In an impassioned appeal, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, called upon the Pakistan Government to do more to protect its minorities even as he lauded the assassinated Pakistan Minorities Affairs Minister Shahbaz Bhatti as a "martyr."
Bhatti was killed by gunmen in Islamabad on Wednesday due to his opposition of the controversial blasphemy law, and his championing of the case of Aasia Bibi, a Pakastani Christian woman condemned to death for allegedly falling foul of this blasphemy law. Bhatti was the only Christian minister in the Pakistan cabinet and his work resulted in numerous death threats made upon him. The Pakistan Taliban later took credit for his murder.
Writing for the London's Times, the Archbishop said that Pakistan was being blackmailed and bullied by religious extremists, and that those who supported Bhatti’s killing "inhabit a world of fantasy, shot through with paranoid anxiety.”
The Archbishop went on to say that there was a faction in Pakistan, which was "wholly uninterested in justice and due process of law, concerned only with promoting an inhuman pseudo-religious tyranny."
Dr. Williams urged for Pakistan to genuinely debate the blasphemy law, because "part of the problem is the weakening of properly traditional Islam by the populist illiteracies of modern extremism."
Bhatti died "for all practical purposes as a martyr," said Dr Williams in his conciliatory conclusion, "Not simply for his Christian faith, but for a vision shared between Pakistani Christians and Muslims."