When the German public asked what they could do to help, I urged them to lobby against greedy arms manufacturers. Years of reporting had convinced me that the easy access to guns – dumped by the US and Western countries in Pakistan – had allowed the establishment to manipulate ethnic and Islamic groups for their ends, resulting in needless bloodshed.
Back in Pakistan, a PPP advisor told me with disapproval that I had been unfair to blame Benazir’s government for cracking down on the MQM; he believed the MQM were terrorists who would likely be let off by the courts for lack of evidence and hold society hostage if they were not tackled at the source.
The trouble with this position, I told him, was that for every “terrorist” killed, there were five others willing to take his place.
The MQM Saga Lives On
After 1999, when Gen. Musharraf – himself a Mohajir – came to power, the army looked to the MQM as the wild card in maneuvering the political set up in Sindh. Like Gen. Zia ul Haq, Gen. Musharraf patronized the MQM in a quid pro quo relationship that guaranteed his military-backed rule. After the 2002 elections, ISI officials negotiated with the MQM and facilitated their key positions in government. The purpose was a familiar one: to block the populist PPP – and its charismatic leader Benazir Bhutto, then living abroad – against forming the government in Sindh.
Under Gen. Musharraf, MQM members, including those facing criminal charges were rewarded with ministerial portfolios. Among them was MQM activist, Ishrat ul Ibad, who had fled to London during “Operation Clean-up” in 1992 but, under Musharraf, returned to become the Sindh governor. MQM loyalist, Rauf Siddiqi was made the minister of interior. With senior administrative positions in Sindh filled by the MQM, the ethnic party was reportedly able to settle scores against the extrajudicial killings of Mohajirs in previously PPP eras.
But decades of murders by law enforcement agencies, political groups and infighting had left the MQM isolated. Despite reaching out to other ethnic communities, including those living in other provinces of Pakistan, its membership remained exclusively Mohajir. MQM chief Altaf Hussain – who had taken British citizenship – was unable to return to Pakistan not only because of the criminal charges against him but also fears that he would be assassinated.
In September 2010, the murder of MQM leader Dr Imran Farooq in London – where he had taken exile after Musharraf’s military coup – created fresh shock waves for the party. Altaf Hussain, who had recently parted ways with Dr Farooq, was depicted sobbing on YouTube, apparently mourning the loss of his “close companion.” Conspiracy theories aside, the murder would fuel fresh paranoia in the MQM that the mafia had reached foreign shores.
In the post-Benazir era, her widower, Asif Zardari, taking a leaf from history, began with a charm offensive on the MQM’s headquarters – Nine Zero Azizabad – to “seek forgiveness,” for the murders of MQM activists in the PPP era. The MQM chief, Altaf Hussain reciprocated. In a quid pro quo scenario, the PPP government rewarded the MQM with ministerial positions, whilst the latter voted for a PPP prime minister and for Zardari to become president.
All of this has come at a price for the vast majority of Sindhi villagers. In the words of middle-class Sindhis, the PPP submits to the MQM’s urban “blackmail,” by diverting funds from the rural and Sindhi-populated areas. The PPP Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani has unsuccessfully attempted to rectify the situation. However, in 2010, he was forced to retract his statement that Hyderabad would be restored as a single administrative unit “to enable just distribution of funds,” after the MQM threatened to break the coalition.
On the other hand, the Pashtun-based Awami National Party, also in coalition with the PPP government, has engaged in violent clashes with the MQM. This has led to spasmodic fighting between Pashtuns and Mohajirs in Karachi, in scenes that eerily resemble the bloody 1980s.
In 2010, the Pashtun-Mohajir conflict claimed so many lives that the MQM chief, Altaf Hussain called for the army’s intervention, only to back down under political criticism. The MQM has frequently threatened to break off its coalition with the PPP government, only to withdraw the threat after getting more concessions.
