OPEN SEASON ON PAKISTANI SHIAS

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

 

From Gilgit to Karachi and from Lahore to Quetta, extremist Sunni terrorist groups appear to have declared an open season on the minority Shia community in Pakistan. Despite the expressions of outrage and condemnation by top political leaders and civil society organizations against the wanton targeting of the Shias, the fact of the matter is that the complicity of the state agencies (partly by design and partly by default) in the mass murder of Shias is too glaring to ignore.

 

In the northern portion of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir – Gilgit-Baltistan – Pakistani authorities have systematically tried to change the demographic composition of the territory by settling Pashtun Sunnis in the area. This policy of the Pakistan government not only violates the Jammu and Kashmir State subject rules that forbid any non-state subject from settling down and buying property in the state, it has also given rise to sectarian tensions in the area. The Sunnis, under state protection and patronage, have steadily pushed the local Shia community to the edge by capturing the business and trade in the area. Starting from 1984, state sponsored pogroms of the Shias have been carried out in Gilgit-Baltistan. The recent outbreak of tensions in Gilgit, where three Sunni policemen were found to be involved in target killing of Shias, is a natural consequence of the policies that Pakistan has followed in the occupied territory.

 

Shias in Karachi have been in the cross-hairs of Sunni extremists for years now – Shia doctors in particular have been regularly gunned down in the city. In Kurram agency of FATA, the Shias have been cut off from rest of Pakistan by the Sunni terrorists for over 3 years. Despite all sorts of assurances the Pakistani authorities have utterly failed to stop the killing of Shias in these areas. Balochistan's capital Quetta has become something of a killing field for the Shias. While Balochistan is predominantly Sunni, there is in Quetta a large settlement of the Hazaras who are Shias. Baloch society has been traditionally secular in their outlook and the Hazaras, who trace their origins to the Mongols, have lived peacefully. But in recent years, there has been a systematic targeting of members of the Hazara community and the suicide attack on a Shia procession in Quetta last week, in which around 70 people were killed and over a hundred injured, is only the latest in a series of outrages that have been perpetrated against the Hazaras in Quetta.

 

Like in Gilgit-Baltistan, in Balochistan too the Pakistani authorities have allowed the sectarian groups to function with impunity. According to reports in the Pakistani and Western media, the Pakistani intelligence agencies have allowed Quetta to become the headquarters of the Taliban. Worse, the 'agencies' reportedly promoting talibanisation through extremist Sunni groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, both of which are closely aligned to the Taliban, in order to counter the Baloch nationalist forces. Given the deep antipathy of the Taliban and their affiliates for the Shias – the Taliban carried out genocide of the Hazaras in Afghanistan after they occupied the Shia lands in that country in the mid 1990s – the killing of the Shias in Quetta comes as no surprise. In Pakistan's heartland of Punjab, the extremist Sunni groups hold sway. In fact, the growth of the Sunni terrorism started in the district of Jhang in Punjab where the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan came into existence. Over the years, the SSP has spread its network all over Punjab and the attack on Shias in the heart of Lahore killing over 40 people comes as no surprise.

 

While the divide between the Shias and Sunnis is as old as Islam, the bestiality on display in Pakistan in recent years can be traced back to the geo-politics of the third quarter of the 20th Century. Dovetailing on this geo-politics was the domestic political compulsions of the military regime of Gen Ziaul Haq. The watershed year was really 1979 when not only did the Soviet's invade and occupy Afghanistan, but there was also the Islamic (actually Shi'ite) revolution in Iran. Before 1979, notwithstanding their sectarian and theological differences, the Shias and Sunnis never indulged in massacring each other. The ulema from the two sects would heatedly argue and debate theological issues. But apart from the occasional clash or a riot between them, things never really deteriorated to a point where blood was shed. The Shia-Sunni armed conflict got accentuated after the American involvement in the Afghan Jihad, which happened just at the time when the Saudi-Iranian rivalry started playing itself out in Pakistan. Fanning the flames of sectarian hatred generated by these two factors were the imperatives of regime survival for Gen Zia military dictatorship.

