Family marooned in floodwater for eight days evacuated

– by Jan Khaskheli

Shahnaz, a lady health visitor (LHV) in her 40s, was looking upset while being brought out with an eight-member family from her inundated house by a boat. She stayed marooned for eight days inside the flooded house in the affected Sanghar city, which was hit by floods after breaches in artificial drains.

Known among the neighbouring people as Dr Shahnaz, she was running her flourishing maternity home in the city’s neighbourhood. When the floodwater was flowing to the city – comprising a population of 150,000 – she was advised by relatives and family friends to leave her house but she took the floods easy and refused to leave.

The house is located in a low-lying neighbourhood, from where almost all other families had shifted to safer areas. Some of them hired vehicles to reach their relatives living in Karachi and other parts of the country. There was seven feet deep water in the low-lying parts of the city. Many houses collapsed completely. Items were flowing in the streaming water. When she was brought out with her family she was still looking in an unending shock. ….

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Imran Farooq murder: the bloody past of the MQM

The party of Imran Farooq, who has been assassinated in London, has a dark reputation that it has never left behind

by Declan Walsh in Islamabad

It is one of the great enigmas of Pakistani politics. For over 18 years the affairs of Karachi, the country’s largest city and thrumming economic hub, have been run from a shabby office block more than 4,000 miles away in a suburb of north London.

The man at the heart of this unusual situation is Altaf Hussain, a barrel-shaped man with a caterpillar moustache and a vigorous oratorical style who inspires both reverence and fear in the sprawling south Asian city he effectively runs by remote control.

Hussain is the undisputed tsar of the mohajirs, the descendents of Muslim migrants who flooded into Pakistan during the tumult of partition from India in 1947, and who today form Karachi’s largest ethnic group.

A firebrand of student politics, Hussain galvanized the mohajirs into a potent political force in 1984, when he formed the Mohajir Qaumi Movement – now known as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM. The party swept elections in the city in 1987 and 1988 but quickly developed a reputation for violence.

At early rallies Hussain surrounded himself with gunmen and urged supporters to “sell your VCRs and buy kalashnikovs”; violence later erupted between the MQM and ethnic Sindhi rivals and, later, against the army, which deployed troops to Karachi in the early 1990s. …

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