Songs of Blood and Sword

by Fatima Bhutto

  A: All right, forget the small tank. You got any fighter aircraft? M: You pressed the right button again, Altaf (no wonder they call you Pir). I have a dozen F-16s parked in my garage. They are yours for the asking.

  A: I don’t know why they call you a terrorist. You don’t seem to have a clue as to what this business is all about. F-16s are

  ineffective in urban areas. What I need are B52s capable of saturation bombing.

  M: Er, actually yes I do have one B52 parked on 70 Clifton’s roof. But it’s the only one I have so I cannot give it to you for good. However, I can lend it to you for a couple of months provided you promise not to wipe out Larkana with it.

  A: Promise. Scout’s honour.

  M: Another thing, for God’s sake don’t go telling Adnan Adil about all this.

  A: You bet. But on one condition: you promise to let me test-drive your nuclear-powered submarine parked in front of your Hawksbay beach hut and I won’t tell a soul anything. Cross my heart.

  Yours,

  Mir Murtaza Bhutto

  Karachi

  As the year came to a close, however, the government’s violence against the Muhajirs would become increasingly aggressive and Karachi would become the centre of the state’s bloody war against their political opponents, the MQM. The violence that Benazir’s government would unleash on Karachi during her second term had its roots in her first stint in power. The MQM was first pushed into existence in the 1980s by General Zia’s dictatorship in an attempt to break the PPP’s strength in Sindh. The party’s dubious origins aside, it grew into a political reality strengthened by the strong support of Karachi’s middle class, who rallied around the MQM’s secular, ethnic, anti-feudal (but very pro-industrialist and oligarchy friendly) leanings.

  In 1988 Benazir entered into a coalition with her former enemies and formed her first government with the help of the MQM. Her ’88 alliance with the MQM was an uneasy one and was continually rocked by Muhajir–Sindhi violence in Karachi. Benazir’s inability to quell the violence and her refusal to admit any responsibility resulted in the MQM quitting the coalition.

  Benazir was dismissed shortly after the MQM walked out of the alliance. The MQM, she believed, had sold her out. She may have been right. The 1990 elections that brought Benazir’s then nemesis Sharif to power saw the MQM appearing on the side of the new victors and ready to perform their role as willing allies once more.

  In 1993, however, the MQM was without establishment strength. It was the second-largest party seated in the Sindh Assembly but had lost its power to ‘make or break’ governments on account of its lack of ministries and national clout.5 The MQM, desperate not to be deprived of its strength, turned into a militant street party and launched an armed movement in Karachi to wrest back its grassroots power and maintain its grip on the city. Benazir, already antagonized by the MQM, seized the opportunity to fight the party that had betrayed her. And she was prepared to fight dirty.

  Instead of entrusting the judiciary to tackle the criminal and political thuggery of MQM, she bypassed the courts and directed her Interior Minister, General Naserullah Babar, to teach the MQM a lesson. General Babar, a cruel man with shady Afghan connections said to be so strong that he often publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘my boys’, launched an attack on the MQM and Karachi’s Muhajirs so brutal that even its name, ‘Operation Clean-Up’, does not do justice to the level of violence the state employed.

  Karachi’s security forces, largely the police and the elite Ranger squads, became an uncontrollable force. Anyone who didn’t fall into line with the Sindh government led by the PPP was declared a ‘terrorist’ or a criminal. The MQM became known simply as a party of terrorists and all Muhajirs as ‘supporters of Altaf’. Altaf Hussain is undoubtedly a man with a criminal past, but he is not the sole – or most credible – representative of the Muhajir community by any means. The most infamous of the methods employed by Operation Clean-Up was the notorious ‘police encounter’, extrajudicial killings disguised as shoot-outs. Assassinations, torture, mutilation and blackmail were also popular with Karachi’s security forces charged with ‘cleaning up’ the city.

  The violence of Operation Clean-Up was so extreme it paralysed the city for the two years that it was officially in force. Schools shut down, certain neighbourhoods became out of bounds, and the economy shrank to such an extent that the ‘flight of domestic capital due to the violence was Rs. 102 billion in the first three months of 1995 alone.’6 Karachi had never before, and has never since, been so crippled by random and arbitrary displays of violence or so ably brought to its knees by the unchecked powers of the state and the police.

