Pakistan: A Hard Country (55 page)

Strong Mohajir support for the protest movement against Bhutto’s government, and for the military regime of Zia-ul-Haq that fol owed, contributed further to Sindhi – Mohajir tension. Sindhi loyalty to the PPP, and dislike of the Punjabi-dominated army, made Sindh the centre of opposition to Zia’s rule. Extensive protests in interior Sindh in the early 1980s led to a military crackdown in which some 1,500

people were kil ed. This is stil described by Sindhi nationalist intel ectuals (with gross exaggeration) as ‘a genocide of the Sindhi people’. The movement was crushed, but left an enduring legacy of violent crime in interior Sindh, as fugitives from military law fled into the jungles to swel the bandit gangs of the region. Meanwhile, thousands of Sindhi PPP supporters were purged by Zia from the bureaucracy, and from the staffs of the state companies as these were reprivatized.

Meanwhile Mohajir radical groups came together in the MQM – al egedly with covert support from Zia’s regime and the ISI, which wished to strengthen opposition to the Sindhi PPP in the province. The first major ethnic violence in Karachi under Zia, however, was not Mohajir against Sindhi, but Mohajir against Pathan, the start of a history of intermittent violence between these two communities which surfaced again during my stay in Karachi in April 2009.

As today, Mohajir resentment and fear of the Pathans was fuel ed by cultural differences, by the Pathans’ grip on passenger and freight transport in the city – an ethnic monopoly often enforced by violence – and, above al , by a growth in Pathan numbers and claims on public land. As today, this was due to a mixture of economic factors and war.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the struggle against it sent some 3 mil ion mainly Pathan refugees into Pakistan, a proportion of whom made their way to join the Pathan community of Karachi. With them came a great increase in the heroin trade, and in the number of automatic weapons in the city. In the 1970s, ethnic clashes in Karachi had been fought with knives, clubs and the occasional pistol. By the late 1980s the combatants were equipped with Kalashnikovs and, sometimes, rocket-propel ed grenades and light machineguns. The effect on the casualty figures can be imagined.

The first major outbreak of violence came in April 1985, when a Mohajir schoolgirl, Bushra Zaidi, was kil ed by a speeding Pathandriven minibus. This sparked murderous attacks by Mohajirs and Punjabis on Pathans, leaving at least fifty-three dead in al . Much of the violence was orchestrated by young activists of the student wing of the Jamaat Islami, the Islami Jamaat-e-Taleba – though apparently without the approval of the party leadership.

In the succeeding years, many of these activists – including the MQM’s founder, Altaf Hussain himself – left the Jamaati student groups to join the MQM. That party’s origins lay among students of lower-middle-class origin. In this, it resembles the Jamaat but is radical y different from al the other major Pakistani parties, which were formed by rural or urban magnates. Altaf Hussain founded the MQM in 1984, and in August 1986 the party held its first mass ral y, in Nishtar Park, at which he declared the Mohajirs a separate nation within Pakistan. Already, the party’s influence had spread so far that the ral y was attended by hundreds of thousands of Mohajirs. Pictures of Altaf Hussain addressing this crowd are central parts of MQM iconography.

In the fol owing years, hundreds more people were kil ed on al sides in ethnic violence. In 1987, the MQM defeated the Jamaat – in what you could cal a kind of matricide, given the Jamaati origins of the MQM leadership – and swept to victory in local elections in both Karachi and Hyderabad, reigniting Sindhi fears of the Mohajirs. By 1988, this Sindhi – Mohajir violence was also occurring on a large scale, with Sindhi extremist groups al egedly receiving covert help from RAW, the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian intel igence service. Hyderabad was even worse affected than Karachi, and its neighbourhoods became completely distinct ethnical y as a result of what almost amounted to ethnic cleansing. Mohajirs fled from the rest of the towns of Sindh, deepening the ethnic divide in the province stil further.

