Author: Tyler Marshall
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: February 7, 2002
When Daniel Pearl's search for the
underbelly of international terrorism led him last month to this Arabian
Sea port, the Wall Street Journal reporter found himself in one of Asia's
most volatile cities, where lawlessness and sectarian warfare have become
part of life.
''It's the only city in Pakistan
where real, Western-style organised crime thrives,'' said Aamer Ahmed Khan,
editor of the Herald, the monthly magazine published by the Dawn group.
''Criminals are known for what they are, yet still have social respect.''
Large gambling and prostitution rings thrive here. Over the last two decades,
Karachi has become a major South Asian transit point for smuggling guns
and drugs. Muslim groups war with one another.
Given Pearl's disappearance last
month and the subsequent demands by his apparent captors, it's ironic that
this city of 12 million has made real progress in controlling one major
class of crime: kidnapping. The seizure of prominent citizens has fallen
from a high of 79 in 1990 to 13 cases last year. Jameel Yusuf, an important
Karachi business leader who has helped spearhead the fight against kidnappings,
maintains that the epidemic has been nearly wiped out. ''This wave of crime
is finished,'' Yusuf said confidently. ''There are more kidnappings and
cases of extortion in Bombay or New Delhi today than in Karachi. We had
only 13 incidents last year, and all of them have been solved.''
Jameel claimed that most of the
kidnapping gangs - who seize people almost exclusively for money rather
than politics - have been broken. ''Daniel's case is very different from
the others,'' Yusuf said of Pearl. ''He sought an appointment with the
abductors himself.''
At a seminar earlier this week in
Karachi, a top police official in the region said he believes the kidnapping
was not planned. ''He wasn't taken forcibly,'' said Inspector General Syed
Kamel Shah . ''He went to see people who then took him.'' Pearl disappeared
on January 23.
But Karachi still can be a dangerous
place. Organised extremist groups operate like de facto street gangs, using
overcrowded alleys and back streets as their near-nightly battleground
for control of the city's mosques. Protests here in September against Pakistani
President Pervez Musharraf's decision to side with the United States against
Afghanistan's Taliban regime were among the largest and most violent nationwide.
Pakistanis are quick to note that
only a fraction of Karachi's violence is directed against foreigners, but
Americans have been targetted before. In 1997, Islamic militants gunned
down four American employees of a Texas oil company and their Pakistani
driver as they drove to work. In 1995, two American diplomats were slain
when gunmen opened fire on a US Consulate van. Today, for many Americans
living in the city, heavy security is an extension of life's routine. US
diplomats, for example, drive in armour-plated cars and are trailed by
a second car carrying armed guards.
Karachi's slide into violence and
crime in many ways is linked with the decades of war and turbulence in
neighbouring Afghanistan. As Pakistan's largest city and biggest port,
it became an important conduit for smuggling weapons to the conflict zone.
It also became a training area for the most militant of Muslim recruits
heading for the fight. At the same time, more than 1 million Afghan refugees
migrated to the city during the 1980s and '90s, many of them linked to
the drug trade in their homeland. The hard-line attitudes among some of
these refugees also fed into a vicious gangland-style power struggle between
Sunni and Shiite Muslims for control of the city's religious institutions.
Jameel blames Karachi's troubles
on the international community, which, he says, abandoned Pakistan and
the region after Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. ''We
were stupidly compassionate people (to take in so many Afghan refugees),
and Karachi is paying the price,'' he said.
Jameel founded a nongovernmental
organisation called the Citizens Police Liaison Committee in 1989 to marshal
private sector resources to help law enforcement agencies fight waves of
kidnappings. The committee bought computers and other equipment that the
police otherwise could not have afforded. He insisted that the Pearl case
does not constitute a resurgence of kidnappings. He and others also note
that the apparent kidnapping is different from most snatches here . ''Karachi
kidnappings have been nonviolent and always were about money,'' Jameel
said. Pearl's kidnapping ''has the air of a group that's not quite clear
how to do it,'' noted Khan, ''like the work of a bunch of amateurs.''
Jameel, who saw the journalist on
the afternoon before he disappeared, said there was another cause for optimism
- an electronic relationship Pearl had formed with Bashir Ahmed Shabbir,
the alleged intermediary. ''He'd built a rapport in corresponding with
Bashir by e-mail,'' Yusuf said. ''They'd even talk about domestic things,
like the fact his (Pearl's) wife was sick. ''To this man, Daniel was a
person who had a wife,'' Yusuf added. ''That gives me hope he's still alive.''
(LA-Times Washington Post)
