Sectarianism in Pakistan

EDITORIAL: A milestone in our sectarian war
Daily Times, ovember 1, 2006

An Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) has sentenced to death two members of the banned sectarian outfit, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, for killing six Shia employees of the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Organisation (Suparco) in 2003 in Karachi. The two militants were charged with attacking a Suparco van carrying its employees to a mosque for offering Friday prayers on October 3, 2003. The accused, Shaukat and Shahnawaz, committed the heinous crime which the court said had been proved beyond any doubt.

We are not told if the convicts were questioned by the police and whether information collected from them was fed into the system presumably in place to prevent further sectarian violence in Pakistan. This year too there has been no dearth of deaths, although most of the leaders of sectarian organisations have been hauled up and are facing trials. We should recall that merely three days after the Suparco killings the leader of the Sipah-e-Sahaba, Maulana Azam Tariq, was gunned down outside Islamabad on October 6, 2003. This happened because the government had long ignored the involvement of the SSP in the terrorism of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Mr Tariq, it may be recalled, was allowed by the government to fight the 2002 elections and get himself elected to the National Assembly.

The Suparco killings came in the wake of earlier killings of Shias in Quetta. On June 8, 2003, 12 Shia police cadets were killed and 8 seriously injured when their bus was blown up, much like the Suparco bus. Unfortunately, the government was unable to do much. Therefore, on July 4, 2003, 50 Shias were killed and 65 others injured when sectarian terrorists carried out a suicide attack at a mosque during Friday prayers. As if in desperation, the victim community hit back and had Mr Tariq assassinated in Islamabad. Of course, in 2004, once again Quetta was the scene of Shia slaughter on the day of Ashura.

The government got rid of the Lashkar leader, Riaz Basra, but blundered in letting someone like Mr Tariq become a member of the National Assembly. This was, unfortunately, in line with the practice of our politicians to allow sectarian killers to come into mainstream politics. In the post-1993 PPP government in Punjab, the SSP was a coalition partner and the police actually kept guard in those days over torture chambers run by the party in Lahore, even as the PPP-nominated chief minister, Arif Nakai, carried on blithely with his not too competent government. However, since Riaz Basra’s death in a police encounter, other sectarian leaders like Akram Lahori are also in custody and facing trial.

The judiciary has not been such a shining example either. It has had to let the Lashkar terrorist go because of police incompetence in properly investigating cases, or sheer pressure of threats, and has allowed or condoned a miscarriage of justice. In April this year, for example, the Sindh High Court had to let a group of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi go because the police — either under threat or bribe — had botched the case against them. The very week they were released they attacked the leading Shia personality of the country Allama Hasan Turabi of Tehreek-e Islami and MMA, and nearly killed him with a remote controlled bomb in Karachi. Allama Turabi escaped unhurt and said that the SSP and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi had done the deed. Tragically, Allama Turabi was killed by the same killers five months later through a suicide bomber.

In August this year the police found that the twisted creed of Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi was alive and well in Peshawar. The city’s ATC sent the owners of four video shops to jail after charging them with selling CDs and cassettes containing anti-Shia speeches by leaders of the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba. According to the first information report (FIR), the CDs and cassettes contained anti-Shia speeches recorded by Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangwi, Maulana Ziaur Rehman and Maulana Azam Tariq, leaders of Sipah-e-Sahaba, as well as — ominously — Maulana Tariq Jamil, a leader of the Tablighi Jama’at, and Mufti Munir Shakir.

The cruel fact is that our most respected clerics have been guilty of a dangerous polemic against the Shia community that forms nearly 20 percent of our population and is the largest concentration of the Shia after Iran. The killings have not ended — the latest happened in Sargodha and Lahore in October — even though Lashkar-e-Jhangvi leaders have been mostly hauled up. Now the Lashkar and Sipah are being given training and shelter by Al Qaeda in its camps in Afghanistan, proving that what most Muslims think as jihad against the United States is nothing of the sort but actually a sectarian enterprise.

The curse of sectarianism is therefore still with us and is bound to cloud our future as a viable state. *