Q: What type of conflict is taking place in Karachi?
A: The classification is “Ethno-political” – ethnicity, identity, politics and crime are all in conflict with each other.
Q: Who are the primary actors in the conflict?
A: MQM, ANP and PPP.
Q: Who are the secondary actors in the conflict?
A: Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), organised criminal gangs, sectarian entities and foreign intelligence agencies.
KARACHI: Preetam Das is a good doctor with a hospital job and a thriving private clinic, yet all he thinks about is leaving Pakistan, terrified about a rise in killings and kidnappings targeting Hindus.
A successful professional, he lives in mega city Karachi with his wife and two children, but comes from Kashmore, a district in the north of Pakistan’s southern province of Sindh.
His family has lived there for centuries and in 1947 when the sub-continent split between India, a majority Hindu state, and Pakistan, a homeland for Muslims, Das’ grandparents chose to stay with the Muslims.
They fervently believed the promise of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah that religious minorities would be protected. Sixty years later, their grandson says life in Kashmore has become unbearable. “The situation is getting worse every day,” he says.
Two of his uncles have been kidnapped and affluent Hindus are at particular risk from abduction gangs looking for ransom, he says.
Rights activists say the climate is indicative of progressive Islamisation over the last 30 years that has fuelled an increasing lack of tolerance to religious minorities, too often considered second class citizens.
Das says the only thing keeping him in Pakistan is his mother. “She has flatly refused to migrate, which hinders my plans. I can’t go without her,” he said.
Hindus make up 2.5 per cent of the 174 million people living in the nuclear-armed Muslim nation. Over 90 per cent live in Sindh, where they are generally wealthy and enterprising, making them easy prey for criminal gangs.
An official at the ministry of external affairs in New Delhi who declined to be named said: “Every month about eight to 10 Hindu families migrate from Pakistan. Most of them are well-off.”
He had no comment on whether the number was on the rise, but Hindu community groups in Pakistan say more people are leaving because of kidnappings, killings and even forced conversions of girls to Islam.
“Two of my brothers have migrated to India and an uncle to the UAE,” said Jay Ram, a farmer in Sindh’s northern district of Ghotki.
“It’s becoming too difficult to live here. Sindhis are the most tolerant community in the country vis-a-vis religious harmony, but deteriorating law and order is forcing them to move unwillingly,” he added.
By Daneen Baloch
SINDH – KARACHI: On a seemingly calm Sunday, when the Rangers’ operation in the city’s oldest quarter was on and Zulfiqar Mirza was making headlines with his diatribe, many in Lyari felt that their voices were not being heard by the politicians and the media.
“Our locality and its inhabitants are being singled out as being part of a gang war that is sabotaging peace in the city,” said Mohammad. A driver by profession, Mohammad, 33, belongs to the Katchi community and is a resident of Old Kumhar wara. “Despite the hype we see about Lyari’s gangs and goons, I was never hurt or threatened by any Baloch in Lyari. For me, the town is my second home.”
Visibly frustrated at the way things were going on in the city, he said, “If the Rangers operation is necessary it has to be across the board. Why is it that it’s only Lyari that is being targeted and termed as a ‘gangsters’ town?”
Living in abject poverty with little means to sustain their day to day existence, the locals feel that broken promises of their elected representatives and the media are responsible for the crisis that this area faces.
“I’m a Baloch from Lyari and I’m not a gangster. Please stop Lyari’s media trail,” said Raza (not his real name), a 23 years old student who runs a net café in the area.
Talking about the recent turn of events that have once again shoved Lyari into the limelight for all the wrong reasons, he says, “The media is very biased and polarised. Lyari was never a ‘No Go’ area for anyone. We have all kinds of ethnic groups living in the same neighborhood; we share each other’s sorrows and happiness together. However, the media is hell bent on creating a hostile picture and there is no one willing to share our stories.”
Of the ethnic violence and gang war in the area, he says its “political in nature with extortionists calling the shots.”
“But it’s not only the killings that are worrying us. After the brutal killing of five men from Lyari, many employers have asked their Baloch workforce not to come to work as security cannot be guaranteed. As it is, poverty and lack of employment opportunities has been frustrating the residents of Lyari for years. Now, this will allow more youngsters to go for the guns and drugs.”
With its narrow interlinked lanes that are no less a maze, a trip to the area is an eye opener. With many communities living side by side, the place once known for its late night rendezvous and football crazy locals is now a shadow of its former self.
Shahid Husain, a senior Journalist and former activist, termed Lyari the most vibrant place in Karachi with its unique sub-culture. “I have never seen such a lively place. I use to go to Lyari everyday when I was a student. I never felt threatened because the people there were so friendly and loving.” But that was over three decades ago and then the downfall of this peaceful locality began. “Considered a stronghold of the Pakistan People’s Party, Lyari was transformed when heroine and Kalashnikov were introduced during the Afghan War. That was a dictator’s gift.” ….
