Thursday, December 06, 2007
There is always something that rivets attention to news of a suicide bombing. After all, an immense amount of belief in a cause, however misguided, is required to blow one’s own body in smithereens in the process of attempting to inflict the same fate on others. This is all the more true when the suicide bomber is a woman. Around the world, the involvement of women in terrorism and violence of all kinds is still, on the whole, considerably lower than that of men — and when an incident in which a woman is the perpetrator takes place, it immediately makes a splash. Pakistan has heard talk of female ‘suicide bombers’ before, including the story of the two young daughters of a Karachi banker who were reportedly ‘picked up’ in Swat in June 2005, and remained ‘missing’ for many months amidst allegations that they had been trained as suicide bombers. The girls ‘reappeared’ early in 2006, and little more has been heard of the matter since. The possibility of other women being used as suicide bombers has also been discussed, and most recently came up after a ‘burqa’-clad man, initially believed to be a woman, blew himself up a few weeks ago in Bannu.
But now that a woman has actually carried out a suicide bombing, at a check post in Peshawar’s highly-secured military cantonment area and near the offices of a sensitive agency, it is clear that the already-immense security threat faced in the country has suddenly multiplied. The fact of life in the country is that, largely due to cultural norms, women are able to avoid many of the checks that men are more regularly subjected to. It is also true that, many times, vehicles occupied by women are not stopped at check points for a search or other scrutiny. The same immunity enjoyed by women has been used effectively by organizations engaged in militancy at other times and in other places. Algerian freedom fighters, battling French colonial rule in the late 1950s and early 1960s, used veiled women activists to enter public places to carry out terrorist attacks. Some reports suggest that it was for the same reasons that the LTTE deployed a woman for the 1991 assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was killed when the bomber blew herself up as she approached the leader with a garland.
It would seem then that the extremist organizations, which in Pakistan have been so successful in motivating and sending out suicide bombers across the country, are too choosing women to carry out the same evil deeds. The licence available to women to pass unhindered through various security checks, particularly since female staff is not always available, makes them the ideal candidates to carry out attacks of this kind. Mercifully, the bombing carried out by the still unidentified woman in Peshawar claimed no lives other than her own. But the fact that she carried out the blast underscores the success of organizations engaged in such crimes in recruiting women, and, as such, draws attention to the need to alter standard security protocol in the country before another such bombing takes policemen on duty by surprise and adds to the terrible loss of life already inflicted by suicide attacks that have taken place across the country.