The MQM built up a powerful armed wing, which targeted not only Sindhi and Pathan militants but journalists and others who dared to criticize the MQM in public. Torture chambers were established for the interrogation of captured enemies. Every morning would see its harvest dumped by the roadside: murdered activists from the various sides, or unlucky passers-by.

By 1992, violence had grown so severe and was having such a bad effect on the economy of Pakistan’s greatest city that (whatever its previous links to the MQM may have been) the army decided that basic order must be restored. First under Nawaz Sharif and then under the second administration of Benazir Bhutto, a tough crackdown was carried out. The operation proceeded in typical Pakistani fashion, through a mixture of ruthless force and diplomacy. On the one hand, the military, police, Rangers and intel igence agencies made widespread use of torture and ‘encounter’ kil ings against the militants.

On the other hand, great effort was devoted to splitting the MQM.

Radical elements, which thought the leadership was making too many compromises with other parties and ethnicities, were covertly encouraged to split off into the ‘Real MQM’, which then launched ferocious attacks against its former comrades. The military (or rather the paramilitary Rangers, which are under the command of the army) were then able to crush the extremists, while eventual y making peace with the chastened MQM leadership, which was released from prison in return for promises to keep their men under control.

Murders have continued, but at a greatly reduced rate – though the MQM – Pathan strife of 2009 – 2010 has led to fears that Karachi may return to the dark days of the early 1990s. The latest round of fighting began in May 2007, when the MQM, who had become close al ies of President Musharraf, used their armed men to attack a ral y to welcome Musharraf’s arch nemesis Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, triggering violence in which dozens were kil ed.

Altaf Hussain had left Pakistan after an assassination attempt at the end of 1991, and ever since has lived in London. Like Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif during their periods of exile – but much more effectively – he maintains control over his party from a distance. Altaf Hussain is official y wanted by the Pakistani courts on charges including conspiracy to murder; but he is also regularly visited by Pakistani politicians and officials, including in April 2009 by President Asif Ali Zardari.

Despite its partial suppression by the state in the mid-1990s, the MQM has re-established an overwhelming grip on the government and politics of Karachi. However, its ability to use its dominance to develop the city is restricted by the very limited powers accorded to municipal government in Pakistan. Given that Karachi’s demographic and economic structures are so different from those of the rest of Sindh, it would in fact make much more sense for Karachi to be a province of Pakistan, as in effect it was from 1947 to 1958, when it was Pakistan’s capital and a separate federal district.

This would, however, lead to extremely violent protests by Sindhis, which would worsen stil further Pakistan’s security problems and probably make civilian rule impossible: These protests would be both by the nationalists, who would see this as theft of Sindhi land, and by the landowner-politicians and their fol owers, who would stand to lose a very large proportion of their powers of patronage – since Karachi accounts for less than half Sindh’s population but around two-thirds of Sindh’s GDP.

Sindh and Karachi are therefore trapped in an unhappy but relatively stable marriage, held in place by a mixture of patronage and fear. The MQM dominates Karachi electoral y and therefore usual y has to be included in any coalition government of the province of Sindh, while Sindhi landowners and tribal chieftains dominate the rest of the province and milk Karachi’s economy for their own benefit. These landowners are mostly PPP, but include a very large number of opportunists who switch sides depending on who is in power in Islamabad – which is why the military administrations of both Zia and Musharraf were able to attract enough Sindhi support to form coalition governments in Sindh.

KARACHI’S ETHNIC FRONT LINES

The MQM’s headquarters is known, with a kind of urban hipness, as Nine-Zero, after the last two digits of the telephone number of Altaf Hussain’s house where the party had its beginnings, and which is now preserved as a kind of shrine. It is in Azizabad, a typical middle-class Mohajir neighbourhood, and by both nature and design it breathes the particular MQM spirit.

