Aboard the Democracy Train (11 page)

Figure 4
JSTPP chief Qadir Magsi addresses a rally in Larkana, June 12, 2009 (
Dawn
photo).

Once the iron gates of the prison clanged behind us, we were in a separate world. My daily presence in the prisoners’ court made me part of the world that I had begun to cover. As the trial proceeded, some of the accused smiled and gesticulated to me in a rather friendly manner. They had read my daily coverage of the 30 September massacre in
Dawn
and wanted me to understand that it was their ideological motivation that drove them to “defend” the people of Sindh.

The lawyer for the accused, Qurban Ali Chohan traveled regularly from Hyderabad for the trial. He quickly introduced himself to me – letting on that he believed my coverage would make a difference to its outcome. After the hearings, the lawyer pulled out two chocolate cakes – bought from Hyderabad’s premier Bombay Bakery – and give one to the judge and the other to me. I took the cakes, all the while amused that the lawyer could imagine that it would affect my coverage.

What really made the difference in the case was that no witnesses turned up to testify. It was dusk when killers went on the shooting spree. The accused knew that mowing down a hundred or so people in cold blood would terrorize eyewitnesses – who were, in any case, unprotected by the weak judicial system. Indeed, the JSTPP leaders exuded the type of confidence that indicated an assurance by the higher-ups that they would not be touched after the “job.”

What was even more scandalous was that there were no arrests and no public trial for the mass murders, which had taken place in Karachi on October 1, 1988, when over a hundred Sindhis were killed. Nor would anyone be touched for the ethnic murders that had occurred on a mass scale under Gen. Zia. The legal system was in shambles and terrorists ruled. It was this loss of confidence in the government that forced Sindhi families to leave Karachi in droves.

In the course of the trial for Qadir Magsi and his party men, I met so called Sindhi nationalists who had resorted to theft, dacoity, murders, kidnappings for ransom and other criminal
activities. Among them, a rather debonair felon from Jeay Sindh, Sattar Morio, came up to me after a hearing. My glance fell on his expensive watch and a thin gold chain flashing around his neck. He had flashing green eyes and wore a starched white
shalwar kameez
(baggy trousers and tunic).

“You are Sindhi – right?” he addressed me in Sindhi in a tone that said he knew the answer.

I nodded.

With feigned hurt, he continued in Sindhi, “Then why do you treat us like this?”

It was an old trick. But it did not work on a person who has always condemned terrorism. Nor would the intimacy sought by Sindhi nationalists who spoke to me in my native tongue, change my perceptions of them. Moreover, those who used Sindhi nationalism as a guise to engage in criminal activity had failed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Sindh.

The dismissal of Benazir Bhutto’s first government in August 1990 was mourned by her supporters, many of whom considered it to be part of a larger conspiracy against Sindhis. On the other hand the largely urban MQM celebrated her downfall, hoping for a better deal under Nawaz Sharif’s government.

Under Sharif, the MQM took a life of its own, strengthening its economic base through crimes including extortion, theft, car jacking and kidnappings.

The Citizens Police Liaison Committee (CPLC) set up in Karachi in 1989 by Sindh Governor Fakhruddin G. Ebrahim to beat crime, found that MQM workers routinely took extortion money from shopkeepers and tax collection agencies. Even ordinary Mohajirs were victimized by the extortionist culture.

Despite being a coalition partner of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the MQM created problems for his government. There was no let up in ethnic riots, killings and damage to property. Matters reached a head when Sharif began to issue statements in the press that the MQM was bad for the investor climate in
Karachi. That was the first indication that the military had a plan up their sleeve.

In January 1992 – whilst Nawaz Sharif was still in power – the army issued a host of criminal charges against the MQM. In a move called “Operation Clean-up” – also used to tackle dacoits in the rural areas – the army arrested hundreds of MQM militants on criminal charges. It had a chilling effect on the apparently indestructible MQM and caused the party’s demigod, Altaf Hussein to flee to London, where he has since taken asylum.

Inside the Sindh Assembly, my ears began to hear the unthinkable. For the first time, MQM party leaders had begun to criticize Altaf Hussain from the floor of the assembly. Their newfound ability to do so filled me with wonder. To publicly criticize Hussain was for MQM loyalists akin to blasphemy and punishable by death.

By June 1992, we discovered that the military had secretly patronized a group of dissident legislators, elected on the MQM ticket, to downsize the party led by Altaf Hussain. Pakistan Television showed the dissidents – called MQM Haqiqi – perched atop army trucks to uncover Altaf Hussain’s “torture camps.” In Karachi, journalists were shown blood-spattered walls and ropes that hung like nooses. The Haqiqi leaders, Afaq and Aamir – whose party later renamed itself the Mohajir Qaumi Movement in contradistinction to Altaf’s Mutehidda Qaumi Movement – told state media that their rivals tortured opponents, drilled holes in them and stuffed their decapitated bodies into gunnysacks.

