On the flip side, the more aggressive Pashtuns and Punjabis united in self-defense. I was assigned by my newspaper to cover their united front – the Punjabi Pashtun Ittehad (PPI). It was a miniscule, shadowy group, mostly limited to press statements. The PPI chief – a hefty, burly man named Ghulam Sarwar Awan – called me late in the evenings at my office to deride the MQM. It was an ineffective gesture of the sort we joked was made by “newspaper tigers.”
While the MQM and Pashtun-Punjabi animosity dragged on, urban middle-class Sindhis had begun to speak out against the MQM. In the forefront was the Jeay Sindh Taraqi Pasand Party (or, the Progressive Party of Sindh) that was subsequently charged with the September 30 massacre. Their urban-based organization was however a cry in the wilderness, given that most Sindhis were peasants who lived in widely scattered villages.
Historically, Sindhis have shunned the ethnic bait. Instead, they have been most attracted to the federation politics espoused by the Bhuttos – first Zulfikar Ali and then his daughter, Benazir. Although founded in Sindh, the Pakistan Peoples Party has from its inception been inclusive of all ethnicities, with a single espoused goal of uplifting the lot of the common person.
An Early Karachi Discord
By December 1988, when Benazir Bhutto was first sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan, the ethnic voting blocs were firmly established. Sindhis who generally lived in the rural areas of Sindh voted for the PPP while the more urbane Mohajirs voted for the MQM. It is the pattern that dominates the politics of Sindh and impacts on the whole nation.
Still, as Benazir was sworn in for the first time, the optimism among all ethnic groups helped put the September 30 carnage behind them. A monumental Karachi Accord was signed between the MQM and PPP to form a coalition government in Sindh. It was a rare sight to see Mohajirs and Sindhis embrace each other and distribute sweets in the city. I had spent the last 3½ years counting the victims of ethnic violence in white shrouds but peace had finally arrived.
And yet, there was a surreal quality in the MQM-PPP embrace. On that historic night, as a fellow journalist and I drove around the city, we looked on in wonder as die-hard enemies greeted each other as brothers. My colleague, the more cynical of the two of us, turned to me and said, “How long do you think the honeymoon will last?”
The answer came quickly. The 1988 elections, which launched Benazir Bhutto had also given the MQM a huge mandate from its Urdu-speaking constituencies in Karachi and Hyderabad – making it a formidable force in the parliament and on the streets.
Seated in the opera-like gallery of the Sindh Assembly, we journalists witnessed how legislators from the PPP and the MQM behaved after over a decade of military rule. Barely had a few months elapsed before there were walkouts by MQM legislators, angry at the failure of the Bhutto government to fulfill their promises. The PPP legislators dithered but appeared helpless.
By 1989, the MQM had matured into the nation’s third largest political party, with the ability to take on the PPP. The Karachi accord went out of the door. As MQM legislators resigned, the city plunged into its worst state of mayhem yet. Every day the MQM leadership called for strikes, which were followed by looting, arson and murder. A pall of thick black smoke hung over most parts of the city as Mohajir militants exchanged fire with the police.
Each time the MQM gave a call for “wheel jam” strikes, Karachi shivered. Public vehicles stopped running, their drivers afraid of getting torched. Since most people relied on public transportation, the strike turned Karachi into a ghost town. Keeping the “PRESS” sign boldly displayed, I drove through a city under curfew. Karachi looked as it might have looked at partition: empty of people and overwhelmed by dangerously heavy and chaotic traffic.
On strike day, violence flared up in most parts of Karachi as the police fought running battles with the MQM workers. The MQM loyalists lay in wait for the police and ambushed them as soon as they entered their localities. Come evening and people telephoned to ask about the “score.” They did not mean the cricket score. It was short for how many people had been killed that day.
As the city plunged into ethnic turmoil, Benazir Bhutto summoned a small group of us journalists to Bilawal House, named after her first-born son. We sat around a wooden oval table, where the youthful prime minister looked more somber than usual. Benazir had barely been in office for a year when her government had begun to totter.
