PAKISTAN: Spiralling Violence Could Engulf Sharif

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Nasim Zehra

ISLAMABAD, Aug 8 1997 (IPS) - Escalating ethnic and sectarian violence in Pakistan’s two biggest provinces threatens the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif which promised to restore peace.

Sharif admits the “law and order situation has gone from bad to worse” and talks of the need to work out a comprehensive strategy involving the judiciary, the provincial government and intelligence agencies.

But setting up an Information and Operation Control Room in the Pakistan capital to monitor the situation and other such administrative structures are at best an “ad hoc and reactive response”, an Islamabad-based political observer says.

Daily gun battles have shattered the peace in the southern port city of Karachi and in the province of Punjab, where this week 22 people were killed in separate incidents within 48 hours.

According to unconfirmed reports, Punjab Chief Minister Shabaz Sharif, the prime minister’s brother, met Pakistan Army Chief Jehangir Karamat on Aug. 6, but the army is reported to have declined the invitation to take on law enforcement responsibilities.

Pressure on the government to stop the killings is mounting. On its own, the Supreme Court issued a suo moto notice on sectarian violence and is holding a hearing on Aug. 9. The reason: the written assurance from the Attorney General and federal Interior Ministry on Jul. 1 that they were doing their best to stop the killings.

“Time is running out as the problem gets worse,” says a political commentator here. “It is indeed a monumental challenge which calls for a well thought-out and integrated response. The government has no choice, but to show that it has the capacity to rise to the challenge — if it wants to survive.”

Years of political mismanagement and drift have stoked the flames of sectarianism and ethnic tensions. Karachi, Pakistan’s economic powerhouse ground to a halt last year because of battles for turf between a variety of pro- and anti-government groups.

The city has a huge migrant population, most of whom are refugees from India who settled in the port city when the subcontinent was partitioned to create Pakistan in 1947. New waves of migrants followed, creating their own ghettos.

As joblessness grew, frustrations erupted in ethnic clashes which became armed battles with arms for the Afghan mujahiddin pouring into Pakistan from the United States. In the 1980s Afghanistan was a theatre of a proxy war between Cold War rivals, Washington and Moscow. And Pakistan the conduit for arms and money to the mujahiddin fighters trying to topple a Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul.

The previous Benazir Bhutto government handed over Karachi, a city of 12 million, to the army for a while. But gang wars just went underground, surfacing again with the return of civilian rule. Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party is pro-Sindhi, the indigenous people in this part of Pakistan and sworn rivals of the migrants from India who though are in the majority.

With the violence spiralling out of control, a political commentator in Islamabad says the Sharif government, which is an ally of the MQM, the party of migrants, has to tackle the problem at various levels if it wants to get the economy in shape.

Already the deteriorating law and order situation has badly undermined new investors’ confidence in the government’s ability to deliver on its promises of reforms.

According to one analyst, the government must immediately “equip itself materially, organisationally and legally” to fight the “highly organised and regimented parties”. And mobilise both the civil and military institutions to deal with the problem with an iron hand.

In Lahore, the capital of Punjab, where there has been revenge killings of Sunni and Shi’ites, the government should encourage a dialogue between the two groups. Even leaders of the fundamentalist Jamat-i-Islami, like Qazi Hussain Ahmad, should be roped in to lead efforts to create harmony.

Sectarian strife in Karachi is believed to be linked to the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran for dominance over the Muslim world. Even senior government officials say off the record that Tehran and Riyadh are the two principle foreign benefactors of radical groups of Shi’ites and Sunnis in Pakistan.

Officials are advocating a tightening of Pakistan’s borders to the so-called religious influence from abroad. “Extreme tolerance is spilling the blood of the innocent,” declares a political observer here.

“Pakistan’s free-for-all physical and ideological borders, specially since the 1980s, were destined to make trouble … The fault is not of the naive, misguided people who fill the ranks of sectarian parties, but of the Pakistani state which facilitated if not participated in the manipulation of simple minds and hearts,” says a newspaper columnist.

The onus is on the government as well as on other state institutions. Approaching the problem holistically, taking into account all its dimensions, is the only way.