Mohammad Ozair, a 25-year-old father of three, was sitting in his watch shop in broad daylight the other day when a gunman from a rival Muslim sect stepped into his curbside location and riddled his body with bullets.
A few hours later, Ozair’s bloody corpse was wheeled past family members at the local hospital, a spare, unswept facility where harried doctors are ill-prepared to deal with the traumatic injuries dumped on their doorstep every day.
Ozair’s sister, 26-year-old Nargis Bibi, cried out to nobody in particular. “Nobody will help us. The police treated us like nothing happened. The neighbors have become blanks-as if they saw nothing,” she wailed.
Ethnic, political and religious violence, which is tearing apart this once-vibrant seaport of 10 million people, has boiled over in recent weeks. There have been more than 100 killings since the beginning of February. Last year’s death toll of 1,113 included more than 100 police; more than 3,500 people were wounded.
Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has done virtually nothing to halt the carnage, making Karachi a fitting symbol of the complicated social woes facing her nation of 128 million people.
“Karachi is our major port, our major city. If Karachi falls apart and is consumed by violence, it will be a major problem,” said retired Gen. Bashir Ahmad, director of the Institute of Regional Studies in Islamabad.
The sectarian shootings have created a climate of fear and lawlessness that has sent foreign businessmen packing, kept people in their homes after dark and made even the most intrepid taxi drivers fearful of driving into the heart of the violence-prone areas.
While most ambushes and shootouts involve members of rival religious and political gangs, the erratic fire from ill-trained militants firing AK-47 automatic rifles in the crowded city has killed hundreds of bystanders, accounting for anywhere from half to two-thirds of the casualties. Sometimes the gunbursts deliberately are aimed at the innocent.
Pakistan has become a conduit for U.S.- and Europe-bound heroin as well as an arms bazaar for the stockpile of weapons left over from the war in Afghanistan.
Economic growth has slumped from the fast-paced 1980s. At 4 percent last year, it barely kept pace with population growth of 3 percent. Inflation is rocketing ahead at 14 percent, and nearly 20 percent for food, the most important commodity for a nation with a per capita income of only $365 a year.
Only one-quarter of Pakistan’s rural population can read and write, and those who manage to get an education face underemployment when they can find work at all. The public education system is nearing total collapse.
Impoverished residents of the nation’s fast-growing cities-urban areas now account for 25 percent of the population-have been forced to send their children to religious schools funded either by Saudi Arabia (Sunni Muslims) or Iran (Shi’a Muslims).
The fundamentalist militant groups whose stature is growing in Pakistan have a fertile ground for recruitment. While still a minority, they increasingly are able to dictate issues of national politics, such as the recent death sentence imposed on a 14-year-old Christian boy for blasphemy under a 1980s law making capital punishment mandatory.
Divisive ethnic politics have marred the governance of Karachi since Pakistan’s founding in 1947, when the port of 400,000 was overwhelmed by millions of migrants, known as Mohajirs, fleeing the anti-Muslim communal violence of the newly-independent India. Today, they and their descendants, anywhere from 15 million to 20 million people, are the majority in Sindh province.
Prime Minister Bhutto, whose husband reputedly is Pakistan’s richest man, is Sindhi. Her father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hung by the military in 1979, founded her Pakistan People’s Party.
Sindhi rule and its reformist rhetoric has not been kind to the Mohajirs. In a series of edicts dating back to 1960s, Mohajirs systematically have been denied access to universities and government jobs. A provincial quota system reserves 65 percent of all slots for natives of “rural” areas, which as a practical matter means Sindhi.
Despite such discrimination, Mohajirs generally are better educated.
In 1984, angry Mohajir student activists formed the Mohajir Qoumi Movement (MQM), which means “Migrant National Movement.” Today they are led by Altaf Hussain, 41, a spellbinding orator whose resume includes a stint driving taxis in Chicago and New York in the early 1980s after being denied access to Karachi University pharmacy school.
Hussain runs a tightly knit network of 5,000 armed militants in Karachi from an expensive flat in the Mill Hill section of London, to which he fled in early 1992 shortly before Pakistan’s military took over administration of the city. He has been described as charismatic and ruthless, especially toward anyone within his organization who challenges his one-man rule.
There is little doubt that the militant organization commands political support from millions of Mohajirs. The above-ground political wing of Hussain’s movement swept municipal elections in 1988 and 1990 and formed an alliance with Benazir Bhutto the first time she was prime minister.
During the MQM’s days in charge of Karachi, observers say, members extorted money from local businessmen to feed the organization. With its power and wealth growing, Hussain’s armed thugs moved to wipe out potential rivals within the group.
More Top Picks Best Lighted Vanity Mirrors For Seniors
This rampant corruption gave Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of the Muslim League, who took over the country in November 1990, the excuse he needed to launch a military crackdown on MQM activities in Sindh.
When the military marched into Karachi in June 1992 during “Operation Cleanup,” they brought with them renegade MQM leaders, who launched their own armed group called Haqiqi.
Violence between the two groups for control of the city has escalated into the current urban guerrilla war.
When Bhutto became prime minister again in October 1993, she escalated the crackdown. She accused India’s government, Pakistan’s bitter enemy, of masterminding MQM violence, going so far as to close India’s consulate in Karachi. Most observers discount the charge.
Human rights violations by police interrogators by all accounts are rampant. Last June, one notorious cop, known for subjecting suspects to the “cheera”-a torture where a man’s legs are spread sideways 180 degrees, permanently crippling him and making him impotent-was slain along with five paramilitary escorts in a hail of MQM bullets outside his home. Bhutto posthumously gave him the nation’s highest award for bravery.
The army occupation widely has been viewed as a failure, especially by the high command. Lower-ranking officers and their soldiers became like the local police, taking bribes and conducting inconsequential house raids after murderous shooting sprees.
“They saw that the situation was political, and they were being used,” said Nazim F. Haji, a volunteer director of the Citizens-Police Liaison Committee, which is trying to end the violence in Karachi. Last November, the army pulled out, triggering the current escalation in killings.
In recent weeks, the prime minister said she wants to conduct a political dialogue with MQM. Its leaders have rejected the move.
While the politicians bicker, the innocent die. Mohammed Zahid, 22, sat inside his tobacco stall in the heart of a Mohajir business district, where his family has done business for 35 years.
He pointed to the neighboring stand with its stacks of puffed breads called khujla. Earlier this month, his 24-year-old brother, an apolitical man, had died there in a machine gun attack that resulted in 11 deaths.
“These people are not Muslims. They are killing innocent people in cold blood,” he said. “They are destroying the city. They want the city paralyzed.”