint.

Meanwhile, growing media attention and support lent by progressive politicians forced the police to register the case. These peaceful activists scored a victory against a hardline mullah who claims to have 100 thousand suicide bombers ready to blow on his call (an exaggerated claim but partly true). Even the government fears him as Taliban factions and certain militant outfits view him as their spiritual head.

The Red Mosque made headlines in 2007 when it’s Imam, Abdul Aziz, and heavily armed students from the seminary affiliated with this mosque began vigilante actions in Islamabad in attempts to implement Sharia. A military action to force these militants from the mosque left scores dead. Abdul Aziz was jailed. However, the military operation by the then military ruler General Musharraf soon became unpopular. Claims were made that the actions was ‘aimed at pleasing the Americans’ while Red Mosque ‘students’, gunned down during the military operation, were lauded by the rightwing forces as martyrs of Sharia.

With a change in government, Abdul Aziz was released and soon returned to head the Friday congregations, delivering poisonous sermons from the pulpit at the Red Mosque.

In a country seething with religiously informed anti-Americanism, which should not be confused with anti-imperialism, every horror and each absurdity gains currency as long as it is perpetrated in the name of religion. Partly the hegemonic hold of anti-American Islamifist forces and partly the Pakistan military’s complicated relationship with the Taliban and al-Qaida obviated the emergence of an anti-Taliban discourse in the country. Of course, the weakness of the left is also a factor in this regard.

In any case, until recently, the Taliban were not seen by a sizeable section of Pakistanis as puritan fanatics. Instead, they were the ‘holy warriors’ waging jihad against the ‘infidel’ USA. Certain ‘leftist’ intellectuals created further obfuscation by depicting Taliban barbarism as liberation struggle.  Incredibly some ‘Marxists’ even detected class struggle in the Taliban butchery.

A student from APS Peshawar later told a demo outside the Red Mosque that their teacher of Islamic Studies used to say, ‘Taliban are our misguided brothers’. The teacher was also gunned down on December 16.

Heartless reprisal attacks by the Taliban, aimed to further punish dissent discouraged the emergence of an opposition. It takes extraordinary courage to publicly show disgust and rage towards the Taliban in Pakistan. On January 16, anti-Taliban manifestations were held not only in Lahore but also in other large towns in the country. The Pakistani Diaspora also held demonstrations in a host of European and North American towns.

(III)

In the two years since I last visited Pakistan, other marked change has occurred. Besides the Taliban’s growing unpopularity, the appearance of school buildings has changed. High boundary walls have been constructed. Barbed wire tops the walls and armed guards stand at the entry gates conveying an impression of fortified military installations instead of school buildings. In some cases, I even noticed trenches by the school gates. Schools run by Christian missionaries and the military have an extra touch of apparent security arrangements.

‘All these security arrangements are an illusion,’ remarked my nephew Haseeb (10), when I stayed overnight at my family home in Sargodha on my way to Peshawar. He had visibly lost weight since I last saw him. He goes to the same local school, run by the air force, that all my siblings and myself attended. Until recently he, along with his siblings was happy to go to the same school as their parents.  But no more!

A paranoid desire for security at the school is driving Haseeb and all my nephews mad. A few weeks ago, principle of the school advised that dustbins in the classrooms should be removed to prevent terrorists from planting bombs in them.

‘But isn’t it good to be careful in these times instead of condemning the security measures as an illusion,’ I tried to reason with Haseeb.

‘Well, if they want to kill us, they can attack us at the time we finish school. School gates are flooded with students while traffic outside of the school is chocked,’ he briskly replied.

My blood froze on hearing a dear child talking about death and blood. A fascinatingly beautiful school campus that invokes so many fond memories for me has become a nightmare for next generation in my family. Children across Pakistan were too nervous to go to their schools after the Peshawar tragedy. Their parents have been even more nervous.

‘Mom! If I am supposed to run or hide if they come’, asked Abdullah, son of my friends, Farooq and Shehnaz, when his school in Lahore re-opened after month-long break announced by the government after the attack on APS, Peshawar.

However, all these distressing accounts are dwarfed before the accounts narrated by Andleeb when I met her at her home in Hayatabad on the afternoon of February 9.

(IV)

Mother of three, Andleeb lost her elder son Maaz on December 16. Her younger son goes to the same school. On December 16, he along with his mates was attending a football match at another school.

Again, I found it hard to begin a conversation as we crouched on mattresses —as is typical in Pushton houses— laid along the walls in her living room. But her extra-ordinary calm and composed manners encouraged me to dare ask about her personal tragedy.

As often is the case with traumatized people, she wanted to share her story too. Unease gave way to engaging conversation. ‘When I heard the gunshots at about 10 in the morning, my initial reaction was to dismiss them as mock shots,’ she says.

In fact, the school had received Taliban threats. Rehearsals were carried out in anticipation of a Taliban attack. ‘However, we always expected a suicide attack or a hostage-taking drama. Children and school staff would rehearse to deal with such situations,’ Andleeb told me.

