From the Anglican Communion News Service:
Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams writing in The Times newspaper:
In the history of some countries there comes a period when political and factional murder becomes almost routine — Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, Germany and its neighbours in the early 1930s. It has invariably been the precursor of a breakdown of legal and political order and of long-term suffering for a whole population. And last week, with the killing of Shahbaz Bhatti, the Minister for Minorities, Pakistan has taken a further step down this catastrophic road.
To those who actually support such atrocities, there is little to say. They inhabit a world of fantasy, shot through with paranoid anxiety. As the shocked responses from so many Muslims in this country and elsewhere make plain, their actions are as undermining of Koranic ethics as they are of rational politics.
But to those who recognise something truly dreadful going on in their midst — to the majority in Pakistan who have elected a government that, whatever its dramatic shortcomings, is pledged to resist extremism — we have surely to say, “Do not imagine that this can be ‘managed’ or tolerated”.
The government of Pakistan and the great majority of its population are, in effect, being blackmailed. The widespread and deep desire for Pakistan to be what it was meant to be, for justice to be guaranteed for all, and for some of the most easily abused laws on the statute book to be reviewed is being paralysed by the threat of murder. The case of Asia Bibi, so prominent in the debates of recent months, and the connected murder of the Governor of the Punjab, make it crystal clear that there is a faction in Pakistan wholly uninterested in justice and due process of law, concerned only with promoting an inhuman pseudo-religious tyranny.
Bhatti, a Christian cabinet member was murdered last week and buried on Friday. The New York Times reports:
Mr. Bhatti had served as the minister for minorities and dedicated his life to religious tolerance in this increasingly radicalized Muslim country. His killing on Wednesday underlined the anxieties among Western governments that extremists were using targeted killings as a way to move Pakistan toward an Islamic state and were doing so with impunity.
Mr. Bhatti’s assassination followed the killing in January of an even more prominent politician, Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab. The men campaigned for the reform of draconian blasphemy laws that are often used to persecute minorities, particularly Christians. Mr. Taseer was killed by his government bodyguard, who was widely hailed in Pakistani society after he confessed.
Diplomats at Mr. Bhatti’s funeral at Our Lady of Fatima Church said they feared that the minister was killed on information provided by his government security detail. A branch of the Pakistani Taliban based in Punjab, where militants control many of the schools and mosques, claimed responsibility for the killing.