 

The Iranian revolution in 1979 had shaken up the predominantly Sunni Sheikhdoms in the middle-east. To prevent the export of the Islamic revolution from Iran to their domains, the Sheikhdoms used sectarianism as an instrument of policy. Sunni Islam was also the natural ally of the Americans in their not so covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After all, bulk of the fighters, or if you will Mujahideen, were Sunnis, many of who adhered to a puritanical version of Islam, which incidentally was rabidly anti-Shia, something that suited the Americans who had burned their bridges with Shia Iran. Add to this the deliberate divide and rule policy adopted by Gen Zia who for political reasons fuelled sectarian differences by providing the Pakistan army's patronage to the worst sort of radical mullahs who started openly spouting hatred against the minority Shias.

 

The relationship between ordinary Shias and Sunnis underwent a transformation after Zia imposed Islamisation in Pakistan. The Shia clergy, which had become very aggressive after the Khomeni regime took power in Iran, organised a mammoth rally in Islamabad against the Zia regime, which they accused of fostering Sunni personal law on the Shias. Although Zia was forced to back off and concede the Shia demands, this show of force convinced Zia and by extension the army establishment, including the infamous ISI, of the need to cut the Shias down to size. Exploiting an existing fault-line between Shia landlords and Sunni tenants in Jhang, the Pakistani agencies unleashed the extremist Sunni organization Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) on the Shias. This was the time that sectarian differences started being settled through bullets.

 

Alongside, the SSP indulged in the most virulent hate speech against the Shias, going to the extent of bringing to bear the theological differences to start a campaign demanding that Shias be declared non-muslims, a la Ahmediyas. The Shias too started organizing themselves and the Tehrik-e-Fiqh-e-Jafferia (TFJ) came into existence. Both the SSP and TFJ formed their militant wings and started targeting each other. The Shias, who comprise around 15% of Pakistan's population, were however, outnumbered and outgunned. The Sunni outfits were flush with arms and money which had flooded Pakistan due to the Afghan 'jihad' against the Soviets. What is worse, the Pakistani state and its infamous agencies patronized the Sunni jihadist outfits which were involved in the targeting of the Shias. Jumping into the fray were the Saudis and Iranians who fought their proxy war in Pakistan using the extremist Sunni and Shia groups respectively, and providing them money and weapons to kill each other.

 

Until the mid-1990s, the Shia-Sunni violence was limited to targeted killings of leaders and activists. But this form of violence soon graduated to mass killings, with Shia Imambargahs being stormed by gunmen. The Sunni extremists in Pakistan received a massive boost after their ideological twins, the barbaric Taliban occupied Afghanistan. Suddenly, many of the Sunni extremists had a ready-made safe haven to which they escaped after massacring Shias. Despite being clients of the Pakistan army, the Taliban rejected all requests from Pakistani authorities to hand-over some of the most notorious Sunni terrorists who had taken refuge inside Afghanistan. Inside Pakistan, the more radical elements in the extremist SSP formed the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

 

The formation of the LeJ allowed the SSP to operate over-ground and participate in politics. The network of the SSP spread so deep into Pakistan's body politic that the current head of the SSP's new avatar, Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat, has claimed that nearly 25 MNAs from across the political spectrum have been elected to parliament with the its backing. In 2002, the Pakistani military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, released then SSP chief Azam Tariq to win the vote of confidence in the National Assembly for his puppet prime minister, Zafarullah Jamali. While the SSP was strengthening its political position, the LeJ was continuing with its Shia killing campaign. There was a lull in anti-Shia violence after the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001. But with the resurgence of the Taliban around 2005, the massacres of Shias once again started, this time with even greater ferocity. Using gunmen to storm Shia mosques was passé. The weapon of choice became the suicide bomber, which has been used to devastating effect in almost all the recent attacks on Shias.

