Pakistan: A Hard Country (52 page)

As he freely admitted, the difficulty of getting convictions means that if the police get an order to deal firmly with some sectarian leader, their response often is to kil him. Several leaders of the SSP have indeed been kil ed, either with or without official complicity. In 1990, one of the group’s founders, Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, was kil ed by Shia terrorists, as was his successor Maulana Zia-ur-Rehman Farooqi. In October 2003, after attempts to convict him for terrorism had failed, SSP leader Maulana Azam Tariq was shot dead by unidentified gunmen a hundred yards or so from a police checkpoint in Islamabad where he had been stopped for half an hour.

Official y, the kil ing was blamed on Shia militants, but both the private accounts of my official friends and the circumstances of the kil ing make it clear that the Pakistani state was involved. This was also almost certainly true of Azam Tariq’s successor, Al ama Ali Sher Haideri, who was kil ed in an ambush in Khairpur, Sindh, in August 2009, once again ostensibly by Shia militants. The kil ing came two weeks after an anti-Christian pogrom orchestrated by the SSP in the Punjabi town of Gojra, which kil ed eight local Christians and severely embarrassed both the national and provincial governments. Private claims by intel igence officials that this was official retaliation for Gojra therefore seem credible.

When covering the 2002 parliamentary elections in Pakistan, I travel ed for a while with a Shia politician in central Punjab. According to both official and unofficial sources (speaking off the record), the SSP had made a plot to ambush and kil her, possibly emboldened by the fact that Azam Tariq had been released from jail shortly before and was standing in the elections.

The local police received categorical orders that sectarian attacks on politicians during the elections were to be prevented. The police response? They took three Lashkar-e-Jhangvi activists (whom they suspected but were not able to prove had been responsible for several previous murders of Shia) into a field at night and shot them ‘while resisting arrest’, and let SSP and LeJ know that if they launched attacks during the elections there would be many more such ‘encounter kil ings’ of their members. I asked an official acquaintance whether a strong warning wouldn’t have been enough. ‘This was a strong warning, the only warning these people understand,’ he replied.

In consequence, for many years the sectarians have also been launching attacks on state targets, which in turn has increased state hostility to them. Terrorism by SSP and LeJ increased enormously after the storming of the Red Mosque in 2007 (in which fighters linked to SSP were kil ed) radicalized Islamists across Pakistan, while US

drone attacks kil ed Punjabis from the sectarian parties fighting for the Taleban in the FATA and Afghanistan.

In July 2009, a huge explosion destroyed part of a vil age in Multan district and kil ed seventeen people when an arms cache in the home of a local madrasah teacher with links to the SSP and the Pakistani Taleban blew up accidental y. In the fol owing months, the growth of terrorism in Punjab seems largely to have been the work of SSP and LeJ militants linked to the Pakistani Taleban, rather than of the Taleban as such. According to credible reports, Pakistani intel igence responded in typical fashion with a mixture of arrests, extrajudicial executions, and attempts to split the militants and draw more ‘moderate’ Sipah-e-Sahaba members into al egiance to the state. This also appears to be the strategy of the PML(N) government of Punjab.

Whether it wil have any success is at the time of writing whol y unclear.

MULTAN

A famous Persian couplet about Multan sums up some of the reasons for Sunni militant support there, and the immense obstacles to it: ‘In four rare things Multan abounds / Heat, dust, beggars and burial grounds.’ The notorious heat and dust of summer have no great impact one way or the other, but while the beggars reflect the area’s poverty, the burial grounds are those of local Sufi saints and their fol owers.

Multan was the first part of present-day Punjab to be converted to Islam, starting in the tenth century, and the conversion was largely carried out by these saints.

It is impossible to miss the saints in Multan. Their tombs literal y tower over the old city on its hil , and give Multan its fame. Several are faced with the equal y famous blue Multani tilework. The shrine of Shah Rukn-e-Alam is a particularly striking combination of grim fortress and soaring fantasy. The lower parts consist of wal s and towers of massive unadorned brickwork, which act as the base for a beautiful tiled dome.

