Members
of Pakistan's Elite Force stand guard during Friday Prayers in
Lahore
Sectarian
Terrorism in Pakistan is Policy of the Establishment
By
Wajid Shamsul Hasan
LONDON,
October 10: Before the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Kenyan
ecologist, Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the
Prize, the 194 candidates included the man who has a self-claim
to be the "only non-terrorist in a terrorist state".
Joint
contender with General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan was the former
Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Both men had been
recommended for the award for their 'sincere' efforts to resolve
the Kashmir dispute.
Notwithstanding
their other acts of omission or commission, the common denominator
between the two is the death of hundreds of innocent people. Whatever
they might do to cleanse themselves, all the perfumery of Arabia
will not be able to wash the stink of their hands stained with
the blood of the unsung and unwept.
Atal
Bihari Vajpayee cannot absolve himself of the extermination of
the innocent Kashmiri men, women and children or the mayhem of
thousands of Muslims under his government in Godhra in Indian
state of Gujarat. General Musharraf's hands too are dripping with
the blood of his innocent countrymen in the tribal areas where
he is carrying on a full-fledged ground and air war on his own
patriotic people.
Besides
that, Pakistan under Musharraf has come to be the only country
where Muslims are killing each other with such horrifying impunity
as never before. In two tit-for-tat sectarian massacres and a
brutal double assassination in Karachi so far this month, more
than 70 people have been done to death while scores continue to
receive treatment for their ulcerating wounds.
In
the first incident in Sialkot bomb attack on an Imambargah 30
Shias were killed. Early Thursday morning in Multan a congregation
organized by the banned Sipah Sahaba to commemorate the death
anniversary of Maulana Azam Tariq was exposed to a huge explosion
in a parked explosive-loaded Suzuki van that was detonated by
a timer. This apparently revenge killing left 41 dead with more
than 80 injured. Multan, now in the grip of sectarian fire, has
been handed over to the Army to control lawlessness and restore
peace and order.
While
quite a large bulk of Pakistani military is busy waging war in
Wana, minorities and law-abiding citizens are passing sleepless
nights in fear of sectarian killers and overall absence of security.
Suffering from deep seethed apathy and no accountability to put
them in the dock the police and other law-enforcing agencies find
it convenient to blame it all on the foreign saboteurs and agencies.
After 9/11 it has also become easy for them to shirk their security
responsibility and blame the unknown religious militants.
For
them it is easier said than done. While Pakistani law-enforcing
agencies have become totally disoriented, they need to be freed
from the notion that their whole responsibility lies towards providing
protection to the lives of hundred or two hundred odd VVIPs and
VIPs and no one else. The police and the intelligence network
in an area need to be made accountable for every crime in their
jurisdiction. The Chief Minister of a province should act at once
unlike Punjab's Choudhry Pervez Elahi who woke up after three
days to suspend the Sialkot DPO.
It
is also high time for the government functionaries to stop playing
truant by doping out to the people that they shall have to suffer
it since terrorists' strings are pulled from outside. Most of
the time the insinuation points towards India, Afghanistan or
Iran and on occasions, even the United States.
The
Sialkot mayhem was attributed to Wahabi designs to make Pakistan
a Wahabi state and the Multan killings can be easily dismissed
as revenge. But cynics in Pakistan believe there is a hand of
government agencies to pre-empt any popular movement on the issue
of General Musharraf’s uniform. Others feel that it is part
of a sinister scheme to fold up the entire system and replace
it with a presidential form of government.
As
usual the investigators are spinning yarns without finding anything
substantive about the culprits. In Sialkot police sources hinted
at the involvement of the 'banned militant organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
that had earlier been responsible for killing of more than 50
Shias in a Quetta Imambargah and also at Karachi. The bombs used
in Sialkot incident were indigenously fabricated but explosive
material used in them was made in India, available off the shelf
in the Lahore markets. Obviously some fingers were pointed at
India as well.
In this context one would recall that following the Quetta Shia
massacre in 2003, the then
prime minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali had told newsmen that
he suspected an Indian hand since Kabul had allowed India to open
its consulates in bordering areas of Pakistan. Only recently the
Baluchistan Chief Minister blamed Delhi for setting up more than
30 training camps to help Baluch dissidents raise the "Baluch
Liberation Army."