In the Khyber Pakhtonkhwa province, Peshwar being the provincial capital, the Taliban have blown up over 1000 schools in the last five years. They would usually dynamite empty buildings during the night. In one case, a suicide mission was averted when a brave ten-grade student, Aitzaz Hussain, noticed the suicide bomber and courageously stopped him. In the ensuing scuffle, both the suicide bomber and Aitzaz were killed. However, Aitzaz, by laying down his life, saved hundreds others.

Back at APS, Peshawar, on hearing gunshots on the morning of December 16, Andleeb first thought it was a routine rehearsal that she had not been informed of. However, when she saw a boy running out of the Auditorium, his feet drenched in blood, she realized something was wrong. Meanwhile, more gunshots at close range scared her further. She rushed to the staff common room. Panic set in when she witnessed glass windows being smashed and heard mad screams all around. She, alongwith two colleagues, locked themselves in the toilet.

For approximately eight hoursthe three of them were holed up in the toilet. ‘Army commandos rescued us at 6,’ she told me.

‘We were praying all the time for everybody’s safety but I was most worried about Maaz. I kept convincing myself that he would have escaped along the escaping kids’.

Later on, she was told that Maaz sustained bullet injuries when the Taliban gunmen attacked his classroom. After a while, a couple of them returned. Maaz posed as dead. But the pain from the wound was unbearable. A tear dropped from his eye as one Talib was inspecting the dead. He was killed in the second round.

My heart sank as she talked about Maaz’ tragic end. I expected tears to roll down her eyes but she maintained her composure. This encouraged me to ask more questions. She knew that her younger son was not at the campus hence she was worried about Maaz throughout. She had no idea of the scale of bloodshed. However, an hours long encounter between nine Taliban who were holed up in various class rooms, and military commandos, as well as intermittently exploding grenades amidst the endless thunder of gunshots was convincing enough to drive home the probable massive scale of the massacre while she hid inside the tiny toilet.

Inside the 8X10 feet toilet, it was not mere prayers and an anxious wait for the rescue team. While they tried to stay silent lest they should catch the attention of the Taliban, a Hollywood-style incident aggravated the situation. One of Andleeb’s colleagues was a diabetic.  She needed something to eat. Andleeb had edible items in her bag. However, in panic she forgot her bag in the staff room when she rushed to the toilet. In the room adjacent to the staff room, a Taliban was holed up.

‘The choice was to let her die in the toilet or get killed with a bullet. I prayed to Allah and tiptoed to the staff room,’ she said. Lucky not to make any noise, she saw a Talib watching out, with his gun pointed outwards. But she managed to return to the safety of the toilet. ‘Alhamdollilah, it all went well’, she remarks.

I am not sure if she was always very religious or her recent tragedy turned her into a religious person. But Allah was either thanked or praised every time she spoke. She told me she has reconciled with her tragedy. ‘Not even a leaf stirs without Allah’s will. There must be a higher wisdom behind the tragedy. My son has been blessed,’ she tells me but it is as if she is convincing herself rather than me.

Finally, when she was rescued by the military commandos and saw dead bodies and body parts littered all over, she realized the exact scale of the tragedy. Since she sustained injuries, she was rushed to hospital in an ambulance. On her way to the hospital, her brother informed her about Maaz. Before she left the hospital, staff asked her to help them identify a few dead bodies, burnt beyond recognition.

‘The physical wounds would heal. But those of us who witnessed the dead bodies will never recover from trauma,’ she said.

How do you cope with a situation where you have to go daily to a site where your son was lost, I asked.

‘What is most tragic: I lecture in the classroom where my son was killed,’ she says.

However, her own pain takes a back seat in the face of the daily challenges she encounters at the school. ‘Students get fits. Some of them collapse. A student in the college section, daily faints. His parents don’t want him to come to the college. He daily insists to attend his lectures and passes out every day at some point during the college times,’ she explains.

Ever since the school reopened the women teachers among the staff have to play an additional role: that of mothering, consoling and counseling the traumatized students!

Traumatized students find it easier to share their pain with women teachers than with their male teachers. As if she has forgotten her personal tragedy, she begins talking about collective problems.

Andleeb is critical of the military establishment’s decision to re-open the school at the same campus. ‘We should have been shifted to another place. Coming back to the same haunted place prolongs our collective trauma,’ she thinks.

Likewise, she may have reconciled with her tragic fate but she has found a couple of new causes.
To honour the school martyrs she launched a website, apsstars.com.  The portal is also an attempt to preserve the memories of APS martyrs. Pictures of 146 students and school staff killed on December 16 along with related footage is posted on this site. Also, she campaigns for financial support of her lost colleagues. She is bitter about the meager financial compensation doled out to the school staffers who lost their lives on December 16. ‘How would their families survive on a few hundred thousand in these times,’ she questions. On this site she provides details about the bereaved families and how to help them.

Her other cause is to plant trees. ‘Our school was a lush green campus. It saddens me to watch the campus denuded of trees owing to security concerns,’ she mourns. She wants every one in Peshawar to plant a tree to honour the APS martyrs!

---