Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

At a time when writers all over the world are dipping their pens in outrage about Washington's role in the world, it is worth pointing out that the same scribes have been conspicuously silent on the death of Fazal Wahab Wahab.

Fazal Wahab Wahab, an author and an outspoken critic of radical Islamic clerics, was shot dead in the hill resort of Mingora, in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province last Tuesday. According to Amnesty International, Pakistani police failed to give him any protection although he had complained that he was receiving death threats. Two years ago, Wahab's book Mullah ka Kirdar ("The Mullah's Role") was banned, and local clerics followed up with a religious ruling declaring him a non-believer. Last year, he published a book critical of Osama Bin Laden and his Taleban hosts. His forthcoming book, Mullah ka Anjam ("The Mullah's Fate") was set to make serious allegations of criminal activities against close relatives of local political leaders. The North-West Frontier Province is ruled by a six-party Islamist alliance, which won elections in October on an anti-US platform pledging to enforce strict Islamic laws.

Searching for the truth in Pakistan is a deadly job. Daniel Pearl, and now Fazal Wahab Wahab have joined the list of those who have paid the ultimate price for being writers in a place where an ideology that will not tolerate criticism controls the life people every minute of their day and encourages its followers to commit vile deeds.

Diarist of the day: Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 27 January 1933

"I resent in a clipping, 'Father of the dead child.' Dead child -- a waxen child stretched out. No -- the child who died.

I resent 'They lost a child too' -- as though that were the same. It is never the same. Death to you is not death, not obituary notices and quiet and mourning, sermons and elegies and prayers, coffins and graves and worldly platitudes. It is not the most common experiences in life -- the only certainty. It is not the oldest thing we know. It is not what happened to Caesar and Dante and Milton and Mary Queen of Scots, to the soldiers in all the wars, to the sick in the plagues, to public men yesterday. It never happened before -- what happened today to you. It has only happened to your little boy?"