Not
that we were without sectarian and ethnic riots in the past. It
was under General Ziaul Haq that ethnic and sectarian divide was
created and exploited to divide the people to weaken their political
power. All the sectarian and ethnic organizations that rule the
street owe their existence and parentage to him and to his policy
of divide and rule.
General
Musharraf usurped power in October 1999 to give good governance,
to restore the writ of the state and to eliminate ethnic, sectarian
and religious violence by militants. Five years down the road,
there is a lot more of it all. Tribesmen, who have always served
as the first line of defence for Pakistan all along the rugged
Northern Frontier, are in revolt. The situation in the biggest
province, Baluchistan, is like a powdered keg waiting for the
flicker of the match to explode.
Besides
the two gruesome incidents in Sialkot and Multan, the half-decade
long Musharraf era has been responsible for the worst of sectarian
violence. Never before such a large number of professional people,
mostly doctors in medicine, majority of them Shia, were done to
death in target shootings. The motive seemed to do more to converting
Pakistan into a Wahabi garrison state than anything else.
Following
the Sialkot bombing incident the Shia community tempers were running
high and
rightly so since it has been the main target of sectarian violence
during the five years of Musharraf. Pakistani newspapers have
quoted officials of Shia organizations accusing Musharraf of 'offering
a gift of Hussaini blood' every time he visited Washington at
the Bush altar.
Analysts
interpret it as insinuation implicating the Americans as his collaborators.
In this context they recall various observations by experts that
once Washington found itself going deeper down the Iraqi quagmire,
then it would resort to igniting Shia-Sunni riots to get out of
Iraq and that Pakistan too would have a Shia-Sunni fall-out.
The
explanation that such incidents could not have been done by the
Muslims since Americans have made them their target did find common
currency where ever Shia killings took place. In the case of the
Quetta massacre, India and Israel were accused to have partnered
it with the Americans. However, when a retaliatory attack killed
the leader of Sipah Sahaba, Azam Tariq, in
Islamabad, his organization lodged an FIR against the Shia Hazara
leadership who had earlier accused Tariq and SSP of being responsible
for massacres in Quetta and Karachi.
It
is another story that the man who masterminded the Quetta killings
was nabbed. He turned out to be linked to the various jihadi organizations,
available to kill any one if ordered by their top bosses including
late Amjad Farooqui.
Notwithstanding
those who somehow believe that Muslims cannot kill Muslims, it
is time to face the reality. Sectarian dissensions have been part
of Muslim religious polity and that many amongst them who are
bigoted have been unkind to Muslims who believe in another Fiqah.
One would tend to agree with the view that the Shia-Sunni violence
has been brought about not mostly by India or the United States,
but by Pakistan's military establishment to protect its vested
political and commercial interests and to keep the masses divided
at all levels.
Pakistan's
intelligence apparatus well before 9/11 has been using the religious
leaders and their organizations for the character assassination
of the political leadership. Even founding fathers like Liaquat
Ali Khan, Khawaja Nazimuddin and Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy were
not spared. The case of Bhuttos is yet another example. When the
Taliban used to eat out of ISI hands, Osama's men tried to kill
the then Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Even Nawaz Sharif as prime
minister was made a target. His motorcade missed being blown up
nine months before he was finally disposed off by the military.
As
for attacks on Musharraf, Karachi Corps Commander and Prime Minister
Shaukat Aziz, they too were attempted by those who felt betrayed
by the junta that had been using them all along and have been
responsible for dropping them like a hat after having used them
for decades. In their case it is the chicken that are coming home
to roost.
A
little digression here. It was the month of August 1997 and I
had been released by the Sindh High Court but the doctors at the
Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology (AFIC) had not discharged
me yet. Some of my journalist friends were visiting me to inquire
about my health.
Suddenly there was a buzz on the mobile of one of the journalists.
The conversation was in Punjabi. Once the conversation was over,
I asked my friend who was calling since he looked rather excited.
He did not answer but pointed at the bearded picture in a "WANTED:
DEAD OR ALIVE" advertisement in a leading newspaper lying
on my bed table. It was Riaz Basra's.