Despite horribly destructive sieges by the Sikhs and British, and the whims of the Chenab River, which now flows several miles away, a combination of the strategic hil and pilgrimages to the saints’ tombs has meant that Multan has always been rebuilt in the same place. It is indeed the oldest continuously inhabited city in Pakistan, and visitors are shown the spot on the old wal s where Alexander the Great was wounded during his attack on the city. This might conceivably be true, though the attraction of the spot for tourists is sadly diminished by the fact that it now faces yet another concrete semi-slum which over the years has swamped what used to be a Mughal garden.

Worship of the saints is the greatest local obstacle to the spread of Sunni radical ideology in southern Punjab, just as the political power of the great landowning families – Gilani, Qureishi, Khakwani and Gardezi – who are the saints’ descendants and custodians of their shrines (pirs) means that a radical takeover would require a massive social revolution. At the time of writing, both the Pakistani Prime Minister, Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani, and the Foreign Minister, Syed Shah Mahmood Qureshi, are from Multani pir families. They are both from the PPP, but began in the PML(N), and other branches of their family are stil in that party.

The shrines and the pir families il ustrate a key obstacle to the propagation of sectarian hatred in Punjab, which is that no one knows how many Shia there actual y are, because in a great many cases no one can ascertain – including quite often the people concerned themselves – who is Shia and who is Sunni. The Sufi shrines, their custodians and their fol owers play an important part in this by constantly preaching against the Sunni – Shia divide and stressing that ‘our saint preached that there should be neither Sunni nor Shia, but only worshippers of God’ – as I was told at many shrines.

Apart from the stricter fol owers of the saints, masses of ordinary local people worship at the shrines and are influenced by this feeling.

As for the pir families themselves, some of the Gardezis are openly Shia, as is their shrine. The Qureishis and Gilanis are general y thought to be Shia, but practise Sunni worship in public. Then there is a variety of traditional local arrangements, either based on status, or intended to dampen sectarian conflict and extend the al iance networks of particular clans. Thus I was told that the local Khosar tribe (like the Legharis, of Baloch origin but now Seraiki-speaking) worship the local saints and take their wives from Shia families, while the men of the tribe remain Sunni. Sayyids (descendants of the Prophet, including al the pir families) by definition only marry other Sayyids, and this rule is far more important than sectarian divides.

I visited the shrine of Shah Yusuf Gardezi in Multan together with a member of the Syed Gardezi family, a student at the local Broomfield Hal School where I had given a talk. The shrine is home not only to the tomb of the original saint but to those of members of his family and leading fol owers – including the lion and snake which accompanied him to Multan, and come in for their own share of respect. Presumably when paying respects to a lion the question of whether the creature was a Shia or Sunni lion is not uppermost in the mind of the worshipper.

Though openly Shia, the shrine is therefore also worshipped at by local Sunni. The stories of miracles I heard about the shrine were told to me by local Shia and local Sunni. A senior official in Multan told me that during the Shia festival of Ashura (10th Moharram) in Multan, when the administration issues licences to carry taziyas (imitation mausoleums of the martyred Imams made of wood and paper, like smal towers) in procession, ‘90 per cent of the licences went to people cal ing themselves Barelvi Sunnis’.

Less encouraging was what my Gardezi guide told me in January 2009 about his school. Broomfield Hal is very much the school of the local elite (not the very top elite, who would go to the famous schools of Lahore, but their close relatives). He said that three-quarters of the boys in his class sympathize with the Pakistani Taleban: ‘They say that they are good Muslims oppressed by America and the Pakistani army.’ He said that one seventeen-year-old son of a local businessman

is trying to grow a big beard to look what he cal s proper Muslim. He says he is a Wahabi. I don’t think he real y knows what that means but he certainly hates us Shia. He says that he would like to go to America and blow himself up together with Americans. He makes me laugh, though it isn’t real y very funny.

