Pakistan: A Hard Country (57 page)
Mr Buner took me to the ANP office for east Karachi, a rather astonishing building. It stands entirely alone on the furthest eastern edge of Karachi, in a desolate suburb which is just beginning to be developed, and is painted inside and out in the ANP colour, bright red.
The whole scene reminded me of something, and then I realized that it was scenes of Hol ywood gangster films set in the 1920s or ’30s, with dreary roadhouses and brothels standing alone in similarly half-empty suburbs. The recol ection was so clear that I half expected Al Pacino and Robert de Niro to turn up.
Which in a way they had. Above the door was a neat line of bul et holes from two days earlier. I was told that this was the third time the building had been shot up by MQM gunmen, though nobody had been wounded. Elsewhere, however, thirteen ANP party workers had been kil ed in east Karachi in the first four months of 2009. ‘They want to kil us al ,’ one of the ANP men said.
The bul et holes, however, seemed to me to tel a different story, of a warning not a murder attempt. If the MQM gunmen are as competent as the rest of their party, they are probably pretty good shots; and anyway, given the resources at their disposal, they could have destroyed the building and everyone in it – the more so as the ANP
men did not appear to be armed. Neither Mr Shahi nor Mr Buner had heavily protected residences, and the MQM headquarters in east Karachi was not especial y wel defended.
If these leaders real y expected to be attacked, such negligence would be suicidal. It seemed to me, therefore, that rather than a war to the death, what was happening in Karachi in the first half of 2009 was a war of maneouvre, part of the Pakistani ‘negotiated state’ in which violence is part of the negotiations: always in the background, and sometimes in the foreground, but in which usual y it is only a few pawns who get kil ed. The greatest risk of Taleban terrorism in Karachi is that it wil provoke the MQM into counter-attacks which wil then trigger an al -out struggle, in which the Taleban wil replace the ANP as leaders of the local Pathans, and the MQM wil use this Talebanization as an excuse to reduce the Pathans to a completely subordinate status.
However, as an official of the Pakistani Intel igence Bureau (IB) told me,
The mood among the Pathans in Karachi is very different from the mid-1980s when al this started and there were huge riots with dozens or hundreds dead. Then, they believed al the old Pathan stuff about how they are the bravest and the toughest and Mohajir city-dwel ers are cowards who won’t fight. But the MQM taught them different, and gave them a very bloody nose.
Today, Pathan gunmen may clash with MQM gunmen, and pick off local MQM activists, but our analysis is that they’l be very careful about joining the Taleban and starting a ful -scale war with the Mohajirs, because they think they’d lose. And if they don’t start a war, then the MQM wil also basical y tolerate them – just push them back from certain places, teach them a lesson now and then. The MQM also don’t want al -out war that would wreck their city.
For a great strength of the MQM is that like the Jamaat, but unlike any other Pakistani party including the ANP, they do have a dream that goes beyond patronage for themselves and their supporters. Their weakness is that this dream is almost certainly unattainable.
The dream is of Karachi as a Muslim Singapore on the Arabian Sea: modern, clean, orderly and economical y dynamic, ruled by a form of relatively mild and benevolent totalitarianism. And if Karachi were an independent island, the MQM and the people they represent would probably be both ruthless and able enough to achieve this dream. But of course Karachi is not an independent island. It is part of mainland Pakistan, and inextricably linked to the problems, and the peoples, of the rest of Pakistan. The danger is that the effort to maintain the MQM’s vision and rule in Karachi in the face of the Pathans and Sindhis wil feed the ruthless and chauvinist sides of the organization until its positive sides are drowned in the resulting bloodshed.
