Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [184]
Meanwhile Mohajir radical groups came together in the MQM – allegedly with covert support from Zia’s regime and the ISI, which wished to strengthen opposition to the Sindhi PPP in the province. The first major ethnic violence in Karachi under Zia, however, was not Mohajir against Sindhi, but Mohajir against Pathan, the start of a history of intermittent violence between these two communities which surfaced again during my stay in Karachi in April 2009.
As today, Mohajir resentment and fear of the Pathans was fuelled by cultural differences, by the Pathans’ grip on passenger and freight transport in the city – an ethnic monopoly often enforced by violence – and, above all, by a growth in Pathan numbers and claims on public land. As today, this was due to a mixture of economic factors and war. The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the struggle against it sent some 3 million mainly Pathan refugees into Pakistan, a proportion of whom made their way to join the Pathan community of Karachi. With them came a great increase in the heroin trade, and in the number of automatic weapons in the city. In the 1970s, ethnic clashes in Karachi had been fought with knives, clubs and the occasional pistol. By the late 1980s the combatants were equipped with Kalashnikovs and, sometimes, rocket-propelled grenades and light machine-guns. The effect on the casualty figures can be imagined.
The first major outbreak of violence came in April 1985, when a Mohajir schoolgirl, Bushra Zaidi, was killed by a speeding Pathandriven minibus. This sparked murderous attacks by Mohajirs and Punjabis on Pathans, leaving at least fifty-three dead in all. Much of the violence was orchestrated by young activists of the student wing of the Jamaat Islami, the Islami Jamaat-e-Taleba – though apparently without the approval of the party leadership.
In the succeeding years, many of these activists – including the MQM’s founder, Altaf Hussain himself – left the Jamaati student groups to join the MQM. That party’s origins lay among students of lower-middle-class origin. In this, it resembles the Jamaat but is radically different from all the other major Pakistani parties, which were formed by rural or urban magnates. Altaf Hussain founded the MQM in 1984, and in August 1986 the party held its first mass rally, in Nishtar Park, at which he declared the Mohajirs a separate nation within Pakistan. Already, the party’s influence had spread so far that the rally was attended by hundreds of thousands of Mohajirs. Pictures of Altaf Hussain addressing this crowd are central parts of MQM iconography.
In the following years, hundreds more people were killed on all sides in ethnic violence. In 1987, the MQM defeated the Jamaat – in what you could call a kind of matricide, given the Jamaati origins of the MQM leadership – and swept to victory in local elections in both Karachi and Hyderabad, reigniting Sindhi fears of the Mohajirs. By 1988, this Sindhi – Mohajir violence was also occurring on a large scale, with Sindhi extremist groups allegedly receiving covert help from RAW, the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian intelligence service. Hyderabad was even worse affected than Karachi, and its neighbourhoods became completely distinct ethnically as a result of what almost amounted to ethnic cleansing. Mohajirs fled from the rest of the towns of Sindh, deepening the ethnic divide in the province still further.
The MQM built up a powerful armed wing, which targeted not only Sindhi and Pathan militants but journalists and others who dared to criticize the MQM in public. Torture chambers were established for the interrogation of captured enemies. Every morning would see its harvest dumped by the roadside: murdered activists from