My
next door room mate was the top bureaucrat of Punjab province
at that time being hunted by the government of the day. He too
had joined my friends in the room. When he came to know that it
was Riaz Basra who had phoned my friend, he said it was he who
as administrative head of the province had issued Riaz Basra's
picture to newspapers. Not only that he had also sought ISI's
help to arrest him since the Punjab government had information
that Basra had a hideout on the border under the protection of
Taliban. The then DG ISI refused to help him arrest Basra and
he was told that he should not bother about him since "Basra
is a useful person".
It may be mentioned here that Lashkar Jhangvi (LeJ) was an off-shoot
of Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The SSP surfaced itself in 1985
when General Zia was in the process of introducing Wahabism in
Pakistan as a counter force to the Islamic Revolution in predominantly
Shia Iran. Sources claim that in early 2001, the Ministry of Interior
had discovered that SSP had raised an army, 50,000 strong, all
recruited in Pakistan, to turn Pakistan into a citadel of puritan
Islam as practiced by Taliban under Mulla Omar and Osama Bin Laden.
Riaz
Basra had been SSP's Information Secretary and he was assigned
by its high command to create a militant wing styled as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
to counter Shia outfit Sipah-e-Mohammad Pakistan (SMP). SSP leader
Haq Nawaz Jhangvi’s murder in February 1990 had led to the
revenge killing of Sadiq Ganji, director of the Iranian Cultural
Center in Lahore.
Basra
was arrested for masterminding Ganji's murder, but he was allowed
to escape. He then operated from Afghanistan and was involved
in as many as 300 cases including torching of Iranian Cultural
Centers in Lahore and Multan in 1997 and killing of nine Iranian
diplomats in Mazar-e Sharif. This had caused a great furore in
Iran and Tehran declared Pakistan as the villain behind the whole
drama.
SSP
and LeJ established themselves as a radical force. They acquired
lot of muscle power under the patronage of General Zia who, backed
by the Americans, was hell-bent on destroying Bhutto's Pakistan
People's Party's since it was the only formidable secular and
progressive force that could challenge him and his military establishment.
SSP became a predominant force among other religious groups that
were pitched against PPP.
Musharraf
and his military establishment has followed into the footsteps
of Ziaul Haq, with PPP continuing to be his arch-rival. Generals
like Aslam Beg and Hameed Gul had grand quixotic dreams. They
believed Taliban's control of Afghanistan gave Pakistan strategic
depth which extended to the banks of River Oxus. And Musharraf
in the similar mould used the Islamic militants from various countries
that had been trained, nurtured and nourished by ISI, not only
to have Pakistan's sway over Afghanistan but also to use them
in aid of Kashmiri freedom struggle through what India calls as
cross border terrorism.
Pakistan's
religious scene has not confined to Shia-Wahabi-Deobandi rivalry.
It has been marred further by the Barelvi backlash that took the
form of the Sunni Tehrik, a militant movement that surfaced in
1992 for protecting Barelvi mosques and vested interests against
the onslaught of the SSP and the Wahabi Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. Sunni
Tehrik's founder, Saeed Qadri was murdered along with five of
his colleagues in May 2001. However, it continued to grow and
became more radical to join in 'fatwa' issued by Osama Bin Laden,
Ayman Al Zawahiri and Shaikh Hamza calling on Muslims to kill
Americans and their allies "everywhere".
It is most unfortunate that Pakistan's military establishment,
pursuing its goal to convert Pakistan into a garrison state and
to have monopoly over political power and country's resources,
has shown preference to sup with these religious elements who
had opposed the Quaid and the struggle for Pakistan.
Not
only that, it created more parasitic religious groups, each more
violent than the other, to divide the people. It is regretted
that in the process it created a perception for CIA to conclude
that by 2010 Pakistan would become totally Talibanized and a failed
state to end up as another Yugoslavia. And surely 'credit' for
it would be bagged by Musharraf.
The
writing on the wall is very clear: it spells doom, disaster and
disintegration. However, there is still a grace period of five
years between now and 2010. By reverting to Quaid's vision of
Pakistan as a transparent democracy where religion will have nothing
to do with the business of the State, the masses and genuine leaders
in the mould of Quaid Azam and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto can bring about
a turn around.
The
writer is a former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK
