After scoring a victory over the extremist religious parties in North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan, the moderate Awami National Party is now prepared to negotiate with militants fighting in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The party is made up primarily of members of the Pashtun ethnic group, the same group that also supplies most of the militants, which may lead to an upturn in relations and negotiations, and this coupled with the A.N.P.’s firm stance against anti-government attacks could lead to a decrease in violence in the coming months. Obviously, if a state can hold back from killing, so much the better, but the real ethical issue is not whether or not the A.N.P. will use words or bullets or both against the militants, but whether they will extend to same treatment to other, non-Pashtun militants.
“Mr. Khattak said talks with Al Qaeda and other foreign militants, many of whom come from Arab lands and Central Asia, were out of the question. “We don’t have a common language with them,” he said.”
On top of this, and more importantly:
“Negotiations, he said, were probably unsustainable with hardened Pakistani militants like Baitullah Mehsud, the man accused of masterminding most of the recent suicide bombings in Pakistan, including the one in which the opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed.”
What this could signal is the preferred treatment of one group over others by the government in an already notoriously divided and tribal province. The massacres in Rwanda occurred because the Belgian colonizers had favored the Tutsi ethnic group for years over others like the Hutus. With the Pashtun militants being similarly held to a different standard of measurement from the other violent groups, it could lead to a lot more bloodshed down the road than if the government was willing to deal evenly with all parties concerned.
The government of Pakistan has a moral duty to protect its citizens from violence by whatever means it has available, but to prefer one group over another- or show signs of doing so- could be considered unethical because it could very easily lead to persecution and hatred from both sides, much like the Shia/Sunni conflict in countries like Iraq. Even if the Pashtun government of the province were flat-out going to favor their own group over another, they should at least try not to show it so overtly to avoid turning the situation more ugly than it already is. Ideally and morally, all humans should be treated equally, and from the murkier state-level of morality, overt favoritism should not take place as it does the country as a whole a disservice.
From “Moderates Hold Key in Pakistan”, NY Times, March 26, 2008.