For the time being, the PPP and MQM have managed to ward off September 30 style conspiracies that threaten violence between the two major ethnic groups of Sindh. Still, it is a fragile coalition that is constantly strained by the separate interests of the Sindhis – who lived in the province before it was Pakistan – and the Mohajirs – who left India to create it.
At the end of the day, it is Sindh’s ethnic divide that keeps its two main ethnic groups – Sindhis and Mohajirs – loyal to their respective political parties and gives the establishment room to manipulate from the center.
Chapter 3
NEWS IS WHAT
THE RULERS
WANT TO HIDE
“What are you Writing? You’re Writing too Much”
September 24, 1991: It was almost 10.00 pm when I turned my car into the dimly lit road that led to our family house in Garden East. Over the years, it had become normal practice for me to alight, turn the key of the small gate and push the large gates open to drive my car inside.
But that evening, driving back alone as usual to my colonial style, fortress-like home, I had an uneasy premonition that I might have become a target because of my investigative reporting.
That year, Sindh Chief Minister Jam Sadiq Ali had cracked the whip on scores of journalists for exposing his underhanded tactics to rein in the PPP opposition. Benazir Bhutto was dismissed after a short, chaotic tenure as prime minister almost a year prior, after which the army had ushered in a new prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, and accorded him a free hand to ensure that the PPP power base was subdued.
1991, the year that the former Soviet Union collapsed, was also a time when Pakistan’s military – newly strengthened by its Cold War alliance with the US in Afghanistan – turned its attention toward strict domestic surveillance. As the chief of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani was served in Sindh by the Intelligence Bureau (IB), headed by the notorious Brig. Imtiaz Ahmed. The ISI and IB, which are legally authorized to bug telephones, spied on “domestic enemies,” – i.e. PPP members of parliament and independent journalists.
That was also the year that the Chief of Army Staff, Asif Nawaz – who was unusual in the fact that he resisted the army’s interference in political affairs – headed a Military Intelligence (MI), which collected evidence of the manner in which the ISI and the IB hamstrung Benazir Bhutto and her PPP from returning to power.
This is when I inadvertently stepped into the picture.
Almost 24 hours before, Kamran Khan – then a reporter for The News and a correspondent for the Washington Post – had been stabbed and taken bleeding to hospital. The assailants were young men who attacked him as he stepped outside his office on the busy I. I. Chundrigar Road and were overheard saying in Urdu, “What are you writing? You’re writing too much.”
That afternoon, when a colleague narrated the incident, chills went down my spine. Instantly, I became aware that my reporting on the chief minister’s corrupt tactics could make me the next target of attack.
Within an hour, the Karachi Union of Journalists had mobilized a protest meeting at the Karachi Press Club – a British-built gray stone building in the center of the city. I saw the intense expressions on my colleagues; men and women journalists determined to protest the attack against one of our own. Knowing that our future as independent print journalists was at stake, we hurriedly spilled out into the street with banners and placards in English and Urdu that called for an end to the attacks on journalists.
As we marched, one of my colleagues pointed out that the Deputy Inspector General of the Crime Investigation Agency (CIA), Samiullah Marwat, who took orders from the Sindh Government, drove leisurely in step with our procession. Marwat was known to haul up PPP supporters for brutal interrogation and was suspected to have ordered the stabbing of my injured colleague.
Still, trying to ig
nore his presence, we kept marching toward the Sindh Chief Minister’s House. Our spirited rally of editors, senior journalists and reporters camped in front of the locked gate with banners and placards, aware of the pressure needed to keep the media free.
In 1991, the English, Urdu and Sindhi print media were in the front lines of independent journalism in Pakistan. Television and radio was state controlled and this was a decade before private electronic media was due to explode onto the scene.
Late evening, driving back home from work, my mind was still preoccupied with our protest. Turning the corner to my house, I slowed down my car in the dark pathway, transfixed by what I saw from my windscreen. There were two shadowy figures that lurked beneath the milky tube-light outside our family home.
