Mohammed Hanif: On Thursday, when eight [Hazaras] were gunned down while buying fruit and vegetables, Quetta’s police was quick to absolve themselves. “We offered them escort, and they just didn’t tell us.” Blaming the victim is the oldest sport in the country but here the law-enforcers seemed to be saying that if Hazaras are so fond of becoming martyrs, who can stop them? Haji Abdul Qayyum Changezi, the head of Hazara Qaumi Jirga and a survivor of many Hazara massacres, still thinks there is a way to stop it. Earlier this month, in his Hazara Town office, he was surrounded by fellow survivors. A man had lost his entire family. “Yes all of them,” the man shook his head and refused to say anything more. Here was a transporter who had lost all his business. An eight-year-old kid with a scar across his face who lost his mother in the Mastung bus massacre. “I was sitting in the front of the bus playing with my brother, my mother was at the back,” was all he could remember. Homes in Hazra Town were full of teenagers who couldn’t go to university and their parents who couldn’t go to their jobs while amateurish looking gunmen sat on streets corners trying to do DIY security. Haji Changezi tapped on a pile of national Urdu dailies published from Quetta and pointed to headlines that he had highlighted; in various poetic forms inciting the murder of Shia Hazras. “Whenever these headlines appear, an attack on our community follows. Can anyone stop these headlines?” A young man in the office opened the Facebook page of a banned sectarian organisation and played a clip from a rally held recently in Quetta stadium. A singer sang a composition declaring all Shias kafir. Speakers following him did the same in blood-curdling prose. More here.