Aboard the Democracy Train (10 page)

In those Cold War days, I reported from the tented village after it became notorious as a drugs and weapons hotspot. The turbaned Afghan Mujahideen, who toured the camps, hunted for young recruits for the US-funded
jihad
against the former Soviet Union. Sohrab Goth was a home for Afghan refugees and a depot for heroin. The army’s National Logistics Cell (NLC) trucks, which carried US arms and ammunition to the Mujahideen in the north, were widely rumored to return carrying heroin to be sold in Karachi.

By December 1986, Karachi’s Pashtuns – flush with drug money – had stocked a sizeable cache of weapons in a desolate area north of Karachi called Orangi Town. The Pashtuns lived here in brick and stone homes atop the rugged cliffs, much as they did in the hilly tribal regions that border Afghanistan. Their homes jutted menacingly over a sea of Mohajirs – including almost a million Biharis who had settled here after 1971, when Pakistan’s eastern wing, “East Pakistan,” seceded and became Bangladesh.

My early recollections of Orangi Town go back to 1972, when as a schoolgirl I was brought by my father to work with
humanitarian organizations in order to help the Biharis resettle in Karachi. The Bengali nationalists accused the Biharis of collaborating with the Pakistani army during the 1971 war. In fact in 1947 many Muslim Biharis had opted to migrate from India’s Bihar state to what was then East Pakistan. They ended up making a double migration in 1971 when they opted to join the Urdu speaking community in Karachi.

Subsequently, 1 million Biharis were resettled in Orangi town by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government. As a teenager, I made trips with my father to the deserted area in the north of Karachi to help an exhausted paramedic serve the poor, malnourished Bihari patients. Hundreds of refugees queued outside our makeshift clinics for cough and cold medicines. As the overworked dispenser dished out the medicines that I handed to him, his fantastic claim sparked my imagination: “I’m so busy I don’t even have the time to die!”

Fifteen years later, these poor Biharis – who had left war-ravaged Bangladesh to become Karachi’s newest Mohajirs – faced the wrath of angry Pashtuns. It was mid-December in 1986 and well past our newspaper deadline when an army of Pashtuns equipped with machine guns charged down the Orangi hills. They made use of the mud walls erected on the hills, shooting and ducking for cover. As the aggressors rained fireballs from their fortresses, the Mohajir areas below them – the Aligarh and Qasbah colonies – went up in flames.

The violence continued into the wee hours as both ethnic groups displayed the worst of human nature. It was reported that Mohajir babies were snatched and thrown into burning oil while Pashtuns were tied up and sliced to pieces in revenge killings. The cycle of violence raged for the next few days and cut off Orangi from the rest of Karachi.

Late at night, as the fires raged in Orangi Town, I got a phone call from a national public radio station in the US asking for the news. I filed my report, thousands of miles from America. It filled me with awe that Orangi Town – which I knew as acres of hilly desert with mud homes and little access to clean drinking water and sewerage – had made international headlines.

It was no less amazing that Orangi had become the scene of clashes between two very different refugee groups – the Biharis from South Asia and the Afghans from Central Asia – separated by thousands of miles of territory. Their peoples had migrated to Karachi to find peace because of the wars that had uprooted them from their respective countries. And now once again their lives were being turned around by bloody ethnic warfare.

The military imposed a curfew in Orangi Town. As the genocide halted, I visited the affected areas in the official van provided by my newspaper. Fear hung in the deserted streets, where broken billboards and hulks of burnt-out vehicles were grim reminders of the killings. The veteran social worker, Abdus Sattar Edhi darted in and out of the unpaved lanes in his rickety ambulances, which carried the dead and the wounded.

Both Mohajirs and Pashtuns had suffered heavy casualties in the incident. Among the devastated Mohajir families, a great number of women had lost their brothers and husbands. An atmosphere of distrust was in the air. People opened the door only after they saw that I was a young woman. The affected family members poured out their woes and lamented the breakdown of trust between Muslims.

The Pashtun-Mohajir riots set back the development work performed by the late Dr Akhter Hameed Khan. Dr Khan had founded the non-profit Orangi Pilot Project to teach residents to build their own houses, construct drainage schemes and help women run their own businesses. Then in his twilight years, Dr Khan proudly told me that his innovative ideas were geared around a related project he had begun in Comilla when it was still East Pakistan. His staff was now challenged by attempts to rebuild the shattered trust between the Pashtun and Urdu-speaking communities.

After the showdown in Orangi town, the Pashtuns moved closer to the Punjabis, another ethnic group that had come to
look for work in the southern port city of Karachi. The Punjabis are the predominant ethnic group within the military and have traditionally been represented at the highest tiers as corps commanders, generals, lieutenants and senior officers. They have a close nexus with the Pashtuns, who enjoy the second best position in the army. The British were known to patronize the Punjabis and Pashtuns on the ground that they were a hardy race, most suited to the martial qualities needed for governance.

In the early Zia years, the MQM threatened both the Punjabis and Pashtuns in Karachi. In comparison to the Sindhis and Baloch, who quietly moved out of Mohajir localities, many of the low-income Pashtuns and Punjabis – who worked mostly as transportation and construction workers – refused to abandon their home territory. Many of them had brought their families to Karachi and they had no intention of leaving.

Those who dared to live in strongholds where MQM militants called the shots paid dearly with their lives. In 1987, a heartbroken Punjabi who lived in the industrial Korangi area called me at my newspaper to describe how his daughter, Iffat Awan, a medical student, was killed point blank as she opened the door to a stranger. It would be incidents like these that would convince a large number of working Punjabis and Pashtuns to relocate back to their home provinces.

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.

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.

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.