Apparently, the ethnic violence that had engulfed Karachi was only the tip of the iceberg. Benazir had offended the military by replacing the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Hameed Gul with a retired officer who was close to her father: Shamsur Rahman Kallue.
That mistake would cost her dearly. Hameed Gul had emerged as a powerful player of the Cold War, when the US used his office to funnel billions of dollars worth of weapons to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.
With ethnic unrest all around in Karachi, Benazir told us frankly she suspected that the state was trying to destabilize her government. “How can I control the intelligence agencies?” she asked us, her “inner group” of journalists.
The meeting was an eye-opener. Up until now, I had believed that the elected head of Pakistan was all-powerful. I had also witnessed the overwhelming popular support for Benazir across the country. But now, the elected prime minister was telling us she did not have control over the army’s intelligence agencies.
That early encounter became a road map to my understanding of why Pakistan had been unable to develop into a stable democracy. The over-indulged state had, since the creation of the nation, taught political leaders one simple lesson: where they fell out with the military, they could be shaken down like dates from a palm tree.
September 30 Accused Go on Trial
Benazir’s first shaky government was overthrown in August 1990 and Nawaz Sharif replaced her as prime minister. A year later, the state agencies brought to trial the men accused in the September 30 massacre. Some of these leaders of the Jeay Sindh Taraqi Pasand Party (JSTPP) had already been arrested under Benazir’s government, while others who fled underground were declared absconders.
In 1991, I began to visit the Karachi Central Jail to cover the daily trial of the JSTPP, led by its stocky, pugnacious chief of Baloch origin, Dr Qadir Magsi. The nationalist group was vocal in its opposition to the MQM. Their leaders came to the Karachi Press Club, armed guards in tow, to raise a red flag about how Sindhis suffered unreported indignities at the hands of the militant MQM. It was a sensitive subject in a city increasingly controlled by the MQM and one that needed to be reported gingerly.
The party’s leadership had ferreted out my Sindhi roots and telephoned me from their headquarters in Hyderabad to get me to write considerately on behalf of oppressed Sindhis. I listened and reported, without losing perspective. With my front line view, I had seen Gen. Zia ul Haq’s military play off one ethnic group against another to foment violence and avoid becoming the target. The Sindhi militants could not convince me that violence was the answer.
In 1991, it intrigued me that the accused of the 30 September massacre arrived with a “devil may care” attitude that suggested that they were political prisoners rather than criminals. Their treatment by the state authorities implied otherwise. They were herded into a big cage, handcuffed and restrained through bars, which separated them from the judge, lawyers and journalists. We had been told they were “dangerous.” Certainly, the accusation that they had mowed down over a hundred people made me scrutinize them carefully.
Figure 4 JSTPP chief Qadir Magsi addresses a rally in Larkana, June 12, 2009 (Dawn photo).
Once the iron gates of the prison clanged behind us, we were in a separate world. My daily presence in the prisoners’ court made me part of the world that I had begun to cover. As the trial proceeded, some of the accused smiled and gesticulated to me in a rather friendly manner. They had read my daily coverage of the 30 September massacre in Dawn and wanted me to understand that it was their ideological motivation that drove them to “defend” the peo
ple of Sindh.
The lawyer for the accused, Qurban Ali Chohan traveled regularly from Hyderabad for the trial. He quickly introduced himself to me – letting on that he believed my coverage would make a difference to its outcome. After the hearings, the lawyer pulled out two chocolate cakes – bought from Hyderabad’s premier Bombay Bakery – and give one to the judge and the other to me. I took the cakes, all the while amused that the lawyer could imagine that it would affect my coverage.
What really made the difference in the case was that no witnesses turned up to testify. It was dusk when killers went on the shooting spree. The accused knew that mowing down a hundred or so people in cold blood would terrorize eyewitnesses – who were, in any case, unprotected by the weak judicial system. Indeed, the JSTPP leaders exuded the type of confidence that indicated an assurance by the higher-ups that they would not be touched after the “job.”
