Violent sectarianism continues unabatedly...

Daily Times, February 11, 2006
EDITORIAL: Another sectarian atrocity

The sectarian tension that has always simmered in the area from Kohat to Parachinar, has come to the fore again following a suicide bombing of a Shiite procession in the town of Hangu on Yaum-e-Ashur, the holiest day in the Shiite calendar. The bombing killed 36 people, mostly Shiites. Since Thursday, when the incident took place, Sunni and Shiite gunmen have exchanged small arms and rocket fire in Hangu and adjoining villages. Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Sherpao says the government has deployed army and paramilitary troops in and around Hangu and that normalcy will be restored within 24 to 36 hours. That may come to pass but the issue needs to be looked at beyond the requirement, essential though it is in the short-term, of disentangling the warring sects and curbing armed violence. Consider.

This is not the first time that the area northwest of Kohat has seen sectarian violence. The seeds of this violence were sown during the period of General Zia ul Haq in the backdrop of the Afghan war and Islamabad’s overt support of Deobandi Islamist groups like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami. The Turis, the only fully Shiite Pashtun tribe fell foul of the federal government when they demanded that the government also help the Afghan Shiites with money and weapons. The friction led to a siege of Parachinar and hundreds of deaths. The resentment led the Shiites in the area and the rest of the country to try and band together. In the Punjab, in Jhang district, another Deobandi cleric Haq Nawaz Jhangvi was making mischief through his fiery and insulting sermons. Pakistan had begun to move towards sectarian violence. The situation was exacerbated by the Iran-Iraq war and the Saudi money that was flowing into the Afghan jihad and also filling the coffers of hardline Sunni clerics.

Since then thousands, mostly Shiite, have fallen prey to the Sunni-Deobandi sectarian frenzy. No place, from Gilgit in the north to Karachi in the south, is safe from this menace. Hangu Mayor Ghani ur Rehman has blamed the attack on “terrorism”. By this he means a foreign hand. We remain sceptical. Every time there is a sectarian attack in Pakistan, religious leaders and officials accuse foreign intelligence agencies of committing the atrocity. The fact, however, is that every time the police catches the culprits, we find that they belong to one or the other half-dozen sectarian groups that have held this country hostage to their agenda. Evidence also proves that the violence has been perpetrated by zealous Muslims rather than by foreign elements.

In Kohat, a former Jamiat Ulema-e Islam (F) leader and a former Muslim League Nawaz MNA, Javed Paracha, has long been acting as an agent provocateur. He was largely responsible for unleashing Deobandi sectarianism on the hapless Shiites in Kohat city — a miniscule number — and also in and around Hangu and Tal. Mr Paracha has also earned notoriety for fighting the cases of suspected Al Qaeda members. But Mr Paracha is not alone. In the 2002 elections, the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan supported Mr Paracha against the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal candidate simply because a small Shiite party is part of the coalition.

The situation has reached a pass where inter-marriages between Sunnis and Shiite in the area have become extremely rare. The two communities are deeply troubled; the Shiite fear the Sunni majority and the harm it can bring them while the Sunnis, after having apostatised the Shiite, are bent upon killing them. It is no coincidence that unlike the mayor of Hangu, the Shiites of the area have blamed the Deobandi-Sunnis for the violence. These terrorists are now mixed up with Al Qaeda whose cadres are also rabidly anti-Shiite. Curbing this violence is, therefore, not simply an administrative issue. It is eminently sensible to immediately induct troops in an area that is witnessing armed violence; the troops will have a deterrent effect. But at the end of the day real normalcy can return only when people stop killing each other on the basis of denominational and sectarian differences. Does the government have a policy towards that end?

We believe not. Reports suggest that hard-line Deobandi elements have already taken over the administration of justice in the Tribal Areas, including in the troublesome South and North Waziristan Agencies. They are applying the Taliban law to Pakistani territory even as the Tribal Areas now have some 70,000 army and paramilitary troops. This is a recipe for disaster. The government cannot allow these elements, even if tacitly, to graft their medieval conception of life onto a modern state and then expect that sectarian and denominational violence will not take place.

The genie let out by General Zia needs to be put back in the bottle. The high-profile sectarian killings that started with the killing of Allama Arif Hussain Al Hussaini in 1988 have already claimed many lives. The NWFP governor under Zia, Gen Fazle Haq, was laid waste by Shiite gunmen for having put down the Turis in Parachinar. Some people still believe that Zia himself might have been killed by Shiites, though this is a weak theory. Militant leaders on both sides of the sectarian divide have been routinely killed. Gilgit has been burning for more than two years on sectarian lines. Zia sought to change the demography of the Northern Areas by inducting Pashtun Deobandi elements there. Imambargahs are regularly blown up by fanatic Deobandi Sunnis while Shiites try to take out Sunni leaders in targeted killings.

This is not a happy scenario. And it won’t do us any good to follow the line of clerics who try to sweep this violence under the carpet by blaming it on foreign hands. We will have to accept that the sectarian bug has bitten us and the fever is running high. Only then can we begin to cure it. *