INTERIOR SINDH
The extent to which Karachi differs from its immediate hinterland in Sindh is absolutely staggering, even in a region of stark social and ethnic contrasts like South Asia – just as, beyond the city limits, the mayor’s great motorway becomes the misnamed ‘superhighway’
between Karachi and Hyderabad, which is mostly a potholed two-lane country road. The bridge between these two worlds is the Sindhi wadero landowning class, tied to Karachi by its urban upper-class lifestyle and by the parliament and government of Sindh which waderos dominate, and which are situated in Karachi. I asked a Sindhi journalist to explain the difference between a wadero and a non-wadero landowner. The answer came down yet again to kinship and hereditary prestige:
A wadero has to have a lot of land, but he has to have other things as wel . He has to be the leader of a tribe, or from a pir family, and here in Sindh the family has to be an old one if he wants real respect. He has to have gunmen and dacoits working for him, and to play a role in politics. Otherwise, no matter how much land he has, he’s just a big farmer.
I have met a considerable number of waderos during various travels in Sindh. The Unar Khans, tribal chiefs and politicians from northern Sindh, are not part of my acquaintance (though as the testimonies below indicate, I am sure they are perfectly splendid people). I did however meet a variety of their dependants during my travels in Sindh, and these meetings provided a frame for the world that the Unar Khans represent.
Of these encounters, the last was in some ways the most striking, because a statement of loyalty and respect that could have taken place 500 years ago was in fact delivered in the modern surroundings of Karachi airport, and by a man in a quintessential y modern service.
The other places in the airport café being ful , I asked if I could share the table of a middle-aged, balding man in the uniform of an official of Pakistan International Airlines. With typical hospitality, he offered me a share of his pudding, and asked about my travels in Pakistan. When I mentioned the Unars, his eyes lit up: The Unars are good people. They are a smal tribe, but more powerful than al the other tribes put together because they are the bravest and help each other. If one of them is in trouble, al the others come together to help, with guns, people, money, whatever is necessary. Everyone knows that they are very generous, very loyal to their friends. They have done so much for my own family.
My PIA interlocutor grinned slightly, but made no comment, when I mentioned my previous indirect encounter with the Unars, a few days earlier. I had gone to a police station in Clifton, Karachi, to meet an officer known as an ‘encounter specialist’ – in other words a policeman tasked with the extrajudicial execution of prisoners. A youngish man was sitting on the floor with his hands together to one side, closer examination revealing that they were in fact chained to the barred window frame. His face was lean and gloomy, but also composed and even dignified despite his position, and what must have been some wel -based fears as to what was going to happen to him.
The policemen told me that he was a member of a notorious dacoit gang from Larkana, picked up in Karachi on a tip-off, in return for a reward of Rs100,000. According to the police, he had been a bodyguard of the Unar Khans. The police, and journalists whom I asked about the Unars, also spoke of their ‘courage’ – though they often added other words as wel . Visiting Sindh twenty years earlier, I had been told in admiring tones how Ghulam Ishaq Khan Unar, elected in 1988 for the PPP, had had three men from a rival family kil ed in revenge after his brother was shot down in a family feud in Larkana bazaar in 1986. A senior policeman in Sukkur told me on that occasion:
Half the people here are protecting dacoits. So what do you do? You try to round them up, and if they are kil ed, fine, and if you can keep them behind bars, also fine. And if a minister or politician turns up and tel s you to release them, wel , relax and enjoy, what else is there to do? This isn’t England. You have to accept these things.
A week or so before my meeting with the dacoit in Karachi, I had been outside the front gate of one of the Unar Khans’ residences, in the vil age of Bakrani on the road between Larkana and Mohenjo Daro. The area was festooned with flags of the PML(Q) Party, which the Unar Khan family was currently supporting, and a large concrete arch at the entrance to the estate commemorated the late patriarch of that family, a PML(Q) member of parliament who had died recently.
His son, Altaf Hussain Khan Unar, had succeeded to his father’s land and his political role.
The PML(Q) was the ‘King’s Party’ set up by General Musharraf to bolster his administration, on the basis of defectors from Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League. It had no popular or traditional roots in Sindh at al – but, like other past ‘parties’ of the same kind, did not initial y need them, because it could always attract to its ranks by a variety of promises landowner-politicians like the Unar Khans.