What was even more scandalous was that there were no arrests and no public trial for the mass murders, which had taken place in Karachi on October 1, 1988, when over a hundred Sindhis were killed. Nor would anyone be touched for the ethnic murders that had occurred on a mass scale under Gen. Zia. The legal system was in shambles and terrorists ruled. It was this loss of confidence in the government that forced Sindhi families to leave Karachi in droves.
In the course of the trial for Qadir Magsi and his party men, I met so called Sindhi nationalists who had resorted to theft, dacoity, murders, kidnappings for ransom and other criminal activities. Among them, a rather debonair felon from Jeay Sindh, Sattar Morio, came up to me after a hearing. My glance fell on his expensive watch and a thin gold chain flashing around his neck. He had flashing green eyes and wore a starched white shalwar kameez (baggy trousers and tunic).
“You are Sindhi – right?” he addressed me in Sindhi in a tone that said he knew the answer.
I nodded.
With feigned hurt, he continued in Sindhi, “Then why do you treat us like this?”
It was an old trick. But it did not work on a person who has always condemned terrorism. Nor would the intimacy sought by Sindhi nationalists who spoke to me in my native tongue, change my perceptions of them. Moreover, those who used Sindhi nationalism as a guise to engage in criminal activity had failed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Sindh.
Operation Clean-up Splits the MQM
The dismissal of Benazir Bhutto’s first government in August 1990 was mourned by her supporters, many of whom considered it to be part of a larger conspiracy against Sindhis. On the other hand the largely urban MQM celebrated her downfall, hoping for a better deal under Nawaz Sharif’s government.
Under Sharif, the MQM took a life of its own, strengthening its economic base through crimes including extortion, theft, car jacking and kidnappings.
The Citizens Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) set up in Karachi in 1989 by Sindh Governor Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim to beat crime, found that MQM workers routinely took extortion money from shopkeepers and tax collection agencies. Even ordinary Mohajirs were victimized by the extortionist culture.
Despite being a coalition partner of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the MQM created problems for his government. There was no let up in ethnic riots, killings and damage to property. Matters reached a head when Sharif began to issue statements in the press that the MQM was bad for the investor climate in Karachi. That was the first indication that the military had a plan up their sleeve.
In January 1992 – whilst Nawaz Sharif was still in power – the army issued a host of criminal charges against the MQM. In a move called “Operation Clean-up” – also used to tackle dacoits in the rural areas – the army arrested hundreds of MQM militants on criminal charges. It had a chilling effect on the apparently indestructible MQM and caused the party’s demigod, Altaf Hussein to flee to London, where he has since taken asylum.
Inside the Sindh Assembly, my ears began to hear the unthinkable. For the first time, MQM party leaders had begun to criticize Altaf Hussain from the floor of the assembly. Their newfound ability to do so filled me with wonder. To publicly criticize Hussain was for MQM loyalists akin to blasphemy and punishable by death.
By June 1992, we discovered that the military had secretly patronized a group of dissident legislators, elected on the MQM ticket, to downsize the party led by Altaf Hussain. Pakistan Television showed the dissidents – called MQM Haqiqi – perched atop army trucks to uncover Altaf Hussain’s “torture camps.” In Karachi, journalists were shown blood-spattered walls and ropes that hung like nooses. The Haqiqi leaders, Afaq and Aamir – whose party later renamed itself the Mohajir Qaumi Movement in contradistinction to Altaf’s Mutehidda Qaumi Movement – told state media that their rivals tortured opponents, drilled holes in them and stuffed their decapitated bodies into gunnysacks.
In Sindh, the state propaganda against the MQM did nothing to change people’s minds. Those who disliked the MQM were convinced that the party was a terrorist organization. Among them were the Pashtuns and Punjabis, many of whom had been forced to leave Karachi after the ethnic murders. They returned to their provinces to spread negative reports about the MQM.
On the other hand, Mohajirs in the MQM grew even more disillusioned with the Pakistan, where they had arrived in their millions since India was partitioned in 1947. Having long blamed the state for their suffering and deprivation, they grew even more convinced that the military was out to get them.
