Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [190]
We can only do something like this once we are in power here. Only then can we set up NGOs. At the moment we are focused on getting access to education and government jobs for our people. In any case, most of our people are workers. They have no money, so can’t do anything like this for themselves.9
The contrast with the MQM leadership could hardly have been more marked.
The longer-established middle-class Pathans of Karachi do however have a rather different face. After the fighting, I visited the ANP president for eastern Karachi, Yunus Buner, who owns a smallish construction business and whose family has been in Karachi for three generations. His home is an apartment in a small block, with a hujra furnished with armchairs rather than cushions, and decorated with artificial flowers. A small, clean-shaven man with glasses and an urbane manner, he introduced with great pride his two English-speaking teenage sons. About the MQM however he was not polite.
We would have won several more seats from Karachi, but in mixed areas like this one the MQM seized the polling stations with heavily armed gunmen. When I went to cast my own vote, the polling staff said that my vote had already been cast. That happened to thousands of our people, and there was nothing we could do about it – we would have been killed. We don’t have enough weapons to fight with them. Whatever the MQM says, we are not armed the way Pashtuns are on the Frontier, and the MQM have the whole administration, police, army and intelligence agencies to back them up. The police refuse even to register FIRs [First Information Reports – see Chapter 3] against their men, while eleven of our men have been arrested ...
I am on the peace committee with MQM, ANP and PPP members to try to keep the peace, but in fact there is no point talking to the MQM politicians here about this, because they just deny everything and anyway don’t control the killers. The MQM’s armed wing is controlled by Altaf Hussain in London ...
As a businessman here, I want to keep the peace. I don’t want a war that would destroy this city, but we won’t accept this for ever. If our businesses go on being burned, we will have nothing to lose, and then there could be an Afghan situation here.10
He bitterly denounced the Taleban, saying that his own relatives in Buner District of the NWFP had been targeted by them, and he was helping refugees from there in Karachi; but that there were very few Taleban sympathizers in Karachi. ‘Just because you are Pashtun and have a beard does not mean you are Taleban. The MQM are just using this to attack the ANP and Pashtuns in general.’
Mr Buner took me to the ANP office for east Karachi, a rather astonishing building. It stands entirely alone on the furthest eastern edge of Karachi, in a desolate suburb which is just beginning to be developed, and is painted inside and out in the ANP colour, bright red. The whole scene reminded me of something, and then I realized that it was scenes of Hollywood gangster films set in the 1920s or ’30s, with dreary roadhouses and brothels standing alone in similarly half-empty suburbs. The recollection was so clear that I half expected Al Pacino and Robert de Niro to turn up.
Which in a way they had. Above the door was a neat line of bullet holes from two days earlier. I was told that this was the third time the building had been shot up by MQM gunmen, though nobody had been wounded. Elsewhere, however, thirteen ANP party workers had been killed in east Karachi in the first four months of 2009. ‘They want to kill us all,’ one of the ANP men said.
The bullet holes, however, seemed to me to tell a different story, of a warning not a murder attempt. If the MQM gunmen