To forget the pain of deaths past, we must do some killing of our own.

Executions are set to guide the plot of Pakistan’s latest episode of the War on Terror. Every day brings news of the numbers, 8,000 awaiting death, a few hung already, the ominous pictures of nooses plastered on the pages of newspapers.

So much hope and consensus exists around the idea of executions; their necessity, their justification, their absolute ability to curb the scourges coursing through Pakistan that one dare not argue.

There is no room to say that the problem with death by state sanction is not that the crime is not horrendous, the massacre not punishable, but that the possibility of a mistake, of killing the wrong man for the wrong crime is a taint no state can risk.

Then, there is the case of killing children themselves.

Shafqat Hussain belonged to this very category. Said to be 14 years old at the time of his conviction by an anti-terrorism court in 2004, the only evidence against Shafqat was his own confession, produced after nine days of detention in police custody.

In speaking to the human rights group Reprieve, Shafqat said that during those nine days he was kept in solitary confinement, blindfolded, beaten, electrocuted and burnt with cigarette butts.

After enduring that day after day, the boy not much older than many of the children who perished in Peshawar said that he was so broken and in such agony that he would have admitted that a “deer was an elephant” if asked to by the police.

Despite this, the Anti-Terrorism Court that heard the case against him handed down a conviction.

 

Also read: Not justice