Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [186]
Like most of Karachi, the neighbourhood itself is urban, in a way that most other Pakistani cities are not. In most cities, outside the downtown areas, the houses of ordinary people are one-storey buildings of mudbrick or concrete, not essentially different from those of villages, and often built around gated compounds, while the houses of the rich are villas set in gardens. The general impression is of the country come to town – which given that most of the families moved from the countryside fairly recently, and keep close contacts with their relatives in the country, is literally true. Azizabad by contrast features taller, narrower but much more solid individual houses set next to each other, and small apartment blocks of four or five storeys. Elsewhere in the city, though there are few tower blocks and no skyscrapers, big blocks of flats line the main roads.
Four blocks around the HQ are sealed off by security barriers, but, thanks to some PR person, the barrier through which I entered is brightly painted with fruit and flowers and a sign proclaiming ‘Street of Love and Peace’. This was thanks to a ‘Concept by Husaini Electrics’. Beside it, a large poster proclaimed that ‘On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the founding of the MQM, the people of this area salute the Great Leader Altaf Hussain.’ Beyond it was a second security barrier, with electronically operated bollards embedded in the roadway. Getting in required a telephone call and an escort – all very far from the disastrously sloppy Pakistani norm.
Opposite is a small, well-kept park, the Bagh-e-Afza, with a children’s playground decorated with statues of giraffes and horses. The houses around were fairly shabby two- and three-storey buildings, but in reasonably good shape, and there was very little rubbish on the streets. ‘The MQM tries to keep its neighbourhoods clean – that is very sacred for them,’ my assistant told me. White, green and red MQM flags were everywhere, interspersed with the black flags of the Shia, because a large Shia prayer hall is just down the road.
The Youth Minister of Sindh, Faisal Sabzwari, took me to see Altaf Hussain’s two-rooms-up, two-down house, with its tiny sitting-room, ‘where Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and any of the other leaders came to meet him and sat on this sofa’. Behind is a small courtyard, with no garden – a million miles from the mansions of PPP, PML(N) and ANP leaders, but also, it must be said, from those of some contemporary MQM leaders I visited.
The house now forms part of a headquarters complex including a media centre where young volunteers monitored a bank of thirty television screens and manned a telephone switchboard. Mr Sabzwari told me that they have a twenty-four-terabyte computer storage facility – ‘which we are going to double soon’ – an e-mail server with 50,000 addresses, and a desktop TV editing machine for making films. ‘From here, we try to monitor whatever is published or broadcast in Karachi and the world about us.’ Once again, the contrast with the amateurish and sometimes comical efforts of the other parties in this regard could hardly be more striking.
In a nearby building, I interviewed the mayor of Karachi, Syed Mustafa Kamal – only thirty-eight years old in 2009 (but still older than the MQM’s first mayor, Abdul Sattar, who was only twenty-four when he took office) and dressed for his age, in blue jeans and a checked shirt, with a closely cropped beard around his mouth and chin – in fact, he could have been a software manager in London. He sat with Mr Sabzwari in a small plain office with peeling blue walls and the inevitable pictures of Altaf Hussain: rather remarkably modest for the mayor of the seventh largest city on earth. In fact, the only unprofessional thing about the mayor is that he