  I remember weeks would pass when Zulfi and I would be stuck at home, school shut owing to the violence in the city. When things quietened down again we’d return to our classes, making up for lost time with lessons on Saturdays and Sundays and extra minutes added to our regular school time.

  Once, as I rushed to my eighth-grade French class with Madame Hadi, a Francophile who had taught at the school for years, wondering how I was going to explain my incomplete homework assignment that had completely slipped my mind the night before, the sound of gunshots rang out. The slap of sneakers on KAS’s cement floors, the hum of students going to class, the sound of lockers opening and closing – all disappeared around us, penetrated by the burst of gunfire.

  KAS was an open-plan campus-style school. The shooting could have come from anywhere. Everyone, all of us middle- and highschool students, froze. Finally, a tenth-grader, a tall and lanky boy I quite liked at the time, yelled at us. ‘Get down!’ he screamed. ‘Everybody get down now!’

  I didn’t want to seem afraid, not in front of the tenth-grader, so I took my time crouching down outside Madame Hadi’s classroom. The shooting sounded as though it was coming from outside the school’s main gate and the shots were sporadic. We lay on the cold floor for some fifteen minutes before the sound of shooting receded. I finished my French homework on the floor, trying stupidly to appear nonchalant and unaffected by the shooting, even though my hands were shaking.

  That afternoon as we ate lunch on the long dining table in 70 Clifton, I told Papa what had happened at school. He was not at all entertained by my story of (a) not having finished my French homework as assigned and (b) my feigned coolness at the shooting.

  School wasn’t safe, but at least it was open and functioning again. I remember a three-week period earlier in the year when I was kept at home because of the shooting and rioting in the city. I was not missing more school, I warned Papa sternly; I had been bored to death sitting at home during those earlier three weeks. He had already sent Mummy, Zulfi and me to Damascus for a quarter of the school term (which I secretly delighted in, meeting up again with my old school friends) because Karachi had become too dangerous. OK, Papa said, you don’t want to miss school? Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.

  The next morning our car had bulletproof vests taped to the back windows. Papa had turned Joonam’s old brown Mercedes into a makeshift bulletproof vehicle. I had a fit. ‘How can I go to school like that?’ I moaned. ‘People will laugh at me!’ I had no real con-ception of just how dangerous our lives were. They couldn’t be real, all those threats. Nothing was that bad, was it? Papa said he’d only move the vests from the windows if I wore them instead. ‘But my head will be exposed!’ I complained. I may have been a self-conscious brat but I didn’t want to die, myths or no myths. We reached a weird settlement. Sometimes I wore the vests, sometimes they hung over the windows. Nobody laughed me. Boys ran to ask me just how much Kevlar was in the vests and to ask what sort of impact my bulletproof windows could withstand.

  A year into Operation Clean-Up, Herald Magazine, a local publication that was printed in English and thus less censored than the more widely read Urdu magazines, launched a thorough and hard-hitting investigation into the Prime Minister’s programme of genocidal violence in Karachi. The Herald report is thirteen pages long, filled with specific police encou
nters that a distinguished and respected investigative journalist, Ghulam Hasnain, helped by Hasan Zaidi, examined, taking apart the official version of events carefully and thoroughly.

  The issue, whose cover featured a grisly photograph of the supposed MQM terrorist Naeem Sharri, who had been killed by the police, concentrated on the operation as it moved into its second year.

  Herald Magazine revealed that Benazir had attended a political seminar in Karachi and had been angrily questioned over the ‘government’s apparent policy of eliminating suspected “terrorists” by summarily executing them’. In response, the Prime Minister ‘praised the heroic efforts of the security forces and countered the allegations of extrajudicial killings by claiming that out of the more than 2,000 people killed last year [1995] only 55 were “terrorists” of the “Altaf Group” and that all of them were killed in real gun battles with the Rangers or the police’. ‘She could not have been more wrong,’ the article stated.7 The Prime Minister’s fuzzy logic and her fervent praise for the operation make clear her role; she was aware of what was happening on the ground. She was aware that Babar had turned Karachi into a killing field.