 

But apart from the religious hatred that makes its kosher for the Sunnis to massacre the Shias, the targeting of Shias today serves a political objective of the Islamists viz. destabilizing the Pakistani state. As a result, the Sunni extremists are killing two birds with one stone. This is, in a sense, a replication of the strategy that the al Qaeda used in Iraq, where it used the Sunni suicide bombers to target Shias and their holy places to spread chaos and anarchy. The question is how long will the Shias take these wanton massacres lying down? Unless the Shias are reconciled to their fate as fair game for the Sunni extremists and are willing to be reduced to the status that the Ahmediyas suffer in Pakistan, they will retaliate and give as good as they get. The big problem that the Shias face is that their militant arm – Sipah-e-Mohammed – has become redundant. Its revival will depend in large measure on the role that Iran plays to build up a Shia counterforce to the Sunni terrorist groups. The repercussions of any such step on the part of Iran on the relations between Sunni Pakistan and Shia Iran (as also Iraq) will be quite severe. But much worse will be the ramifications of a Shia backlash on the already tottering state of Pakistan. At a time when Pakistan is facing the blowback of its jihadist policies and is being targeted by its 'strategic assets', and is also in the throes of an insurgency in Balochistan, a Shia-Sunni war could well sound the death knell of the Pakistani state.

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    <1765 Words>                    9^th September, 2010

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'A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE'

By

SUSHANT SAREEN

    In a country where an extremely wealthy and well-connected member of Islamabad's social elite unabashedly introduces himself as an "importer and manufacturer of Bollywood CDs" – a euphemism for piracy of Indian films and music – why blame cricketers for fixing matches for money? If anything, the outrage, not to mention shame that many Pakistanis are feeling after the remarkable expose of the rampant match-fixing by Pakistani cricketers sounds quite incongruous to the culture of corruption that seems to have seeped deep into every pore of Pakistani life. Increasingly, Sir VS Naipaul's description of Pakistan as a 'criminal enterprise' is sounding more and more true and Gresham's law – bad money drives out good money – has pervaded all spheres of national life, with decent, enlightened and honest citizens being reduced to an anachronism.

    To be sure, something of this sort is also happening in India, what with one notorious match-fixer becoming an 'honourable' MP, and another being a permanent fixture on a TV channel to analyse cricket matches. The Indian attitude to corruption, however, pales before the chutzpah of the Pakistanis in brazening out irrefutable charges of wrongdoing. Forget about being contrite, the standard response of the Pakistanis when caught with their hand in the till is to first demand such exacting standards of proof that even God almighty will not be able to provide. Strangely, these same people readily and unquestioningly lap up the most bizarre allegations as proof of guilt of 'others' without even a shred of evidence to back these allegations – for instance, RAW backing the Baloch separatists and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Mossad and CIA sponsoring terrorism in Pakistan.

Even as they insist upon the need to 'qualify and quantify' the evidence, they start working overtime on building up elaborate, if totally convoluted, conspiracy theories involving India (read Hindus), Americans and British (read Christians and 'crusaders'), and Israelis (read Jews), all working in concert to malign Pakistan. And no, it is not the lunatic fringe, but the lunatic mainstream that indulges in such activity. True to form, on the day that the spotgate scam hit the headlines in Pakistan, a 'mainstream' newspaper, Pakistan Observer – mainstream not in terms of circulation, which is negligible, but because it is considered to be the unofficial mouthpiece of the ISI, which is as mainstream as you can get in Pakistan – alleged that the entire scandal was "part of a greater psy-ops...to demoralize the Pakistani nation" and that the reporter who carried out the sting operation was "known for his bids [sic.] to implicate Muslims"! Taking the cue, 'imbedded' TV anchors have started mounting a spirited defence of the accused players, pointing to the so-called inconsistencies in the reportage of the sting operations, raising questions over the intention behind the sting, and of course, hinting at the ubiquitous Indian angle, without which a conspiracy theory in Pakistan can never be complete.

