We condemn Kabul bomb attack
The road to reconciliation and some form of peace in Afghanistan is plunged into uncertainty once more with a savage suicide bomb attack on an education centre where mainly teenagers were studying. A week before Eid-ul-Azha, the second major Muslim religious event, such a barbaric act leaves us shocked and outraged.
Afghanistan had been in tumult for more than a decade and public life is always in jeopardy because militants and extremists, believing in a perverted ideology, regularly carry out suicide missions, undermining all efforts for a semblance of social cohesion required for harmonious co-existence.
The recent attack was in a Shia neighbourhood, a community which has been demonized, oppressed and targeted by Sunni radicals. A profoundly bigoted outlook deems the Shias as non-Muslims, terming their way of performing Islam, heretical. Its deeply unsettling that religious schism continues to motivate people to carry out gross acts of violence.
Afghanistan, which has been in a constant state of turbulence since the Soviet invasion in the late seventies and Western interference at the turn of the century, needs to cultivate tolerance at all levels, with communities standing up to blinkered interpretations of faith that justify the taking of lives.
Those killed in the recent suicide blast were youngsters and the future of the country. With such instability, the promising young, feeling that their lives are in danger, may opt to leave the country and undertake perilous boat journeys on high seas to end up at detention centres abroad. The UN and other foreign agencies are working to create a platform for dialogue through which the government can reach a consensus with the warring tribes.
However, there has to be a determined desire from disparate clans because no foreign power or agency can stabilize a nation unless the people within her feel the need to act to reach a compromise. The fact that a militant walked into a school and detonated a bomb to kill youngsters is proof that extremist indoctrination is deeply ingrained in the country.
Education plus sensitizing of people in the remote areas are of paramount importance with the understanding that violence only breeds more destruction and can hardly carve a path towards reconciliation. Realistically speaking and taking into consideration the ongoing internal conflict, the best possible approach is through dialogue. The UN has to take the effort, calling on warring sides to sit for talks to chalk out a way forward.
