Pakistani city fears return of ethnic violence

By Staff
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Google Oneindia News

Karachi, May 18: Nervous residents of Pakistan's biggest city are wondering if last weekend's political violence, in which about 40 people were killed, heralds a return of the bloodshed of the 1980s and 1990s.

The latest violence was triggered by an attempt by Pakistan's suspended chief justice to visit supporters in the city and pitted backers of Karachi's ruling ethnic-based party against old enemies in rival factions.

With the central government under mounting pressure over the judicial crisis and an election due at the end of the year, Pakistan looks set for a volatile time and Karachi could rupture along ethnic fault lines and descend again into bloody chaos.

''With so many people killed it seems we've gone back 10 years,'' said Rashid Ali, 45, sitting at a typewriter on a city centre street where crumbling colonial-era buildings stand next to modern blocks housing banks and airline offices.

''It's the poor who suffer. We earn on a daily basis and if we can't come to work we can't support our families,'' said Ali, who types letters for people as a living.

Psychiatrist S. Haroon Ahmed, who has studied the impact of the city's problems, said the weekend violence after years or relative calm had shaken people.

''There is a great sense of helplessness, of hopelessness,'' he said.

Karachi, sitting precariously by the Arabian Sea on the edge of a desert, had a population of only 300,000 in 1947 when Pakistan was carved out of British-ruled India as a home for the subcontinent's Muslims.

Now 13 million people crowd the sprawling, mostly low-rise city and most face acute shortages of power, water, housing transport, education and work.

The population is growing at 4.8 per cent a year as people from across the country migrate to the port and business hub, which generates 15 per cent of gross domestic product, the city government says.

At the time of independence, a wave of Urdu-speaking migrants from India, known as mohajirs, flooded what had until then been a Sindhi-speaking city.

They and their descendants vie for resources with numerous others groups including ethnic Pashtuns from North West Frontier Province, Baluchis and Punjabis. The war in Afghanistan in the 1980s brought refugees as well as drugs and guns.

''Ethnic groups are concentrated in particular parts of the city.

In that respect, it's not just one city,'' said University of Karachi political scientist Syed Jaffar Ahmed.

But there has been little mixing in the melting pot.

''It's always difficult to have that melting process in a city if the ethnic groups are so big and have a self-sufficient cultural environment and economic activities,'' said Jaffar.

The city's fragmentation has been long been exploited by politicians. Thousands of people were killed in years of bloodletting in the 1980s and 1990s.

''The politics of ethnicity were ruthlessly promoted and supported by the military regime in the 1980s, and we've not been able to get rid of it,'' said Karachi architect and social activist Arif Hasan.

The powerful party that runs Karachi, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), is an important ally of President Pervez Musharraf's government.

It rose to prominence in the 1980s and draws its strength from the mohajir, Urdu-speaking community, which makes up nearly half the city's population. But the party makes no effort to consult or build consensus with other groups, Hasan said.

Jaffar said ethnic rivalry and violence stemmed from politics, not economic competition: ''It's created by political leaders who try to invoke cultural identity for their political ends ... The state has to demonstrate neutrality.'' But he said politicians were much less able to exploit ethnicity than they were in the 1980s. Different groups were not competing economically and had too much at stake to see violence shut down the economy, he said.


Reuters

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