Like most of Karachi, the neighbourhood itself is urban, in a way that most other Pakistani cities are not. In most cities, outside the downtown areas, the houses of ordinary people are one-storey buildings of mudbrick or concrete, not essential y different from those of vil ages, and often built around gated compounds, while the houses of the rich are vil as set in gardens. The general impression is of the country come to town – which given that most of the families moved from the countryside fairly recently, and keep close contacts with their relatives in the country, is literal y true. Azizabad by contrast features tal er, narrower but much more solid individual houses set next to each other, and smal apartment blocks of four or five storeys. Elsewhere in the city, though there are few tower blocks and no skyscrapers, big blocks of flats line the main roads.

Four blocks around the HQ are sealed off by security barriers, but, thanks to some PR person, the barrier through which I entered is brightly painted with fruit and flowers and a sign proclaiming ‘Street of Love and Peace’. This was thanks to a ‘Concept by Husaini Electrics’.

Beside it, a large poster proclaimed that ‘On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the MQM, the people of this area salute the Great Leader Altaf Hussain.’ Beyond it was a second security barrier, with electronical y operated bol ards embedded in the roadway. Getting in required a telephone cal and an escort – al very far from the disastrously sloppy Pakistani norm.

Opposite is a smal , wel -kept park, the Bagh-e-Afza, with a children’s playground decorated with statues of giraffes and horses.

The houses around were fairly shabby two-and three-storey buildings, but in reasonably good shape, and there was very little rubbish on the streets. ‘The MQM tries to keep its neighbourhoods clean – that is very sacred for them,’ my assistant told me. White, green and red MQM

flags were everywhere, interspersed with the black flags of the Shia, because a large Shia prayer hal is just down the road.

The Youth Minister of Sindh, Faisal Sabzwari, took me to see Altaf Hussain’s two-rooms-up, two-down house, with its tiny sitting-room, ‘where Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and any of the other leaders came to meet him and sat on this sofa’. Behind is a smal courtyard, with no garden – a mil ion miles from the mansions of PPP, PML(N) and ANP leaders, but also, it must be said, from those of some contemporary MQM leaders I visited.

The house now forms part of a headquarters complex including a media centre where young volunteers monitored a bank of thirty television screens and manned a telephone switchboard. Mr Sabzwari told me that they have a twenty-four-terabyte computer storage facility – ‘which we are going to double soon’ – an e-mail server with 50,000

addresses, and a desktop TV editing machine for making films. ‘From here, we try to monitor whatever is published or broadcast in Karachi and the world about us.’ Once again, the contrast with the amateurish and sometimes comical efforts of the other parties in this regard could hardly be more striking.

In a nearby building, I interviewed the mayor of Karachi, Syed Mustafa Kamal – only thirty-eight years old in 2009 (but stil older than the MQM’s first mayor, Abdul Sattar, who was only twenty-four when he took office) and dressed for his age, in blue jeans and a checked shirt, with a closely cropped beard around his mouth and chin – in fact, he could have been a software manager in London. He sat with Mr Sabzwari in a smal plain office with peeling blue wal s and the inevitable pictures of Altaf Hussain: rather remarkably modest for the mayor of the seventh largest city on earth. In fact, the only unprofessional thing about the mayor is that he talks so fast it is difficult to take everything in. Together with his deep melodious voice, and pounding delivery, the impression is rather of being addressed by a bass drum.

He denounced the ‘feudal’ leadership and character of the other parties, and spoke of the MQM as a progressive middle-class alternative for al Pakistanis:

For the past sixty years, forty families have ruled Pakistan. They have been reelected seven times in one form or another, but in al that time they have never done anything for the people even on their own estates. They send their children to school in London, but they have never built a single school in their own vil ages ... The MQM is the hope for the people of Pakistan, in which ordinary people wil rule, and not these forty families.7

Concerning Karachi, his main refrains were his administration’s commitment to building infrastructure, the hopelessness of the other parties in this regard, and the dysfunctionality of Pakistan’s federal system, which left responsibility for the city’s development and services in many different institutional hands, only some of them his: Al our efforts are being undermined by the law and order situation, but I have no control over the police – not even the traffic police. So we build roads, and then we film the police holding up traffic and taking bribes along them.