Of eighteen people I spoke to in the vil age, al but four said that they had voted and would vote for the PML(Q), for a reason about which they were entirely candid: ‘This is the vil age of Unar Sahib. His house is just over there. We vote how our wadero says, because we are his people. He gives us everything, so we fol ow him,’ as Nizar Shaikh, a carpenter, told me. As I sat in the café in the gleaming surroundings of Karachi airport I thought back to this scene, in a dusty vil age of mud houses which seemed little changed from those of Mohenjo Daro – two worlds apparently so utterly different, but linked by invisible but immensely strong links of kinship and patronage.
HUNTING BOAR AND LEADING TRIBES
The purpose of the first days of my journey to interior Sindh was not supposed to be politics – but then, in the world of Pakistani landowners, as in that of their English equivalents in the past, everything is in fact politics, including deaths, births and above al marriages; and hunting parties, which was what this particular trip was about. Sardar Mumtaz Ali Bhutto, uncle of Benazir Bhutto and hereditary chief of the Bhutto tribe, had invited me to a hunt for wild boar, organized in a patch of jungle on the banks of the Indus by a landowning family cal ed Khoshk, waderos of a vil age of that name.
Mumtaz Ali Bhutto was providing most of the dogs, for the breeding of which he is famous, and the huntsmen.
The Sardar’s love of animals can take some curious forms. As our vehicle passed an emaciated, exhausted-looking horse pul ing an overloaded cart, he told me how unhappy such sights make him: ‘Sometimes, if I see a man beating his horse and donkey, I wil stop the car, get out and give him a beating instead.’ Since kindness to animals is not much of a South Asian tradition, this must be one of the more interesting combinations of British attitudes to animals and Sindhi ‘feudal’ attitudes to people.
Like fox-hunting in Britain, wild-boar hunting in Pakistan is a matter of pure sport, since in a Muslim country the animals cannot be eaten by the hunters. The carcasses are thrown to the dogs or given to one of the remaining groups of low-caste, formerly tribal Hindus who live along the Indus. I was offered one myself, but declined; because driving around interior Sindh like a motorized Obelix, with an enormous putrefying pig tied to the roof of my car, while it would undoubtedly have attracted attention, would probably not have contributed to my prestige.
As was the case for mil ennia in Europe, hunting is an important means of maintaining connections and forging new bonds among the landowner-politicians in Sindh. Hunting in Sindh twice played a part in the rise of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto: once in 1955 when President Iskandar Mirza brought General Ayub Khan to Larkana to hunt and introduced Bhutto to him; once in January 1971 when a joint duck-shooting trip with President Yahya Khan helped bring them together in the moves which led to the horrible events surrounding Bangladeshi independence.
I had wanted to go on a boar hunt ever since I had had to turn down an invitation in southern Punjab in 1989, despite the incentive added by my host that two local landowning families were covertly at odds and might use the occasion to shoot each other rather than the boar.
No such possibility was present on this latter occasion, if only because it turned out that the boar were to be hunted not with guns, but with spears.
At this news, my joy at being invited to this absolutely quintessential ‘feudal’ event was rapidly overtaken by the comical mental image of myself holding a spear, and the less comical one of my doing so while facing a large and understandably irritated boar. However, I needn’t have worried. Only one huntsman carried a spear, to deliver the coup de grâce after the boar had been brought down by the hounds. The rest of us were spectators, with a very slight chance of becoming participants if the boar charged us directly.
As perhaps in hunting for sport everywhere, the quarry on this occasion seemed in part an excuse for getting up early in the morning to see the countryside at its best – and the countryside of Sindh in early summer is definitely at its best at dawn and not at midday. The sun popped up through the mist as a pale disk, looking much more like the moon, and for a while it was blissful y impossible to imagine the dreadful heat of a few hours later.