Daily Times

Scare, panic, and shock were the reactions as people found Karachi city in the grip of a fresh wave of violence that erupted suddenly after an early morning murder of a MQM member, resulting in the declaration of March 28, 2012, as a mourning day by the MQM. Many people had already reached their workplaces and their children were in schools when news of the disturbances broke. Panic-stricken parents dashed to their children’s schools, struggling through traffic jams and avoiding areas marred by violence, while the children, stranded at schools, terrified, waited for their parents to show up and take them home. News of target killings and burning of public properties kept pouring in via TV screens, spreading a sense of fear among city dwellers as to how unsafe their lives could be made by some lawless hordes of unknown identity. The whole day people lived in a spell of shock, praying for the safety of their loved ones, hoping that the ongoing violence would not turn into the retaliatory ethnic violence of the early 1990s, when old neighbours and friends become enemies because of their ethnic diversities.

Reports the next day carried figures of 10 persons as victims of the day of mourning on March 28, 2012. Among the dead were some ANP members, which justified the ANP to declare the next day as their mourning day. People of Karachi went through another day of fear and by the end of the day, three dead bodies showed up. Newspapers published editorials to condemn brazen killings of innocent people and damage to public properties. The president and the interior minister came to Karachi with an aim to bring peace to the violence-riddled city; and yet no relief came to people as target killings continued and the party members belonging to the ANP, MQM and PPP lost their lives every second day.

Right at the time when Karachi was bleeding and suffering from destruction and hooliganism, other parts of Pakistan experienced crimes of similar brutality and ferocity too, but, for some reason, the media remained oblivious to those events. No political party announced a mourning day to register its protest against the ongoing killings even though the deaths and destruction were much higher compared to Karachi. It was probably treated as a fete de accompli for the unfortunate people living in those parts of Pakistan that, commercially and politically, hold no importance in the polity of the country. Look at the number of people killed in Pakistan during the month of March 2012. Nearly 876 persons were killed in one month, including 95 that were the victims of target killings in Karachi alone. In FATA, the death count went up to 595 while the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) recorded 73 deaths. Punjab appeared to be the most peaceful province with a death count of six persons during the entire month. Military operations killed 365, acts of terrorism 279, and insurgency in Balochistan 71. The dead bodies of 109 people were discovered from Balochistan, FATA, KP and Sindh, with FATA being the most highly affected. It counted 53 dead bodies, Balochistan 11, KP 20, and Sindh 25 (all from Karachi). Punjab was lucky to have had no dead bodies discovered from its backyards.

Another volatile situation that could not go beyond its newsworthy value was the conflict between Lashkar-e-Islami (LI) and the Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP) in Khyber Agency that had been going on since January 2012; in the month of March, it consumed 231 persons. A report from UNHCR shows that nearly 100,000 people have become IDPs since the beginning of this conflict in January 2012. The infighting between the LI and the TTP led them to commit all kinds of atrocities against each other, from killing and injuring several people to sending suicide bombers to desecrate mosques and other holy places. Until the beginning of this infighting, all their terrorist activities and the resultant deaths and destruction in the country were justified by most of our religious parties as the collateral damage of a holy war. Both of them were jointly fighting against the presence of infidel forces of the US and NATO in the neighbouring Islamic country. Now which one of them has crossed the fence and joined the infidel forces to think all these killings and destruction are justifiable is a holy secret not to be confided to unholy common people.

Interesting is the role of political and religious parties that very conspicuously avoided to raise any voice of condemnation against such a large displacement of people, and these acts of homicide at a place that is relatively small in size and human population compared to Karachi. The Jamaat-e-Islami took no time to blame the MQM and the ANP for the violence that broke out in Karachi, but it did not have similar courage to blame the TTP or the LI even for those killings and destruction they very proudly claimed to have committed. Even the custodians of the rule of law — the lawyers — acted no differently. Lawyers from KP registered their protests on March 27, 2012, against the failure of the government to provide safety to the lawyers’ community and public in Karachi, but forgot to display similar concerns for a lawyer, Mohammad Rahman, and his son, Raees Khan, who were shot dead in Mardan by an unidentified killer on March 26, 2012.

A selective approach, even in cases of human deaths and tragedies, speaks a lot about the kind of apathy we, as a society, have developed towards such humanitarian issues. Mourning the tragic death of a near and dear one is a legal right of every citizen, and a political party as well. To exercise this right discriminately is inhuman and equal to the crime one is mourning about. To mourn and condemn the death of 95 persons in Karachi is as necessary as mourning the killing of 231 persons in Khyber Agency and anywhere else in the country. Unless we come out of our petty biases and discriminatory attitude towards killings in the country, the perpetrators will continue to have a free hand in targeting innocent people, using the name of jihad, ethnicity, or political rivalry as their shields. Common citizens have to wake up and take no sides in such discriminatory attitudes of the perpetrators, no matter who they are and what holy mask they carry on their faces.

The writer is a freelance journalist and researcher. He can be reached at mohammad.nafees@yahoo.com