Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [174]
The local police received categorical orders that sectarian attacks on politicians during the elections were to be prevented. The police response? They took three Lashkar-e-Jhangvi activists (whom they suspected but were not able to prove had been responsible for several previous murders of Shia) into a field at night and shot them ‘while resisting arrest’, and let SSP and LeJ know that if they launched attacks during the elections there would be many more such ‘encounter killings’ of their members. I asked an official acquaintance whether a strong warning wouldn’t have been enough. ‘This was a strong warning, the only warning these people understand,’ he replied.
In consequence, for many years the sectarians have also been launching attacks on state targets, which in turn has increased state hostility to them. Terrorism by SSP and LeJ increased enormously after the storming of the Red Mosque in 2007 (in which fighters linked to SSP were killed) radicalized Islamists across Pakistan, while US drone attacks killed Punjabis from the sectarian parties fighting for the Taleban in the FATA and Afghanistan.
In July 2009, a huge explosion destroyed part of a village in Multan district and killed seventeen people when an arms cache in the home of a local madrasah teacher with links to the SSP and the Pakistani Taleban blew up accidentally. In the following months, the growth of terrorism in Punjab seems largely to have been the work of SSP and LeJ militants linked to the Pakistani Taleban, rather than of the Taleban as such. According to credible reports, Pakistani intelligence responded in typical fashion with a mixture of arrests, extra-judicial executions, and attempts to split the militants and draw more ‘moderate’ Sipah-e-Sahaba members into allegiance to the state. This also appears to be the strategy of the PML(N) government of Punjab. Whether it will have any success is at the time of writing wholly unclear.
MULTAN
A famous Persian couplet about Multan sums up some of the reasons for Sunni militant support there, and the immense obstacles to it: ‘In four rare things Multan abounds / Heat, dust, beggars and burial grounds.’ The notorious heat and dust of summer have no great impact one way or the other, but while the beggars reflect the area’s poverty, the burial grounds are those of local Sufi saints and their followers. Multan was the first part of present-day Punjab to be converted to Islam, starting in the tenth century, and the conversion was largely carried out by these saints.
It is impossible to miss the saints in Multan. Their tombs literally tower over the old city on its hill, and give Multan its fame. Several are faced with the equally famous blue Multani tilework. The shrine of Shah Rukn-e-Alam is a particularly striking combination of grim fortress and soaring fantasy. The lower parts consist of walls and towers of massive unadorned brickwork, which act as the base for a beautiful tiled dome.
Despite horribly destructive sieges by the Sikhs and British, and the whims of the Chenab River, which now flows several miles away, a combination of the strategic hill and pilgrimages to the saints’ tombs has meant that Multan has always been rebuilt in the same place. It is indeed the oldest continuously inhabited city in Pakistan, and visitors are shown the spot on the old walls where Alexander the Great was wounded during his attack on the city. This might conceivably be true, though the attraction of the spot for tourists is sadly diminished by the fact that it now faces yet another concrete semi-slum which over the years has swamped what used to be a Mughal garden.
Worship of the saints is the greatest local obstacle to the spread of Sunni radical ideology in southern Punjab, just as the political power of the great landowning families – Gilani, Qureishi, Khakwani and Gardezi – who are the saints’ descendants and custodians of their shrines (pirs)