  In 1994, 1,113 people were killed in what Herald Magazine called a ‘bloody trail’ that had turned Karachi into a ‘virtual city of death’.8 The city was on fire. The police acted with impunity and brazenly killed those who got in their way. No arrests were made – not legally at least; warrants were not produced in the event of detentions, those who were seized by the security forces were hardly ever taken before the courts.

  Top-level officials in the government spoke anonymously to the Herald about the state’s decision to target their enemies by assassination rather than through legal action and parroted the government’s official line. ‘Look at what happened when we tried to seek justice through the courts,’ a senior police official told Hasnain and Zaidi. ‘We used to arrest these terrorists but the courts let them go.’ Another well-placed policeman defended Operation Clean-Up by insisting that the extrajudicial murders were actually ‘the most cost-effective way of tackling crime’.9

  Publicly, of course, ‘there is an outright denial of any such policy, since it amounts to premeditated murder by the state’.10 Furthermore, to admit that gunning their enemies down was their modus operandi would openly ‘express the executive’s ultimate contempt for the judiciary, which in theory at least, is supposed to balance the powers of the state’.11

  Naserullah Babar, the retired army general who ran the operation, spoke to the Herald, attacking it for its coverage. ‘I don’t know why you should talk all the time about people who in any case have a large number of killings to their name,’ General Babar said. ‘Every man killed in an encounter had a record of murder.’12

  ‘Encounters’ were elaborate police set-ups that always followed the same pattern. The police or Rangers would claim to turn up at location X with the intent of arresting terrorist Y who would inevitably ‘fire’ at the police and so had to be killed on the spot rather than be taken in. It bears noting that the dead terrorist was usually shot very precisely, often in the head or the chest. They were never shot in the back, for example, which might have given credence to the claim that they were running away or trying to evade arrest. Their bodies often bore countless bullet wounds, evidence of torture, broken bones and other signs that their attackers had mutilated them. Witnesses, other than those within the police contingent, could never be found to testify that an actual gun battle had taken place. The police officers involved in ‘encounters’ were rarely investigated, internally or otherwise, for their excessive use of force – only twenty cases of internal investigation into encounters and deaths in police custody were opened and the results were never made public13 – and none were ever punished for their actions.14

  In 1995, Karachi’s death toll rose considerably: 2,095 people were killed under Operation Clean-Up.15 The Herald published a list of people killed by the law enforcement agencies from the official start of the operation in July 1995 to March 1996. The tally is disconcerting. Executions take place almost daily, several murders per day. The victims, all men, are described by name when known or by epithets such as ‘unknown (alleged bandit)’ or ‘so and so (MQM)’.16 Except for a few cases of alleged carjackers or thieves, the official list confirmed by the police is exclusively MQM victims. As always, the numbers on the police list and the number of actual dead bodies varied hugely.

  The Prime Minister and General Babar, who both played for sympathy by dredging up stories of how nasty the dead men had been and how much better the city was now that they were gone, rejected the moral ambiguity of the state. ‘We are all idealists when it doesn’t hurt us,’ General Babar explained in his interview, ‘but when it directly affects us, we have totally different values.’17

  Hasnain and Zaidi went so far as to visit mortuaries to see the victims for themselves. They discovered that ‘extreme forms of torture’ had been used on many of the victims, ‘with detainees being burnt with cigarettes and iron rods, beaten, cut with razors, having their flesh gouged out and their bones broken’. The mutilated bodies were, they said, ‘the norm rather than the exception’.18 The investigation detailed how thoroughly outside the parameters of the law the police were operating. Operation Clean-Up was murder sanctioned by the state. Now any and all acts of police brutality and illegality could be condoned as ‘politically necessary’.

