M.Q.M. is allegedly involved in a number of high profile killlings of Urdu-speaking leaders

MQM terrorists kill Karachi organizer of National Party

By: Ahmar Mustikhan, Baltimore Foreign Policy Examiner

Terrorists allegedly belonging to the Muttahida Qaumi Movement gunned down a Baloch political organizer in Karachi Monday afternoon.

The victim was identified as Yaqoob Baloch, 45, Karachi Divisional organizer of the National Party. The deceased was an employee of the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation and a resident of Old Golimar.

“He was at his office at Nazimabad No. 1 when the killers came there and asked him if he was Yaqoob. When he replied ‘yes’ they shot and killed him,” Hameed Baloch, Sindh organizer of the National Party said.

He said identity of the killers are not known, but suspected that they belonged to the militant M.Q.M. as the area is the party’s stronghold.

A country for bigotry

Land of bigots

By Tazeen Javed

It has been a year since Shahbaz Bhatti passed away. No, strike that, he did not pass away; his life was brutally cut short when he was murdered. Everyone from the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) to the Sipah-i-Sahaba Pakistan have been suspected with his murder, either by the police officials, or by the home ministry, yet no decent progress has been made.

In a way, it all makes sense, since only certain kinds of angry groups of men, who bay for blood and destruction, seem to carry any weight around here. Bhatti was NOT that kind of a man. He believed in fighting for rights the democratic way and had planned to introduce legislation that would ban hate speech and hate literature against all. He was campaigning for official holidays for minorities’ religious festivals and wanted the blasphemy law to be repealed which turned out to be a crime worthy of death.

Bhatti’s death is not a lone incidence of brutal violence. Planned acts of aggression and cruelty against minorities — whether ethnic, religious, sectarian or communal — is becoming a norm in the ‘Land of the Pure’. Intolerance has reached such levels that people with names that revealed their sectarian or religious beliefs are afraid to use them when they feel unsafe. Slain journalist, Mukarram Khan Atif narrated one such incident, which depicted the extent of narrow-mindedness and fanaticism in the country. He and another reporter were travelling south from Mohmand Agency through Khyber Agency and one of them had to use a name that would make him pass off as a member of the majority sect.

The minority communities — no matter who they are and where they are living — are constantly under threat. We have cases of forced conversions of Hindu girls, mostly minors in Sindh who are forcefully abducted and married to Muslim men and then presented to the court as religious converts. According to a treasury member of the Sindh Assembly, around 20 to 25 forced conversions take place every month in the province.

Acts of mob violence against Ahmadis seem to be rising at an alarming rate. The situation is such that any Ahmadi family is at risk of being threatened with the blasphemy law. Their places of worship are gunned and/or ransacked and the law-enforcement community and the state does nothing and silently looks on.

The perpetrators of the Gojra incident, where a whole Christian colony was burnt down, still roam free and the Hazaras in Balochistan are regularly targeted for their sectarian and ethnic identity. Also, nothing is done to check the dissemination of hate literature, some of which can be found even in mainstream bookstores. Last week’s tragic shooting of passengers travelling on a bus to Gilgit on the Karakoram Highway, where people were asked to show their CNICs and then taken off and killed — all of them were Shia — shows that we have reached an even higher level of prejudice and bigotry.

It would not be wrong to say that intolerance rules our society and no one is safe here in this country other than the men who perpetuate bias, bigotry and hatred?

Courtesy: The Express Tribune, March 3rd, 2012.

Waking up to the war in Balochistan – BBC

Attitudes are hardening in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province against the government, but the state is now belatedly reaching out to the Baloch separatists. Writer Ahmed Rashid considers whether after years of civil war, talks could end the bloodshed.

It took an obscure United States congressman holding a controversial hearing in Washington on the civil war in Balochistan to awaken the conscience of the Pakistani government, military and public.

For years the civil war in Balochistan has either been forgotten by most Pakistanis or depicted as the forces of law and order battling Baloch tribesmen, who are described as “Indian agents”.

Just a few weeks ago, Interior Minister Rehman Malik even hinted that Israel and the US were supporting the Baloch separatists, while the army had totally ”Indianised” the Baloch problem.

On 23 February, Mr Malik did an about-face, saying that the government was withdrawing all cases against Baloch leaders living in exile and asking them to return home for talks. ”I will receive them in person,” he told journalists.

Don’t expect Baloch leaders to turn the other cheek at Mr Malik’s sudden shift – the Baloch have seen too many such U-turns before.

Brahamdagh Bugti, head of the separatist Baloch Republican Party and living in exile in Geneva, remains sceptical.

His grandfather Sardar Akbar Bugti, the head of the Bugti tribe, was killed in 2006 on the orders of former President Pervez Musharraf in a massive aerial bombardment, while his sister Zamur Domki and her 12-year old daughter were gunned down in Karachi in broad daylight just in late January – allegedly by government agents.

He told journalists last week: ”I have seen this all before… I am not an optimist.” Nevertheless, for the first time in years his face appeared on every Pakistani TV channel as he and other Baloch leaders gave interviews.