As I drew nearer, they advanced toward my car and I saw them more clearly. They were two young men who looked like they had been deputed for the job. In the deserted and faintly lighted street, they stood on either side of my approaching car. I saw a small knife flash as one of the youths made the first move.
Forewarned by the day’s events, I pressed the accelerator and sped past them, driving at break neck speed. Instincts told me to drive toward the nearest police station. Then better sense prevailed and, looking at the rear view mirror to see if the assailants were in hot pursuit, I kept speeding toward my newspaper office.
As I ran up the steps, my colleagues took one look at me and knew. My city editor, Akhtar Payami got that serious preoccupied look he got when any major incident occurred. Instantly, he was on the phone with my editor, even as he assigned two reporters from my newspaper – the late Aleemuddin Pathan and Ali Kabir – to jot down the details.
Aleem, my light-skinned Pashtun colleague – who foreign journalists often mistook for Italian – heard my narration with his usual aplomb. He began typing for the Pakistan Press International wire services in his slow, deliberate style with cigarette in mouth.
Ali Kabir – my senior colleague with a curling moustache and a sardonic air who had tried to give me a hard time for being a free spirit – soberly pounded the story on a manual typewriter.
“It is the first ever attempt on a woman journalist in the history of Pakistan,” he wrote in a news report that appeared the next morning with the headline: “Dawn woman reporter escapes attack.”
While my colleagues typed, I waited for my eldest sister, Naseem to take me to her home in Defense Housing Society. It was too dangerous for me to go back home that night. Instead, I told my parents about the incident on the telephone. They listened to me as though they had been half expecting it. My aging parents were no strangers to a daughter who did dangerous, investigative reports and now even they had been dragged into the fray.
A week earlier, my father, then in his seventies, had pulled his car out of the driveway, parked it by the front door and walked back to close the gates when a thug followed him. He pressed a gun to my father’s waist, asked him to be quiet and took away his car keys.
A short while later my mother opened the front door to see a heavy-set man in the driver’s seat. The man stared unblinkingly at her. It did not even cross my mother’s mind that the car in which he silently sat was ours, or that it had been stolen at gunpoint from my father. That was the last time we saw the car, carrying the files of the charity agencies for which my father worked voluntarily.
At my sister’s house, I grappled with the events of the day. Living as I did in the inextricable world of politics and journalism, it became palpably clear to me that I had become one more victim of the political situation that had developed in the province of Sindh.
Coming after Gen. Zia ul Haq’s long military rule, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s short and unceremonious dismissal had caused much anguish to her die-hard supporters. On the other hand, the nation’s feudal, religious and ethnic political parties had formally bonded in the ISI-funded IJI coalition, with a mandate to prevent the PPP from returning to power.
ISI chief Asad Durrani’s affadavit to the Supreme Court in 1996 revealed that Nawaz Sharif’s appointed chief minister Jam Sadiq Ali had received PKR 5 million (USD 59,000) from the spy agency. As chief minister, Jam would repay the army for every penny they spent on him, wasting no opportunity to vilify Benazir and her husband Asif Zardari – even while the latter was holed up in prison on charges of corruption.
In that highly polarized atmosphere, my independence as a journalist had been cast aside to bracket me with the PPP and I had been dealt with accordingly.
In the grip of a nightmarish night of being chased by knife-wielding thugs, I became bitterly angry at the realization that the government wanted to intimidate us journalists into silence. With the knife threat fresh in my memory, I couldn’t be absolutely certain that they would stop here. Perhaps they would follow through their plan to make sure I was killed.
The sound of the telephone bell ringing early morning made me almost fall out of my bed. I feared the worst. But it was only my brother Pervez, who taught at a university in Islamabad. He had read the report titled “Another Journalist Attacked,” in The News – our rival newspaper – and discovered that the journalist was his sister. Furious, he suggested – and my family agreed – that I should fly to Islamabad, situated a thousand miles from Karachi, and lay low until the storm blew over.