    Not surprisingly, the tainted captain of the tainted team, Salman Butt did not bat an eyelid in dismissing the charges and saying "these are just allegations and anybody can stand out and say anything, it doesn't mean they are true." But why blame Butt? He probably drew inspiration from the Pakistani authorities who whenever confronted with damning evidence of involvement in terrorism – a classic example being the 26/11 attacks – adopt exactly the same approach. Remember, it took Pakistan weeks to even admit that the beast called Ajmal Kasab was a Pakistani? Don't also forget that when the London School of Economics report on how the ISI was running the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan was released the Pakistanis went red in the face denying all charges of playing a double game. However, when within days of the LSE report the wikileaks revelations were made, the same Pakistanis explained these away by saying that this was all old hat and that no such thing is happening anymore.

Clearly, denial, obfuscation and stone-walling has become something of a national malaise in Pakistan, and the Pakistan Cricket Board's refusal to act even against cricketers who have been serial offenders is hardly surprising. In PCBs case, the problem also is that there are dark suggestions pointing to the complicity of the board's top officials in the entire match-fixing scandal. But given that the PCB chief is a close relative of the country's defence minister and his sidekick who is the 'manager' of the team is the father-in-law of a PPP Senator who never tires of playing the ultra-patriotic card, they obviously feel that they cannot be touched. As a result, a culture of impunity has developed in Pakistani cricket, with players confident that they can get away with anything, from doping to match-fixing.

Not that this culture of impunity is anything new. Allegations of match-fixing have been surrounding the Pakistani cricketers for decades but apart from the life-ban imposed on two cricketers, everyone else has got away scot free. The irony is that many of the former Pakistani cricketers who have themselves been either accused or implicated in match-fixing in the past are today taking a very holier-than-thou stand on the entire spotgate scam. Apart from a few notable exceptions – Sarfraz Nawaz and Aamir Sohail, to name two – who have been whistle-blowers and have consistently been calling for cleaning up Pakistani cricket, most of the other cricketers have been suspected of involvement with bookies. The funniest sight was Javed Miandad talking about match fixing. Considering his friendship and his family ties with the international terrorist and the kingpin of the cricketing betting mafia, Dawood Ibrahim, it was disingenuous of Miandad to comment on the episode, unless of course he was trying to settle scores with a rival betting mafia on behalf of his 'friend'.

The tragedy of Pakistan, which has produced some fabulously talented cricketers, is that even when they formed a judicial commission to investigate match-fixing charges, the judge appointed to head the commission was a man who though a brilliant legal mind enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most corrupt and amoral judges in Pakistan's history. Such is the rot in the system that it is unlikely if even the three A's that rule Pakistan – Allah, Army and America – can cleanse cricket in Pakistan. Since the American's don't know even the C of cricket, they are obviously not up to the task. Allah's soldiers in the cricket team – the Tablighi mafia, including people like the former skipper, Inzamam-ul-Haq – have also been tainted with charges of match-fixing, not to mention ball-tampering. As for the generals, Musharraf did try and enforce some military discipline in Pakistani cricket when he appointed a general to head the PCB. The result was predictable – the general tried to manoeuvre the entry of his sons in the national team.

Like everything else in Pakistan, it appears unlikely if Pakistan will clean up its cricket without any outside intervention and pressure. Left to the PCB and Pakistani authorities, the entire spotgate scam will be white-washed and it will be business as usual. The problem is that the ICC, headed as it is by Sharad Pawar, who himself has been tainted by the entire IPL scam, is ill-equipped to take any meaningful action to clean up not only Pakistani cricket but also world cricket. The bookies and match-fixers would therefore be betting that once all the brouhaha dies down, their 'criminal enterprise' will continue to flourish.

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    <1225 Words>                    3^rd September, 2010

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