Sisters freed after 15 years (04082008)

Two sisters were held captive in solitary confinement by none other than their own brother for 15 years in the walled city of Lahore. Lahore has become in the past twenty years the hub of fashion, art and all that is chic in Pakistan, but lurking within the shadows of the high palaces are the sordid stories which are too shocking to get over. The people can hardly forget the crimes of Javed Iqbal, the child serial killer, who slaughtered hundreds of kids and then destroyed their remains in acid, this heinous crime went unnoticed by both the governments (read police) and the society for a long period of time and hundreds of innocent children became nameless victims.
Similarly, the ordeal of the two sisters has gone on for fifteen years before being found out, this reflects the weakness of our social system. People are getting away with heinous crimes for decades before they are found out accidentally or through some other freak incident.
In a village or community living environment this sort of thing cannot go on because every one knows every one else but in an environment where no one knows their neighbours or even relatives every man has become an island, with the fall out of rising crime rate and erosion of the social values.
However, given that the society cannot change over night, the government needs to become more aware of its responsibilities and try and become more efficient at detecting and solving crimes, which can lead to putting the criminals away. But for this to happen the police need to be given more resources and purged of the rampant corruption that has become the hallmark of the police force across the country, especially in major urban cities like Karachi. Police alone though will not be able to deliver because the police are only part of a bigger system, the other more important parts are the office of the public prosecutor and the courts where the proceedings take place. Sadly, each one of these institutions is over worked, under paid and massively corrupt. Therefore, the people turn to alternate means.
Either people take law into their own hands or ignore it completely or they turn to elements like the Red Mosque and Hafsa seminary brigades for quick justice. It is already too late because Taliban, the alternate legal and the policing system, have become far too powerful and are now challenging the government openly in the settled areas like Swat and D.I.Khan, while they have started sending warning letters to the people in the other urban centres of the country. This is the thin end of the wedge and our premier intelligence agencies and the Establishment are deeply engaged in a battle to regain their own power by wrangling it away from the democratically elected government. An operation clean up is needed in the country but its logical start is not in FATA or Swat. The operation has to start from Islamabad and end in FATA.