Broken promises

Three Sindhi Hindu doctors gunned down on Eid, Sindh observes mourning

Three Hindu doctors gunned down on Eid, Sindh observes mourning

By AFP / Express

Excerpt;

…. Sindh observes 3-day mourning

A three-day mourning is being observed in Sukkur and adjoining areas against the murder of three Hindu doctors in Shikarpur district, reported Express 24/7 on Tuesday.

Following the incident, the SHO of Chak police station was suspended while the head constable was arrested on the directives of SP Shikarpur Junaid Shaikh.

Ten people were also arrested in different raids on the directives of President Asif Ali Zardari and Sindh Home Minister Manzoor Wassan; however, no case has been registered so far. ….

Read more » The Express Tribune

The radicalization of Pakistan’s military

By Fareed Zakaria

Excerpt:

Whatever their strength, American troops will not determine success in Afghanistan. Nor will the newly formed Afghan National Army. As U.S. forces are gradually withdrawn over the next three years, it is Pakistan’s 600,000-strong army that will become the dominant military force in the region and will try to shape its future. But that military is undergoing a deep internal crisis of identity, its most serious since Pakistan’s founding in 1947. How it resolves this crisis will determine its future, the future of the Afghan war — and much else.This week’s news that a Pakistani brigadier general has been arrested for his ties to a radical Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, is only the latest in series of events that have rocked that nation. In the past year, two senior Pakistani officials have been gunned down, one by his own security guard. Last month, well-armed militants attacked a key naval base in Karachi, an operation that required inside assistance. Also last month, a brave Pakistani journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who detailed the growing extremist presence within the Pakistani military, was tortured and killed, almost certainly by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (which denied the allegation). And then there is the case of Osama bin Laden, who was for years comfortably ensconced in an army town.

Pakistan’s military has traditionally been seen as a secular and disciplined organization. But the evidence is now overwhelming that it has been infiltrated at all levels by violent Islamists, including Taliban and al-Qaeda sympathizers.

There is also strong evidence of a basic shift in the attitude of the Pakistani military. Last month, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, was invited to speak at the country’s National Defense University. Addressing a large gathering of officers, Haqqani asked the audience, “What is the principal national security threat to Pakistan?” He offered three categories: “from within [Pakistan],” “India,” and, “the United States.” A plurality voted for the third option. …..

….. Pakistan is drifting into a strategic black hole. Does the country really think its best path forward is as an adversary of the United States, currying favor with militants and becoming a vassal of China? Are its role models North Korea and Burma? Or does it want to crush the jihadist movements that are destroying the country, join the global economy, reform its society and become a real democracy? These are the questions Pakistan has to ask itself. The United States, for its part, having disbursed $20 billion in aid to Pakistan in the past decade — most of it to the military — needs to ask some questions of its own.

To read complete article: The Washington Post

The behavior of the Pakistani security establishment towards its nation is, as if it be the medieval rulers and the people are be its subject slaves

The obnoxious most, Military Apartheidism in Pakistan .

Issued by the Central Secretariat CPP:  (10.06.2011) The behavior of the Pakistani military towards its nation, is, as if it be the medieval rulers and the peoples are be its subject slaves . It is always above the established constitutional mandate, and that’s why it does not allow any civilian dispensation to function in peace . Whenever it suits, it would send even an elected prime minister to the gallows, or would forced him into exile.

Under this belligerent mind set, it has unleashed a holocaust on the people of Baluchistan, where dozens of the deformed and mutilated corpuses of the Balochi youth and progressive intellectuals and political workers shall be found all over the Baloch land, every day .

The Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa’s Swat, Dir Districts and its adjacent tribal area is made a paradise for the Jihadists and Al-Qaida terrorists, and no go area for its own inhabitants and a grave yard for the progressive political workers and law abiding peaceful innocent ancestral citizens. At the pretext of operation, will bombard and level whole towns and villages , where later on the innocent peoples dead bodies will be produced in front of the media, being terrorists and Taliban, where the captured terrorists are set scot free on pretext of lack of evidences to prove them guilty in the courts of law.

Innocents people including pregnant women are gunned down at the security check post in Kharotabad, Balochistan, progressive political leaders are shoot down at point blank and then their corpuses are sprinkled with Petrol and set to ablaze, in Sangarh, Sindh, is for now, no more unusual matter of the day.

Or Salim Shehzad’s like journalists are torchered to death. In a similar, one among the dozens of daily brutalities meted out to the poor people of Pakistan, is this heart wrenching and blood curdling shooting of Sarfarz Shah, a Karachi city’s resident’s most audacious and highly condemnable cold blood murder at point blank by the Security forces of Pakistan in a broad day light ,where the unfortunate victim succumbed to death due to bleeding, while pledging for medical aid after he was shoot on legs, was to no avail of human compassion. This heinous atrocity has no match, even to the Hulagu and Genghis Khan’s horrors against humanity .

Please watch the link to this brutality :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0mCbWIEk8qI

The Communist Party of Pakistan condemns this act of brutality in the strongest most possible terms and demands the Government of Pakistan for immediate and harshest punishment to the culprit scoundrels of this heart breaking barbaric incident.