Read more → DAWN.COM
By Karin Brulliard
SINDH: KARACHI, Pakistan — A trash-strewn dusty street here became a front line in recent ethnic battles that killed 100 people in four days.
Now, in the aftermath, residents speak of the street as though it is a chasm, dividing the population of this oceanside city of 18 million and even Pakistan itself.
On one side, people known as Mohajirs, long the dominant group in this economic hub, seethingly point to bullet-scarred and burned houses and demand a new province that would be theirs alone. On the other side, Pashtuns who migrated here in recent years after fleeing an Islamist insurgency in their native northwest also point to bullet holes, and some express worry that a sort of ethnic cleansing is to come.
“Now they are asking for their own province,” Adnan Khan, a Pashtun whose brother was fatally shot by unknown assailants this month, said of the Mohajirs. “Next maybe they will ask for their own country.”
Karachi, Pakistan’s most diverse city, is once more spewing violence that goes unchecked by police and is stoked by thuggish politicians. While the fierce Taliban insurgency seeks to overthrow the government from mountain hideouts hundreds of miles away, the city’s battles are laying bare the deep ethnic, political and sectarian cleavages that pose an additional threat to this fragile federation — as well as an impediment to its unity against Islamist militancy.
When Pakistan parted from India in 1947, it fused vast spans of ethnically and linguistically distinct populations under the common cause of Islam. But the state has struggled to define Islam’s role as a social adhesive. The powerful, Punjabi-dominated military, meanwhile, has aimed to suppress various nationalist movements, even while sometimes backing ethnic and sectarian groups as tools for influence. Politics remain cutthroat and largely localized. The result, some say, is a nation hobbled — and increasingly bloodied — by factionalism.
“Why are they fighting in Karachi? Because they have not become Pakistani yet. People have not become a nation,” said Syed Jalal Mahmood Shah, the Karachi-based leader of a small nationalist party that represents people native to surrounding Sindh province. Mohajirs, like Pashtuns, are themselves migrants to Karachi: They are Urdu-speaking Muslims who fled Hindu-majority India at partition.
Escalating clashes
Shifting demographics are the root of the fighting in Karachi, where an influx of ethnic Pashtuns from the war-torn region along the Afghan border is challenging the Mohajirs’ long-standing grip on the city. The struggle is waged through assassinations, land-grabbing and extortion, and it is carried out by gangs widely described as armed wings of ethnically based political parties. The Urdu speakers, represented by the dominant Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, accuse the Pashtuns of sheltering terrorists in Karachi; the MQM’s main rival, the Awami National Party, or ANP, says the city’s 4 million Pashtuns are ignored politically. But the violence is escalating to new levels, and residents say ethnic tensions are sharpening.
Courtesy: → Washington Post
By Saleem Shahid
Hundreds of thousands of children are victims of physical and mental torture in schools, religious seminaries and homes: SPARC
QUETTA: Organised criminal gangs are using thousands of children as sex workers across the country, a workshop on children’s rights organised by the Society for Protection of Rights of the Child (SPARC) was informed on Friday.
Muhammad Hanif Panezai, the chief of SPARC’s Balochistan chapter, said a survey had revealed that thousands of children were being used as sex workers at bus and truck stands and railway stations.
“Internet cafes and videogames’ shops are also being used for the purpose,” he said, adding that men belonging to several criminal networks remain present at these places to trap children and later use them as sex workers,” Mr Panezai said.
The Programme Manager of SPARC’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chapter, Mr Imran Khan Takkar, said a survey had revealed that 80 per cent of 1.5 million street children in Pakistan were victims of sexual abuse.
He said that organised criminal networks were using children to make pornographic material and later blackmailing them to commit heinous crimes, including suicide bombings. ….
Read more: DAWN
– Insecurity envelops Balochi Hindus after a series of abductions. Many are emigrating.
by Mariana Baabar
In the inhospitable terrain of Balochistan, perennially outside Islamabad’s shrinking circle of control, marauding gangs have made it a habit of targeting people even on days of celebration. It was so with Maharaj Lakhmi Chand Garji, the 82-year-old head priest of the ancient Kali Mata Mandir in the town of Kalat. …
via- Globeistan -Read more : OutLook
Karachi Turns Deadly Amid Pakistan’s Rivalries – By JANE PERLEZ
KARACHI, Pakistan — This chaotic city of 18 million people on the shores of the Arabian Sea has never shrunk from violence. But this year, Karachi has outdone even itself.
Drive-by shootings motivated by political and ethnic rivalries have reached new heights. Marauding gangs are grabbing tracts of land to fatten their electoral rolls. Drug barons are carving out fiefs, and political parties are commonly described as having a finger in all of it. …
Read more : THE NEW YORK TIMES
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