  Karachi’s police were getting away with murder. The elite Rangers squads had even more freedom, fearing no repercussions from the law. When Rangers picked someone up, since they were not registered to specific stations or neighbourhoods as the police were, there was virtually no record. ‘While the police also regularly detain people illegally,’ the Herald team wrote, ‘the mere fact that a thana [police station] is a public place makes it nominally easier to trace those arrested and usually – unless they are killed immediately – their arrest is admitted by the police in three or four days. Rangers’ premises, on the other hand, are considered to be “security” establishments and are barred to the public.’19

  Legally, Rangers were not empowered to perform arrests – only to maintain order. Tasleemul Hasan Farooqui, a former MQM councillor, was – according to the Herald investigation – ‘one of the lucky ones’ who left the Rangers custody alive. ‘He was dumped in a shopping area in Buffer Zone after being tortured, during which hot iron rods were inserted into his ear and he was slashed by knives on his back and on his inner leg.’20 Farooqui had no criminal background; no allegations of ‘terrorism’ were levelled against him. He was a political worker. After he was released, Farooqui moved his family out of Karachi. No Rangers were questioned for their role in his detention and torture.

  Hasnain and Zaidi witnessed a doctor at Jinnah Hospital, one of Karachi’s two main emergency hospitals known for dealing with police cases, conduct four autopsies in twenty-five minutes.21 Post-mortems of police victims were conducted ‘with scant regard for the facts’. Often, victims’ bodies were not brought to medical facilities until hours after their murder, allowing the corpses to decompose and forensic evidence to be destroyed. There was often no effort to conduct proper medical examinations on the victims; ‘the MLOs (Medical Legal Officers) usually just make an incision on the chest and then sew it up to give the impression that a post-mortem has been done.’22 A gruesome photograph accompanies the authors’ assertions.

  The Herald journalists, digging further into the role of the medical community, uncovered more distressing facts: out of the fifty-five MLOs and eight assistant police surgeons in Karachi at the time of Operation Clean-Up, not a single one was trained in forensic pathology – a basic requirement of doctors performing post-mortems.23 The nine doctors in the Sindh Health Department with forensic training, and therefore qualified to conduct autopsies in Karachi’s bloody 1990s, did not have sufficient safarish or political connections to land themselves a well-paid MLO posting. In addition, Karachi’s only forensic laboratory at the time – with a staff o
f over a hundred people – did not have a single forensics expert on its staff.24

  Close to 3,000 people would be killed on the streets of Karachi before Operation Clean-Up was declared successfully completed. These are, of course, the official numbers – they are the numbers of the body bags that had names on them, of the corpses who had relatives to identify and retrieve them for burial. There must be others, unnamed and unclaimed victims of the state’s war on their citizens. People told me there were parts of Karachi, in Korangi and places like it, where bodies were left to rot out in the open, serving as gruesome warnings.

  Naeem Sharri’s bloodied face appears on the cover of the Herald ’s issue on Operation Clean-Up. He was, at the time the magazine went to print, the state’s latest and most notorious victim. Sharri was a wanted man, one of MQM’s most feared figures; he was accused of numerous counts of murder among many other crimes and had a price of 5 million rupees on his head. On 11 March 1996 Sharri and a companion were killed in a police encounter. The Rangers at the helm of the operation claimed that the two men had resisted arrest and fired at them – a standard excuse – and that the Rangers had to fire back to protect themselves, resulting in a deadly gun battle during which four Rangers were injured. However, in the course of their investigation the Herald journalists uncovered a more sinister reality. The Rangers, alleged Hasnain and Zaidi, were hit by ‘their own highpowered bullets ricocheting off surrounding walls’ while Sharri and his companion were killed in a premeditated manner.25 No evidence matched the Rangers claim of crossfire and photographs of Sharri’s body, showed that the skin on his torso and arms had been scorched off, with the flesh on the left side of his body torn off his bones. He had not died as a result of a simple gun battle.

  Sharri and his associate were, by all accounts, hardened thugs and ruthless criminals. That is not in dispute. But even hardened thugs have the basic right to a trial, and deserve the right to defend themselves before a court of law. Friends of my aunt and her supporters in general attacked me when I wrote about Operation Clean-Up in Pakistani newspapers or brought up Benazir’s dismal human rights record. ‘You don’t know,’ they would say condescendingly, ‘they were monsters.’ ‘This is what we should be doing in Swat now,’ they would urge. ‘We need more Clean-Ups.’ The government is currently doing exactly that.