The news item about the attack had appeared in all the newspapers across the country, giving me exposure that I had never imagined that I’d experience. The next morning, when my sister booked my ticket from Karachi to Islamabad on Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), the booking clerk told me that he had read about the attack in the newspapers – and that he knew why I was leaving!
That afternoon, on my way to the airport, a ragged hawker thrust an Urdu newspaper – Qaumi Akhbar – into the car my sister was driving. On the front page was my face, wearing an intense expression, and a slug in Urdu: “Murder attack on Nafisa.”
Figure 5 Newspaper article of author after attack on September 23, 1991 (Photo by Asghar Bhatti).
Apparently, a creative reporter from the Qaumi newspaper had discovered that they had my photograph from the previous day’s rally and called up my parents the night before to get the information for the report.
On the plane to Islamabad, I found myself sitting next to a European woman from a non-governmental organization. She had a copy of Dawn newspaper neatly folded her lap with the news item of the attacks on the press prominently displayed on the side. As we struck up a conversation, she told me with concern that she’d read that journalists were being attacked in Pakistan.
I turned the half folded newspaper over, and pointed to the news item entitled “Dawn woman reporter escapes attack,” with the words, “That’s me.”
The look of surprise on my newfound acquaintance’s face was unforgettable. Bolting upright in her seat, she drew sideways and looked at me closely. We talked about what it was like to undertake investigative reporting in Pakistan until the plane landed in Islamabad two-and-a-half hours later.
“It was the Best of Times, it was the Worst of Times”
As I recuperated from the shock of the knife attack in Islamabad – Pakistan’s capital city, framed by the Margalla hills – I gained a fresh perspective on the political situation in the country.
With its quiet, well-planned roads and foreign embassies sprawling amidst lush greenery, Islamabad was a far cry from the volatile city of Karachi. It was here that the parliament had tightened the screws on the Sindh administration – a move that had contributed to the attack on my person.
To borrow a phrase from English novelist Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Although Benazir had not even begun any land reforms, the prospect of her unleashing the power of the people had led the establishment to intimidate independent journalists.
The chief minister of Sindh, Jam Sadiq Ali began to exert his influence over the press, offering incentives to journalists for being sympathetic to the administration whilst punishing
those who did not comply with the government’s policy of vilifying Benazir Bhutto, her husband, Asif Zardari, and other PPP loyalists. He began with the carrot approach.
Even as a provincial minister under Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, Jam was reputed to be generous with state funds. It was rumored that, at one time – when Bhutto and Jam drove around the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah – the prime minister had leaned over and whispered, “Jam – at least don’t sell off land around the mausoleum.”
So, when journalists received an invitation from the chief minister to have lunch with him at the CM House, we joked half-seriously that the administration might try to buy our loyalties with plots of government land.
I had never seen Jam at close range. As he walked by unsteadily, I felt an odd repulsion. Perhaps it was the way he eyed the women dressed in flowery shalwar kameez, dyed with bright splashes of summer color. As his gaze rested on me, I saw him flinch. He saw my skeptical expression as he sized me up.
The chief minister’s aides stood by dutifully as Jam handed me a beautifully wrapped package. I took the gift in the spirit of Sindhi hospitality. Of course, they were not the papers for a government plot of land we had joked about. Instead, afterwards we found we’d received expensive fabric woven with brilliant rainbow threads – likely to be used as a sofa cover or bedspread.
There was nothing unusual about Jam Sadiq Ali offering the carrot to journalists. This is how political parties and organized groups in Pakistan interact with the media. Those who host lunches or give presents obviously mean to tilt the news in their favor. Indeed, in the open and hospitable Pakistani culture, there is a fine line between being gracious and offering bribes. Mentally, I made the distinction. Although I accepted these gifts, they never stopped me from being critical.
Aboard the Democracy Train Page 9