Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [185]
By 1992, violence had grown so severe and was having such a bad effect on the economy of Pakistan’s greatest city that (whatever its previous links to the MQM may have been) the army decided that basic order must be restored. First under Nawaz Sharif and then under the second administration of Benazir Bhutto, a tough crackdown was carried out. The operation proceeded in typical Pakistani fashion, through a mixture of ruthless force and diplomacy. On the one hand, the military, police, Rangers and intelligence agencies made widespread use of torture and ‘encounter’ killings against the militants.
On the other hand, great effort was devoted to splitting the MQM. Radical elements, which thought the leadership was making too many compromises with other parties and ethnicities, were covertly encouraged to split off into the ‘Real MQM’, which then launched ferocious attacks against its former comrades. The military (or rather the paramilitary Rangers, which are under the command of the army) were then able to crush the extremists, while eventually making peace with the chastened MQM leadership, which was released from prison in return for promises to keep their men under control.
Murders have continued, but at a greatly reduced rate – though the MQM – Pathan strife of 2009 – 2010 has led to fears that Karachi may return to the dark days of the early 1990s. The latest round of fighting began in May 2007, when the MQM, who had become close allies of President Musharraf, used their armed men to attack a rally to welcome Musharraf’s arch nemesis Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, triggering violence in which dozens were killed.
Altaf Hussain had left Pakistan after an assassination attempt at the end of 1991, and ever since has lived in London. Like Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif during their periods of exile – but much more effectively – he maintains control over his party from a distance. Altaf Hussain is officially wanted by the Pakistani courts on charges including conspiracy to murder; but he is also regularly visited by Pakistani politicians and officials, including in April 2009 by President Asif Ali Zardari.
Despite its partial suppression by the state in the mid-1990s, the MQM has re-established an overwhelming grip on the government and politics of Karachi. However, its ability to use its dominance to develop the city is restricted by the very limited powers accorded to municipal government in Pakistan. Given that Karachi’s demographic and economic structures are so different from those of the rest of Sindh, it would in fact make much more sense for Karachi to be a province of Pakistan, as in effect it was from 1947 to 1958, when it was Pakistan’s capital and a separate federal district.
This would, however, lead to extremely violent protests by Sindhis, which would worsen still further Pakistan’s security problems and probably make civilian rule impossible: These protests would be both by the nationalists, who would see this as theft of Sindhi land, and by the landowner-politicians and their followers, who would stand to lose a very large proportion of their powers of patronage – since Karachi accounts for less than half Sindh’s population but around two-thirds of Sindh’s GDP.
Sindh and Karachi are therefore trapped in an unhappy but relatively stable marriage, held in place by a mixture of patronage and fear. The MQM dominates Karachi electorally and therefore usually has to be included in any coalition government of the province of Sindh, while Sindhi landowners and tribal chieftains dominate the rest of the province and milk Karachi’s economy for their own benefit. These landowners are mostly PPP, but include a very large number of opportunists who switch sides depending on who is in power in Islamabad – which is why the military administrations of both Zia and Musharraf were able to attract enough Sindhi support to form coalition governments in Sindh.
KARACHI’S ETHNIC FRONT LINES
The MQM’s headquarters is known, with a kind of urban hipness, as Nine-Zero, after