Most of this is doubtless adolescent posturing, but as far as anti-American sentiment among the students goes, there can be no doubt.

When I spoke to the senior classes, they were ful of the same crazed conspiracy theories as the rest of society. In their view, it has been proved that the Jews were responsible for 9/11; that a Jewish conspiracy exists to dominate the world; that the US has occupied Afghanistan in order to invade Pakistan, Iran and Central Asia, and so on, and on.

The vast majority of Broomfield’s students of course have far too much to lose ever to join an extremist group; but sentiments among poor people on the street were just as extreme – and they have far less to lose. As in the rest of Punjab, in January 2009 in Multan I found some sympathy for the Pakistani Taleban among most of those people I asked who declared themselves to be Sunni (I made a point of asking my interviewees’ sectarian affiliation, though many refused to answer, in some cases giving adherence to a saint as the reason). Concerning the idea of military action against the Taleban (Pakistani or Afghan) a majority of Sunni and even some Shia were opposed. This may have changed since then, but I doubt it has changed completely.

However, the Shia (together with smal er minority Muslim groups like the Bohra, who also fear persecution by Sunni radicals) were the only section of the population with many members wil ing to support military action. Shia and Bohra were also the only former PPP voters on the streets in Multan, many of whom stil said that they would vote for Zardari and the PPP at the next election. As of that date at least, the local Sunni seemed to have deserted the party en masse.

Then again, one should not make too much of this. Several of the Shia and Bohra also said that they were sick of the PPP and Zardari and would vote PML(N) at the next election, and a good many Sunni, if not a majority, denounced the Pakistani Taleban and said it was right to fight against them. Al my interviewees, Sunni, Shia and Bohra alike, denounced the US and its presence in Afghanistan, but then that is true even in the most anti-militant circles in Pakistan. Furthermore, this was among the lower-middle-class shopkeepers in the bazaars of Multan city, where one would expect Sunni militant feeling to be stronger, and where people (including the Shia middle classes, for economic reasons) are more likely to vote PML(N). After the 2008

elections, of Multan district’s six national assembly seats, three were held by the PPP, two by the PML(N) and one by the PML(Q). Two of the PPP’s Members of the National Assembly (MNAs) and the PML(Q) MNA were from pir families. The PLM(N) MNAs were a smal landowner and a local businessman.

In the countryside of Punjab south of Multan, pirs and their shrines are stil very widely revered, and kinship groups and their hereditary landowning chieftains remain political y dominant. This, the Seraiki language, and the presence of large numbers of Baloch tribes bind southern Punjab closely to Sindh, the subject of the next chapter – more closely in many respects than to northern Punjab. Rural Sindh contains very little support for Islamist militancy of either the jihadi or the sectarian variety; but like southern Punjab and Balochistan – and unlike northern and central Punjab – most of Sindh also contains few signs of economic and social change and dynamism.

8

Sindh

We all knew it would start up again – the shootings on a massive scale, the unnatural silence in the evenings, the siege mentality – but for the moment, for today, Karachi was getting back on its feet, as it had always been able to do, and that didn’t just mean getting back to work, but getting back to play: friendship, chai, cricket on the street, conversation ... In the midst of everything that was happening, Karachi had decided to turn round and wink at me. And in that wink was serious intent: yes, the city said, I am a breeding ground for monsters, but don’t think that is the full measure of what I am.

(Kamila Shamsie)1

On the late afternoon of 29 April 2009 in Karachi I visited the local headquarters of the Jamaat Islami party and spent a couple of hours talking with the head of their social welfare organization; then went on to Zeinab Market in the old downtown area to buy some presents, and spent another hour or so haggling over tablecloths and shawls; then to another shop to buy a new suitcase, and back to my hotel for a shower and a meal, and to cal my family.