News
Monday, June 28, 2010
Karachi wracked by spate of killings* Majority of killings linked to gangs controlled by political parties
* Many trace conflict’s origins to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and Zia’s decade of ‘Islamisation’KARACHI: Asif Raza and his brother were killed days apart and in the same manner; gunned down on the streets of the country’s largest city. Their relatives insist the pair was targeted by Sunni extremists only because they were Shias.
Around the same time, Rizwan Qadri, a Sunni, was killed when he stopped by a betel leaf shop on his way home. His killers are presumed to be either Shia extremists or members of a powerful political party that has been linked to many deaths in the city.
Close to half of the 600 murders reported so far this year in the economic hub of Karachi have been ‘target killings’. This figure is roughly double the number that occurred in all of 2009.
“Successive political governments with conflicting political interests, fragile policies and weak political determination and will are not able to deal with the cancerous disease of sectarianism, ethnicity and the mafias,” Imtiaz Ahmed, a former intelligence chief, said of Karachi’s problems.
In Pakistan, though, an increase in urban crime is never just a local problem.
The city’s chaos provides cover for the growing number of Taliban and al Qaeda militants looking for a hideout beyond the northwestern tribal regions.
It is also threatening to undercut confidence in the US-allied government bogged down in a war against those extremists.
Responsible: Many killings have been linked to gangs controlled by the city’s main political parties, who have their electoral bases in the city’s different ethnic groups.
Members of the Sunni Tehreek have been targeted in the past by both Shia extremists and most powerful political party in Karachi.
Qadri’s death underlines the difficulty of tracing the cause of many killings in Karachi, where sectarian and political tensions, as well as criminal impulses, all fuel violence. The only thing that binds the deaths is the inability or unwillingness of authorities to stop them.
Over two dozen Shia Muslims have been killed this year, according to data collected by the Citizen Police Liaison Committee, a public-private sector crime watchdog.
Origins: Most people trace the origin of the conflict to two events in the 1980s that helped changed the nature of what has always been Pakistan’s most cosmopolitan city. First, the US-sponsored war against Soviet occupation in Afghanistan triggered a flood of weapons into the region, as well as refugees. At the same time, dictator General Ziaul Haq oversaw a decade of ‘Islamisation’ in Pakistan, seeking to remodel the country along the lines of Saudi Arabia, which along with the US supported his rule. Thousands of hardline Sunni religious schools that promoted anti-Shia beliefs were established, with Karachi home to many of them. ap
Courtesy www.dailytimes.com.pk