In Sindh, the state propaganda against the MQM did nothing to change people’s minds. Those who disliked the MQM were convinced that the party was a terrorist organization. Among them were the Pashtuns and Punjabis, many of whom had been forced to leave Karachi after the ethnic murders. They returned to their provinces to spread negative reports about the MQM.

On the other hand, Mohajirs in the MQM grew even more disillusioned with the Pakistan, where they had arrived in their millions since India was partitioned in 1947. Having long blamed the state for their suffering and deprivation, they grew even more convinced that the military was out to get them.

As the MQM plunged into a deeper state of alienation and paranoia, Karachi became a battle ground between Altaf Hussain’s followers and the dissidents. The city was divided into “no-go areas” where rival MQM factions could not enter. Intra-ethnic warfare began to kill more Mohajirs than any other ethnic group. In the 1990s, Karachi acquired the reputation of being one of the most violent cities in the world.

In June 1992, I was invited to a South Asian journalists’ conference in Kathmandu, Nepal to explain Karachi’s violence. When delegates from India and Bangladesh heard me narrate the MQM saga, they were bewildered. The Mohajirs had been their countrymen – who migrated from India in 1947 to create the Muslim homeland of Pakistan. And now the Pakistani army portrayed them as “terrorists.”

It was difficult to explain to the South Asian journalists the complex, mafia-ridden world of Pakistani politics. True, the refugees who came to Sindh from different parts of India at partition failed to find a sense of identity and fought a battle for survival of the fittest. Still, it was rather paradoxical that the military, which helped to build the MQM tiger, resorted to false techniques to rein it in.

When Benazir Bhutto returned to power for a second time in 1993, she was given a free hand by the military to defang the MQM. She appointed a retired general as the minister of interior – Naseerullah Babar – and gave him the authority to “flush out the terrorists.” A hefty Pashtun with a broad forehead and a pendulous nose, Babar instructed the police in Sindh to shoot MQM militants rather than bring them to trial.

But although Benazir’s bid to cut down the MQM was backed by the establishment, she miscalculated that the ethnic party had roots among the people. The MQM activists were frequently lower-middle-class urban dwellers who simply wanted a better life for their community. Benazir’s blanket policy of ordering that MQM
militants be shot at sight not only intensified her unpopularity with Mohajirs but also drew sharp criticism from human rights groups, who had previously been her foremost supporters.

As police and MQM casualties mounted in Karachi, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan invited Benazir to discuss the cold-blooded killings at a public meeting in the city. I saw an older and more determined Benazir calmly tell the meeting that while she sympathized with the families of Mohajir youth killed, she had a duty to the people of Karachi to keep them safe from “terrorists.”

This argument did not hold up in a predominantly Mohajir city. Inside parliament, MQM members cried “genocide.” Outside, an armed cadre backed their legislators’ anti-government tirades with violent strikes. In the Mohajir-dominated localities, buses were torched and public property destroyed and looted. By the end of 1994, some eight hundred people had been killed in police clashes and intra-factional rivalry.

As Karachi bled throughout the 1990s, hawkers brandished Urdu newspapers with photographs of bloodied Mohajir youth on the streets. The front-page pictures depicted dead young men in handcuffs, who had been shot at close range. With the court system in disarray, extrajudicial killings became the order of the day. Apparently, these were the new rules set by the army with which Benazir showed her willingness to play along.

The MQM retaliated against the PPP government’s police force – ambushing and killing those found alone. One Sindhi police officer I knew went into a hotel in the center of his city to wear his uniform and then changed back into civilian clothes to go home. Wearing police uniform in a Mohajir-dominated area like Liaquatabad would have invited attacks by armed militants, who lay in wait for unguarded police, ready to take revenge.

In 1995, Karachi’s reputation as a “killing field” spread to Europe. In December that year, Amnesty International invited me to visit
ten cities in Germany and speak about the extrajudicial killings in Karachi. Five of us “human rights defenders” from conflict areas were dispatched across Germany to discuss our respective situations.

As we grouped on a railway platform in Germany and then split off to visit different cities, I knew how the early Jesuits must have felt when they traveled to spread the message of peace. Interestingly, some Germans compared the experiences of Mohajirs under Benazir to those of Jews in Nazi Germany. I worked to dispel this illusion. It took some explanation to convey that the MQM problem was complex and rooted in the creation of Pakistan.

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.

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.