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In July 2002, I received an email from my friend Shahbaz Bhatti, the president of the Christian Liberation Front in Pakistan. He had just convened a meeting of all of Pakistan’s oppressed minorities in order to work more successfully for their human rights and religious freedom. The Christians, Hindus, Sikhs, Ahmedis, Baha’is, and others from all the provinces of Pakistan formed the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance (APMA) and elected Bhatti as the chairman. “Dear Sister Faith,” he addressed me in his usual style as a fellow Christian, “Pakistan’s opinion makers were noting that the religious minorities of Pakistan had made history by forming an alliance for the first time in Pakistan’s history, which would empower them ‘to resolve contentious issues which have been confronting them for decades.’” He was upbeat and hopeful when I replied to his email to congratulate him. I wish I had sent him more emails over the years.
Nine years later, Wednesday morning, March 2, 2011, I received word of my friend’s brutal slaying by jihadist proponents of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. He was 42. Bhatti, a Catholic who became Pakistan’s Minister for Minorities in 2008, was the only Christian government minister in the country. Amid numerous death threats, he had been working for years to overturn the draconian blasphemy laws in the country’s Criminal Code. The cowardly gunmen ambushed him just outside his mother’s home in Islamabad and riddled his car with bullets, according to reports. Reports also indicate that the gunmen appeared to know Bhatti’s movements and to know that he was without security that morning. He had not been given a bullet-proof vehicle by the government, although he requested one.
Bhatti had battled tirelessly defending the rights of the minority peoples of Pakistan. He was a voice for the marginalized, such as the 4% of Pakistan’s population that are Christians, who are deprived of education, and whose only jobs are sweeping the dung off the streets, cleaning sewers, living in a brickyard building bricks, or other such work. He was an advocate for Pakistani Christian parents whose daughters have been abducted, raped, and forced to marry their Muslim rapists, and for those children’s Muslim employees have decided it is easier to murder them than to pay them.
But in his battle to reform his country’s blasphemy laws, Bhatti was not only an advocate for all of Pakistan’s non-Muslim ethnic groups, but for Muslim victims of the laws as well. In fact, the blasphemy laws have been used as a weapon against Muslims more frequently than against Christians and other minorities. Their application has been capricious, vindictive, and irrational. They are used as a weapon to settle personal arguments and business and land disputes. The laws, a component of the Shariah, make any perceived insult of Mohammed, the Koran, or Islam itself, a crime punishable by death. The accusation against an enemy is enough. Then the burden of proof is on them to defend themselves, amid the chaos of a half-crazed mob already screaming for their blood.
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