Glimpses of Beirut in Karachi’s violence

By Muhammad Ali Hashmi

While Beirut has uneasily risen out of its war-torn past as a glitzy metropolis, Karachi seems to be hurtling toward a bloodier crisis. Once romanticized as “the city of lights,” Karachi is now marred by death, darkness and chaos. It is a city on the brink of an almost civil war.

Shot four times after being brutally tortured, gunned down by unidentified men riding a motorcycle, kidnapped for ransom, blown by grenade thrown into crowded restaurant — these are the stories playing out across the city’s wards each day.

Between 2003 and 2011, an estimated 5,549 people died in Karachi from target killings, terrorism and sectarianism, according to a recent report by the Center for Research & Security Studies, a Pakistani think-tank founded by civil society activists. The number is nearly half of the 11,990 civilians killed in Pakistan due to terrorism in the 2003-2011 time period, the report said.

“Karachi’s situation has really deteriorated in the past year,” said Noman Baig, a Ph.D. student of anthropology at the University of Texas Austin, who is currently doing his fieldwork in Karachi.  The situation began to worsen substantially after the 2008 elections when several political parties and crime syndicates began challenging the decades-long hegemony of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement— an ethno-nationalist party, which represents the nine million Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, who migrated from India in the 1947 partition.  Since then, hundreds of political workers have been killed.

These targeted killings thrive with almost perfect impunity. Extortion and kidnappings, used by the political parties as instruments to obtain and maintain power, flourish.  No business in Karachi can operate without paying to the extortionists.  

“Right now nobody knows who is killing who,” he said. “The city’s situation can be gauged from the fact that Karachi is now being compared with war-ravaged Beirut in the 1980s.”

Beirut and Karachi, while vastly different, have many parallels: both are seaport cities; both play a pivotal role in each country’s economy and politics; and both have an inflammable ethnic mix.  It is the ethnic factor which gains particular salience in the anatomy of stability in the two cities.  During the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was primarily divided between the Muslim west part and the Christian east.  In Karachi, the Mohajirs and the Pashtuns lie at the heart of conflict.

For a quarter of a century, the M.Q.M., the Mohajir political party, has controlled both state and non-state governing apparatus of Karachi in a thoroughly one-sided affair. This has bred animosity and resentment from a growing number of other ethnic populations.  The M.Q.M. has violently clashed with other political and ethnic groups in Karachi — Sindhis, Punjabis, Balochis, the Pakistan People’s Party and Jamaat-e-Islami. Since 1994, an estimated 9,696 people have been killed in Karachi and majority of them are victims of ethno-political conflicts, the C.R.S.S. report said.

The main challenge to the M.Q.M.’s dominance in Karachi has come from the Pashtuns. Despite the fact that nearly half of Karachi is Pashtun, few Pashtuns hold political power in the city.  The M.Q.M. holds 17 of 20 national assembly seats in Karachi while Awami National Party, the party of the Pashtuns, holds no seats.  Of the 44 seats in Karachi’s provincial assembly, the A.N.P. holds two.  The M.Q.M. has 34.

“The M.Q.M. maintains its dominance of Mohajir politics through a combination of coercion and consent,” said Hafeez Jamali, an anthropologist based in Pakistan and the U.S who specializes in ethnic nationalism. It emerged in 1985 as a platform to channel popular Mohajir resentment due to what they perceived as unfair treatment of Mohajirs in the education and civil services.

The M.Q.M.’s ideology was accompanied by a brand of rogue politics reliant on targeted killings, extortions and kidnappings. “Over the years, the party lost its shine due to its excessive reliance on violent means and its fascist tendencies, as well as the dubious alliances it made with the Pakistani establishment, to remain in power at all costs,” Jamali said.

The absence of any other legitimate power force— one that is seen as a legitimate negotiator by all the factions of the society— in Karachi’s politics is a serious problem for the city: there is no way to negotiate the violence on the streets. Pashtuns and other ethnic communities, who do not have enough political strength to keep the M.Q.M. at bay, have started to exert power through violent means.

Karachi continues to attract migrants from other parts of Pakistan. In the wake of the Taliban insurgency and the ongoing War on Terror in Pakistan’s frontier region, more Pashtuns have fled the tribal areas to seek refuge in the Pashtun dominated areas of Karachi’s slums. The M.Q.M. sees this growing influx of Pashtuns and other migrants as a demographic change that will ultimately challenge the authority of the M.Q.M. in the city politics.

“Karachi is now witnessing a new political consciousness in non-Mohajir ethnic groups, especially in Pashtuns,” Baig said. On the other hand, the M.Q.M. is neither willing to cede any political power nor willing to accept other ethnic groups as equals.  In its latest fact-finding report, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called the tussle between the M.Q.M. and the A.N.P. “Karachi’s main fault-line.”

The commission argues Pakistan’s current government has completely failed to maintain law and order in Karachi. It said it believes “the arrest, trial and conviction of a few ringleaders” could alter the course of the city’s future.

But Baig is skeptical about such a solution. “Law and order can bring some sense of peace to the city, but it’s not the answer to Karachi's problems.”

In the wake of deteriorating law and order situation in Karachi, another humanitarian organization has filed a petition for military intervention in Karachi. But most agree that military operation in Karachi is not a good idea, and the option of using military action can further exacerbate the situation, as it did in 1992. In 1992, Pakistan’s Army, in consultation with the civilian government, launched a military-led operation to clean up Karachi. The operation was marked by extrajudicial killings and ultimately resulted in further radicalization of the political groups in Karachi.

The P.P.P., the party in power, needs the support of M.Q.M. for its minority government and seems completely disinterested in resolving this crisis.  After the general elections of 2008—in which the M.Q.M. emerged as the fourth largest party in the parliament— the M.Q.M.’s support was crucial for Pakistan P.P.P.’s minority government.

“Perhaps an international peace mediator, which can bring all the stakeholders on the table, can resolve this situation,” Baig said.  “A peaceful solution can only be achieved if the M.Q.M. accepts these ground realities and starts seeing other ethnic groups as communities that also have political aspirations.

Karachi’s problems are both deeper and dangerous than has been recognized. Mohajirs, who consider themselves intellectual elites of the country, regularly denigrate the Pashtuns and other ethnicities as “sub-humans” and “imbeciles” who are suitable only for menial jobs. This mythologized dehumanization of “the others” is disturbing. As we have learnt from past tragedies of ethnic conflict, when one group denies the humanity of the other groups and monopolizes the political apparatus in a conflict situation, the stakes become high for inaction. For Pakistan, this could mean Karachi turning into another Beirut.