Thursday, February 01, 2007
EDITORIAL: War within Pakistan http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\02\01\story_1-2-2007_pg3_1
Two days before the Ashura or the climactic tenth day of Muharram, the cities and towns of Pakistan were being hit by sectarian suicide bombers, this time beginning with the North Western Frontier Province (NWFP). After Peshawar, the terrorists hit Dera Ismail Khan, a Frontier town on the border of Punjab and the hometown of Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of the country's largest Deobandi party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). This time too, the administration was ready for the bomber, but there was no way to prevent him. He killed two people. Later, an imambargah was rocketed. On the Ashura day itself, when the government was fearing more violence, the toll was only two dead and several injured when Sunni sectarians opened fire on a procession in Hangu. Most of the injured were policemen. In Bannu, a rickshaw was found with explosives and other munitions but whoever intended to use them could mercifully not do so.
DI Khan is an old sectarian trouble spot, with many past tragedies to its name. It fits the prognosis that such aggression is always targeted at a minority which is concentrated in any area. This has happened in Jhang, Quetta, Gilgit, Hangu, Bannu, Karachi and a number of towns in South Punjab. It is also significant that Deobandi seminaries are prominent in these areas, which is why Multan remains vulnerable to sectarian violence despite its dominant Sufi ambience.
It is a stroke of good luck and heightened security that these cities could somehow avoid getting hit by suicide-bombers on Ashura in the new anti-Shia wave that is radiating from Iraq where Al Qaeda decided last year to change the direction of its jihad and make it anti-Shia and anti-Iran. In the past, Quetta was targeted repeatedly to kill the Hazaras who are living in a part of the city since the rise of the Taliban whose savage treatment of them in Afghanistan led to their exile and ghettoisation in Quetta. But since Pakistan could not escape being selectively Talibanised, Quetta was helpless in the face of this punishment.
Karachi is the other place where the Shia have been attacked by extremist Sunni organisations. But here the Shia have tried to retaliate and in turn killed some of the top sectarian Deobandi clerics. Unfortunately, the state of Pakistan has been unable to stem this growing trend because of its past involvement with the jihadi militias who were trained out of the Sunni seminaries. Now we find that 20 percent of our Shia population is under threat from the very Sunni militias which our state nurtured in the past and before which it now seems helpless.
In Shabqadar on the Afghan border, Pakistani tribal teenagers are being recruited for battles inside Afghanistan. The active militia there is Harkatul Mujahideen, yet its leader lives in Islamabad merely under the surveillance of the government. Nearly 4,000 Pakistani teenagers have died fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan while many hundreds of others from the Pushtun regions are also getting ready to be suicide-bombers against the Shias.
Pakistan's police sources had warned about the coming wave of Shia killings last year, saying that this time Al Qaeda would be clearly involved in the mayhem. As usual, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LJ) was named as the only organisation involved in planning this Ashura bloodshed, ignoring or obscuring the fact that many other religiously-inspired organisations used in the past by the state to fight its Kashmir jihad are also involved in this activity. The logic of this policy is incomprehensible. Either the state is too weak or too scared to name and take on all such sectarian organisations or it still hopes to 'use' some of them for dubious 'national security' purposes in the future or, as is more likely, it is a bit of both.
The fact, however, remains that violent sectarianism will not be extirpated unless President General Pervez Musharraf reorients his own domestic stance and also changes some aspects of his foreign policy in regard to Kabul and New Delhi. His first decision to bring the MMA into the political system to balance the power of the PPP and the PMLN resulted in worsening the sectarian situation in the country. (It should be recalled that the greatest number of sectarian killings have taken place on his watch rather than in the days of General Zia-ul Haq who first planted the seeds of sectarian hatred in our faith.)
The news that India too is going sectarian should not please anyone in Pakistan. Hard line Islam is coming to Indian shores from the Gulf where many poor Indian Muslims work as labourers. And, ominously, they are turning to sectarianism under further blandishments of Wahhabi charities such as Rabita and Motamar Islami. In fact, Al Qaeda is riding the crest of this Wahhabism in South Asia, as was apparent after the hanging of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. India erupted into a fever of sectarianism led by the most powerful Deobandi seminary of India in Lucknow, the Nadwa, while the Shias of India refused to mourn.
Sectarianism is the outcome of the process of national-security driven 'nation-building' by the military in Pakistan for many decades. We are, however, glad that the military has begun to diagnose the disease under President General Pervez Musharraf's regime. But until the remedial surgery isn't undertaken, the cancer of violent sectarianism will continue to eat into the entrails of the state. *
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