Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [192]
I have met a considerable number of waderos during various travels in Sindh. The Unar Khans, tribal chiefs and politicians from northern Sindh, are not part of my acquaintance (though as the testimonies below indicate, I am sure they are perfectly splendid people). I did however meet a variety of their dependants during my travels in Sindh, and these meetings provided a frame for the world that the Unar Khans represent.
Of these encounters, the last was in some ways the most striking, because a statement of loyalty and respect that could have taken place 500 years ago was in fact delivered in the modern surroundings of Karachi airport, and by a man in a quintessentially modern service. The other places in the airport café being full, I asked if I could share the table of a middle-aged, balding man in the uniform of an official of Pakistan International Airlines. With typical hospitality, he offered me a share of his pudding, and asked about my travels in Pakistan. When I mentioned the Unars, his eyes lit up:
The Unars are good people. They are a small tribe, but more powerful than all the other tribes put together because they are the bravest and help each other. If one of them is in trouble, all the others come together to help, with guns, people, money, whatever is necessary. Everyone knows that they are very generous, very loyal to their friends. They have done so much for my own family.
My PIA interlocutor grinned slightly, but made no comment, when I mentioned my previous indirect encounter with the Unars, a few days earlier. I had gone to a police station in Clifton, Karachi, to meet an officer known as an ‘encounter specialist’ – in other words a policeman tasked with the extra-judicial execution of prisoners. A youngish man was sitting on the floor with his hands together to one side, closer examination revealing that they were in fact chained to the barred window frame. His face was lean and gloomy, but also composed and even dignified despite his position, and what must have been some well-based fears as to what was going to happen to him.
The policemen told me that he was a member of a notorious dacoit gang from Larkana, picked up in Karachi on a tip-off, in return for a reward of Rs100,000. According to the police, he had been a bodyguard of the Unar Khans. The police, and journalists whom I asked about the Unars, also spoke of their ‘courage’ – though they often added other words as well. Visiting Sindh twenty years earlier, I had been told in admiring tones how Ghulam Ishaq Khan Unar, elected in 1988 for the PPP, had had three men from a rival family killed in revenge after his brother was shot down in a family feud in Larkana bazaar in 1986. A senior policeman in Sukkur told me on that occasion:
Half the people here are protecting dacoits. So what do you do? You try to round them up, and if they are killed, fine, and if you can keep them behind bars, also fine. And if a minister or politician turns up and tells you to release them, well, relax and enjoy, what else is there to do? This isn’t England. You have to accept these things.
A week or so before my meeting with the dacoit in Karachi, I had been outside the front gate of one of the Unar Khans’ residences, in the village of Bakrani on the road between Larkana and Mohenjo Daro. The area was festooned with flags of the PML(Q) Party, which the Unar Khan family was currently supporting, and a large concrete arch at the entrance to the estate commemorated the late patriarch of that family, a PML(Q) member of parliament who had died recently. His son, Altaf Hussain Khan Unar, had succeeded to his father’s land and his political role.
The PML(Q) was the ‘King’s Party’ set up by General Musharraf to bolster his administration, on the basis of defectors from Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League. It had no popular or traditional roots in Sindh at all – but, like other past ‘parties’ of the same kind, did not initially need them, because it could always