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In January 2011, a man driving a white Honda Civic through the bustling streets of Lahore, Pakistan stopped at a red light, pulled out an unlicensed glock, and fired five rounds through the windshield. He stepped out, took a look at his two victims sprawled dead on the street, fired four more rounds into their lifeless bodies, and took a few pictures before stepping back in and driving away. The man radioed for backup, and it came in the form of an SUV filled with armed attackers, running over and killing three more people as it sped through oncoming traffic. The backup did not reach him in time though, as the man was promptly arrested. The trunk of the white Honda Civic contained guns, knives, balaclavas, multiple ID cards, over a hundred live rounds of ammunition, and the flag of his organisation, all typical fares of a terrorist.
The four gunmen in the SUV had escaped and fled the country within hours, but for the man in the white Honda Civic, things were slightly more complicated. The organisation employing him not only claimed responsibility but demanded his immediate release. It challenged the state of Pakistan, asserting its operative deserved impunity. Shocking claims, but even more shocking was that owing to rising pressures and a desire to remain in this organisation’s good books in the future, the state of Pakistan conceded. Upon taking advantage of a little-known aspect of the Pakistani legal system that allows financial compensation to a victim’s family in exchange for exemption from incarceration, the organisation managed to secure its operative and effectively flout a sovereign states legal system by getting away with the murder of five of its citizens.
Sounds like just another sob story of a troubled nation failing to protect itself from terrorists, doesn’t it? To the outside world, it might have, had the organisation in this case been ISIS or Al Qaida, rather than the United States government, and had the man in the white Honda Civic sported a long beard and had an Arabic accent, rather than his clean shave and lack of melanin. Instead, in March 2011, CIA contractor Raymond Allen Davis flew out of Pakistan on a US military jet as a free man. While the then-government of Pakistan may well have had some share of the blame in how it handled the situation, this incident goes to show how powerful countries take advantage of laws they otherwise condemn as backwards when it suits their interests. And judging by the lack of awareness about it among the Western public, the Raymond Davis incident may be placed alongside Iran Air Flight 655, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the Yemen school bus bombing and countless others in the list of atrocities in history committed by the UK and US alone, only to be conveniently excluded from their media’s narrative.
The law used by the American government to free Raymond Davis was ‘diyya’, which in the Pakistani penal code is a remnant of the British colonial era laws that the young nation inherited upon independence, supplemented with some Islamic Sharia in the 1990s. It states that in a murder case, the victim’s immediate family may choose to accept a financial compensation in exchange for their forgiveness, which in turn would exempt the perpetrator from all legal consequences. Such a law ignores a state’s responsibility to ensure that murder does not go unpunished, as in effect the law legalises all murder that a victim’s family is willing to absolve. While this may seem like a narrow field, the most obvious loophole is when the murderer and the immediate family member are the same person. Until very recently in Pakistan, if you murdered your own sibling, you could simply sign a document stating that you pay yourself a dollar, and you’re free to go. This selective lawlessness rampantly fuelled the practice of ‘honour killings’ by which fathers or brothers would murder a woman in the family if she committed acts thought to bring them shame, and escape without consequence due to the glaring loophole in the diyya law. On top of this, the very act of making a crime as heinous as murder go unpunished expands an already deep-rooted class divide, that effectively renders the law applicable only to the poor.
There is little doubt that the Raymond Davis incident of 2011 influenced global discourse on a rethinking of the diyya law, as while the oft-repeated American statement of ‘Do More’ has become a symbol of foreign self-righteousness in Pakistani society, little is said about the countless consequences of such a glaring hole in a legal system that applies to a nation of 18 million people. Although in recent years widespread legal reform has brought out significant improvements in the Pakistan, the diyya law, with flaws and loopholes ever present, still exists. And following 2011, from the global flagbearers of justice and human rights, the silence is deafening.