ISLAMABAD: Paying homage to the victims of the last year’s Taliban attack on the Army Public School Peshawar, the Pakistan People’s Party and Muttah­ida Qaumi Movement criticised the federal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa governments on Tuesday for having failed to take concrete steps to provide justice to the bereaved families and to avert such incidents in future.

PPP leader and former president Asif Ali Zardari in a message issued from Dubai called for an “honest assessment” of the abysmal failure and “ruthless accountability” of those who had failed in the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) against terrorists.

“Abysmal failure in implementing the NAP amounts to rejecting the sacrifices of countless shuhada of the armed forces, the paramilitary forces, the police and the civilians in the fight against militancy and extremism,” he said.

PPP Senator Farhatullah Babar quoted the ex-president as describing as “most troubling to every patriotic citizen” the absence of progress in core areas of NAP, including action against banned organisations, reforms of madressahs, structural reforms in Federally Administered Tribal Areas, reforms in the criminal justice system, empowering the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta) and bringing all intelligence agencies under its umbrella.

He lamented that banned militant organisations had been allowed to resurrect under new names behind the facade of charity work and even parliament had been “misguided” in this regard.

Structural reforms in tribal areas have been swept aside by resorting to the familiar tactic of setting up committees after committees, he said.

Nacta remains dysfunctional. Religious fanatics who publicly sought assistance of the militant Islamic State group are roaming about freely while madrassah reforms is as distant a cry as ever, Mr Babar, who is spokesman for the former president, pointed out.

Senator Syed Tahir Hussain Mashhadi of the MQM has submitted an adjournment motion in the Senate Secretariat in which he said that both federal and provincial government of KP had failed to order or hold judicial inquiry into the Dec 16, 2014 attack.

He said that the families of the deceased had been demanding a high-level judicial inquiry but for some unfathomable reasons the two governments had failed to fulfil it.

“Nation has the right to know how such incident took place and who was responsible, where were the flaws and mistakes, how many of the monsters were captured, how many escaped, and all omissions and commissions that were committed. The...fact can only come to light after a proper high-level inquiry,” he said.

Mr Mashhadi said the matter should be discussed in the Senate and the house after a debate should direct the federal and the KP government to hold an impartial high-level judicial inquiry into the gory incident.

Meanwhile, Leader of Opposition in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Ahmed Shah said that the good aspect of the APS massacre was the raising of a collective voice against terrorism.

Mr Shah said he had recently addressed a letter to the prime minister and conveyed him the desire of the parents of the APS victims, who had met him during his visit to Peshawar, that a special status may be accorded to this day (Dec 16) and events may be organised across the country in remembrance of this tragedy. He said libraries may be set up at Islamabad and provincial headquarters in memory of the APS martyrs.

144STORIES: Visit the Army Public School Memorial

Published in Dawn, December 16th, 2015