Don't blackmail me into coming to Quetta, PM tells Hazara mourners
Promises to visit the Hazara community as soon as they bury the slain miners
Rizwan Shehzad January 08, 2021
Prime Minister Imran Khan. PHOTO: SCREENGRAB
ISLAMABAD:
Prime Minister Imran Khan announced on Friday that he will not be blackmailed into coming to Quetta and would visit the mourners, including women and children, sitting along with bodies of 11 labourers in extreme weather conditions near the Western Bypass area close to Hazara Town only when they bury the dead.
The prime minister was of the view that linking the burial with his prior visit made no sense, adding that no one blackmails a sitting prime minister like this anywhere in the world.
“If this condition is accepted then everyone will blackmail the prime minister,” the premier said, adding that a gang of robbers – the opposition parties – is also trying to blackmail him for the last two-and-a-half years.
“If you bury the dead today, I assure you that I will visit Quetta today,” PM Imran announced while speaking as a chief guest at the launching ceremony of Special Technology Zones Authority in Islamabad.
The prime minister went on to add that all the demands of the bereaved families and people protesting in Quetta have already been accepted except the condition that they would bury the dead only when PM visits them.
“Do not put a condition that makes no sense,” Imran said.
In his speech, PM Imran once again accused India of spreading chaos in Pakistan, saying he has been saying it since March 2019 that “India is fully involved in spreading chaos” and wants to spread sectarian violence in the country.
He lauded the intelligence agencies for averting four major terrorism attacks since he has informed his cabinet and openly expressed about India’s involvement in terrorism activities in Pakistan.
Also Read: No decision yet on PM’s visit to Quetta
Armed attackers had slaughtered 11 miners near a mine site in Balochistan's Machh coalfield area on Sunday. The militant Islamic State group claimed the responsibility of the gruesome attack. Since then thousands of Hazaras have been protesting while sitting along with the coffins of their loved ones.
In his speech, PM Imran expressed that Hazara was the most targeted community in the country; he has visited them many times in the past and witnessed their fear, adding that “no community has been oppressed the way the Hazara community has been oppressed over the years.”
Deeming the murder of 11 coalminers brutal, he said, all this is part of the conspiracy hatched by India which has been highlighted many times since March. “It’s a big attempt to spread sectarian divide,” he maintained.
Expressing that the government was aware of the sufferings of the Hazara community, Imran said that he first sent the interior minister and later two other federal ministers to Quetta to tell the protestors that the government was with them and it will provide every kind of compensation as “bread earners” were killed in Machh, Balochistan.
Earlier, PM Imran took to micro-blogging site Twitter to reassure the Hazara families that he was “cognizant of their suffering and their demands” after they refused to end their protest until PM himself visits them and listens to their demands.
However, PM Imran has reiterated that the bereaved families should first bury their loved ones and only then he would visit them. The PTI-led coalition government has been feeling the heat of the Hazara community’s sit-in Quetta and seemed to be thrown on the defensive as it was repeatedly challenged by the opposition over its slow response to the massacre in Machh.
“You cannot blackmail the prime minister of a country like this,” Imran Khan said on Friday while referring to a demand of the protesting Hazara community that he visit them at the Quetta sit-in before they bury the 11 colliers massacred by terrorists last week.
tribune.com.pk
Imran Khan is over his head, and his attitude really comes out in this. He should go visit them, instead of meeting with actors from a Turkish Drama, so that he can be there in the Namaz-e-Jenazah and feel the pain that those people are feeling, maybe then he will take the worsening terrorism in Balochistan a little more seriously.
In New Zealand, the premier visits victims' families after the terrorist attack immediately. Expresses solidarity, and actually shows a reaction to deal with the terrorist attacks and curb hate crimes. But in Pakistan, the premier believes that the victims of terrorism are blackmailing the premier. Just wow.
Edit: A person who wants to establish a 'Riyasat-e-Medina,' but cannot even fathom what any of the four enlightened caliphs would have done in his position, that person is a joke and a complete joke.
Even more of a clown, if he believes that some poor people, from one of the most persecuted minorities in Pakistan, are playing politics and blackmailing, using their own loved ones bodies in the freezing cold temperature, the 'mighty premiere' who has better things to do, like, ironically, visit Ertugrul Drama actors.
