Author: Editorial
Publication: Daily Times
Date: December 7, 2005
URL: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005%5C12%5C07%5Cstory_7-12-2005_pg3_1
The latest news is that the intelligence agencies
have unearthed a plot by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah Sahaba to use suicide
bombers to kill Shia members of the legislative council of the Northern Areas.
The suicide bombers are said to include women and children to be sent from
outside Gilgit. There is a rumour that the extremist clerics in the Punjab
are trying to recruit potential terrorists from the quake-hit areas of Azad
Kashmir and the NWFP, distributing publications like Zarb-e-Momin among them
for this purpose. It is said that Maulana Ghulam Kibriya of Rahim Yar Khan
has been assigned to arrange for these children's admission to seminaries
in southern Punjab.
It is clear that preparations are being made
for another bout of sectarian attacks. On Monday, a Sunni cleric from Multan
was gunned down in Karachi to avenge the murder of a Shia cleric in Balochistan
a day earlier. The entire country has become linked in a network of terrorism
which now boasts Al Qaeda-style suicide-bombing. If you look at the map of
the country, the territories under challenge comprise the Northern Areas,
the North and South Waziristan Agencies in the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA) and all of Balochistan, the largest province comprising 40 percent
of Pakistan's territory. One can easily say that half of Pakistan is in the
grip of people whose way of life is violence. And who is responsible for this
if not the government which has been unable to tackle the problems that give
rise to this violence?
The biggest mess is in Gilgit, the administrative
centre of the Northern Areas. And the mess dates back to the army's decision
to deploy an extremist anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Tayba during the Kargil Operation
of 1999 in tandem with regular troops. The administration in Gilgit has shown
a criminal lack of understanding of the majority population (60 percent) of
the city, the Shia, while deciding matters such as the content of school textbooks.
Thus it would shock the world to know that Gilgit and the surrounding areas
have seen a consistent pressure from the Shia community demanding changes
in the textbooks for the last half decade and that the government, with all
its intellectual resources, was not able to satisfy it. Nor was it able to
prevent the target-killing of prominent Shia leaders, which enlisted the sectarian
emotion of the entire community in the country.
One glaring example of Islamabad's lack of
sensitivity came to the fore this year when the new chief commissioner of
Gilgit was appointed. The ministry concerned appointed a fundamentalist Sunni
as chief commissioner despite its awareness that the Shias of Gilgit panic
at the appointment of officers holding extreme Sunni views. What it ignored
was the message contained in the earlier murder of a retired Sunni IG. Chief
Commissioner Major (retd) Nadeem Manzur, a strict practising Sunni officer
and a son-in-law of General (retd) KM Arif, carries no blot but his almost
fanatic observance of Sunni faith should have alerted the ministry to his
unsuitability. In the event, he proved ineffective and has recently been recalled.
Why was he sent to Gilgit in the first place? One fears that the ministry
itself could be infected with sectarian passions.
To get a perspective on how the Gilgit unrest
affects the rest of the country, let us go over this year's toll of terrorist
casualties. On January 8, Shia leader Agha Ziauddin Rizvi was killed in Gilgit.
On January 31, a leader of Sipah Sahaba Maulana Haroon ul Qasimi was killed
in Karachi. On March 23, former Northern Areas IG Sakhiullah Tareen, a Sunni
hardliner, was ambushed and killed in the Northern Areas. On April 1, Allama
Najafi, head of a major Shia seminary in Lahore, was murdered. On May 27,
a suicide bombing killed 20 at the Barri Imam shrine near Islamabad. On May
30, the Shia seminary Jaamiat ul Ulum in Karachi was attacked by a suicide-bomber.
On June 24, Mufti Rehman and Maulana Irshad, leaders of the Deoband-Sunni
headquarters, Banuri Mosque in Karachi, were target-killed. The government
should not wait helplessly for what the suicide-bombers of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
and Sipah-e-Sahaba have in store for the nation in the coming days.
Islamic states tend to be sectarian. Iran
is overtly a Shia state where the Sunnis may find themselves discriminated
against. The Sunni utopia created by the Taliban in Afghanistan was intensely
sectarian and anti-Shia. After 20 years of jihad and Talibanisation, Pakistan
too is showing clear signs of being a sectarian state. Saudi influence, spearheaded
by Saudi funds to hardline Sunni seminaries, has changed Pakistan's traditionally
non-sectarian character. Its conduct in Shia-majority localities has been
extremely violent. Gilgit is a case in point where in 1988 the state began
its cycle of violence together with Parachinar in Kurram Agency. The pattern
is that Sunni extremists will focus on areas where there is a concentration
of Shias.
The year 1988 was crucial to these Shia populations.
That year General Zia allowed the mujahideen to attack Parachinar to break
the Shia resistance to their operations inside Afghanistan. The same year
he allowed Sunni lashkars of Sipah Sahaba to attack Gilgit, resulting in high
Shia casualties. The same year the chief of the Shia party in Pakistan, Allama
Arif ul Hussaini, was murdered in Peshawar. Thousands of people have died
since then in this sectarian war. The future of Pakistan has been rendered
uncertain by a group of powerful clerics who are now able to deploy suicide-bombers.
If their violence against the minority communities is not stopped, they will
turn on new, more high-profile, targets after they are done with the minorities.
No one is safe.