As the MQM plunged into a deeper state of alienation and paranoia, Karachi became a battle ground between Altaf Hussain’s followers and the dissidents. The city was divided into “no-go areas” where rival MQM factions could not enter. Intra-ethnic warfare began to kill more Mohajirs than any other ethnic group. In the 1990s, Karachi acquired the reputation of being one of the most violent cities in the world.
In June 1992, I was invited to a South Asian journalists’ conference in Kathmandu, Nepal to explain Karachi’s violence. When delegates from India and Bangladesh heard me narrate the MQM saga, they were bewildered. The Mohajirs had been their countrymen – who migrated from India in 1947 to create the Muslim homeland of Pakistan. And now the Pakistani army portrayed them as “terrorists.”
It was difficult to explain to the South Asian journalists the complex, mafia-ridden world of Pakistani politics. True, the refugees who came to Sindh from different parts of India at partition failed to find a sense of identity and fought a battle for survival of the fittest. Still, it was rather paradoxical that the military, which helped to build the MQM tiger, resorted to false techniques to rein it in.
Benazir Issues Shoot to Kill Orders
When Benazir Bhutto returned to power for a second time in 1993, she was given a free hand by the military to defang the MQM. She appointed a retired general as the minister of interior – Naseerullah Babar – and gave him the authority to “flush out the terrorists.” A hefty Pashtun with a broad forehead and a pendulous nose, Babar instructed the police in Sindh to shoot MQM militants rather than bring them to trial.
But although Benazir’s bid to cut down the MQM was backed by the establishment, she miscalculated that the ethnic party had roots among the people. The MQM activists were frequently lower-middle-class urban dwellers who simply wanted a better life for their community. Benazir’s blanket policy of ordering that MQM militants be shot at sight not only intensified her unpopularity with Mohajirs but also drew sharp criticism from human rights groups, who had previously been her foremost supporters.
As police and MQM casualties mounted in Karachi, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan invited Benazir to discuss the cold-blooded killings at a public meeting in the city. I saw an older and more determined Benazir calmly tell the meeting that while she sympathized with the families of Mohajir youth killed, she had a duty to the people of Karachi to keep them safe from “terrorists.”
This argument did not hold up in a predominantly Mohajir city. Inside parliament, MQM members cried “genocide.” Outside, an armed cadre backed their legislators’
anti-government tirades with violent strikes. In the Mohajir-dominated localities, buses were torched and public property destroyed and looted. By the end of 1994, some eight hundred people had been killed in police clashes and intra-factional rivalry.
As Karachi bled throughout the 1990s, hawkers brandished Urdu newspapers with photographs of bloodied Mohajir youth on the streets. The front-page pictures depicted dead young men in handcuffs, who had been shot at close range. With the court system in disarray, extrajudicial killings became the order of the day. Apparently, these were the new rules set by the army with which Benazir showed her willingness to play along.
The MQM retaliated against the PPP government’s police force – ambushing and killing those found alone. One Sindhi police officer I knew went into a hotel in the center of his city to wear his uniform and then changed back into civilian clothes to go home. Wearing police uniform in a Mohajir-dominated area like Liaquatabad would have invited attacks by armed militants, who lay in wait for unguarded police, ready to take revenge.
Karachi’s Killing Fields
In 1995, Karachi’s reputation as a “killing field” spread to Europe. In December that year, Amnesty International invited me to visit ten cities in Germany and speak about the extrajudicial killings in Karachi. Five of us “human rights defenders” from conflict areas were dispatched across Germany to discuss our respective situations.
As we grouped on a railway platform in Germany and then split off to visit different cities, I knew how the early Jesuits must have felt when they traveled to spread the message of peace. Interestingly, some Germans compared the experiences of Mohajirs under Benazir to those of Jews in Nazi Germany. I worked to dispel this illusion. It took some explanation to convey that the MQM problem was complex and rooted in the creation of Pakistan.
Aboard the Democracy Train Page 8