Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [172]
President Zia-ul-Haq had already become bitterly unpopular with many Shia for the execution of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (a Shia), and for his promulgation of Islamic laws for Pakistan based purely on the teachings of the Hanafi Sunni sect. This move led to massive Shia protests orchestrated by the radical Shia organization the Tehriq-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqah Jafferia, which forced the government to back down and concede to the Shia their own separate code in certain respects.
These developments in turn stoked the anger of certain Sunni groups, and may have led Pakistani intelligence services to favour the creation of Sunni sectarian forces in response. There is, however, no actual evidence of this, and it is entirely possible that these forces simply bought some of the arms which flooded into Pakistan to arm the Afghan Mujahidin – especially as these were being funded by state and private money from Saudi Arabia, with its strong traditional hostility to Iran and Shiism.
Later, the sectarians also forged links with groups participating in the Kashmir jihad, and probably received guns from them – another case of the Frankenstein syndrome or, rather, of Frankenstein’s monster wandering off, making friends with other monsters, and starting whole families of little monsters.
The result was the creation in Jhang in 1985 of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), as a breakaway group of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI). The SSP began a programme of attacks on local Shia targets, in the name of declaring the Shia non-Muslims and making Pakistan an officially Sunni state like Saudi Arabia. Local police told me that, in a few cases, local Sunni businessmen owing debts to Shia creditors or with business disputes with Shia rivals paid the SSP or LeJ (Lashkar-e-Jhangvi) to kill them.
Over the years the SSP’s activities spread beyond Jhang to take in southern Punjab and other areas of the country where old Sunni – Shia tensions had been latent, including Quetta, Peshawar and the Kurram Agency of FATA, where tribal conflict between the Sunni Bangash and Shia Tori tribes dates back some 300 years. In recent years, the SSP and their even more radical offshoot the LeJ have also extended their anti-Shia campaign to take in Ahmedis and Christians. Radical Shia fought back through the Tehriq-e-Jafferia and other groups, and in the 25 years to 2010 more than 6,000 people have been killed in sectarian clashes and terrorism, with the dead in a rough proportion of three Shia to two Sunni. Individual leaders and activists on both sides have been killed, mosques have been bombed, and on occasions bazaars frequented by people of the rival community have also been attacked.
It should be noted that, unlike with the jihadi groups fighting in Kashmir and Afghanistan, since General Zia’s time at least there has been no evidence of Pakistani governments backing the anti-Shia militants. The PPP is naturally extremely hostile to them, if only because the Bhuttos and Zardaris are Shia, and so are (in private at least) many of the PPP’s chief supporters among the landowners of central and southern Punjab. Despite the apparent sympathy of some leading members of the PML(N) for the anti-Shia militants, when Nawaz Sharif was Prime Minister in the late 1990s, his government launched a crackdown against them during which many were killed. The response was an attempt by the LeJ to kill Mr Sharif. The Musharraf administration continued this assault on the Sunni sectarians, and banned the SSP and LeJ in January 2002.
These repeated attacks by the state are a key reason why the SSP and LeJ (unlike the militants fighting in Kashmir such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba) have themselves increasingly attacked the state as well as the Shia and Christians, and as of 2009 have formed an alliance with the Pakistani Taleban. The wave of terrorism they have launched in Punjab also gives one more sympathy for the Pakistani state’s deep unwillingness to add to the number of their terrorist enemies by attacking the even more formidable