Adil Najam
Pictures on the television show Karachi burning. The city is at war. Morchas everywhere. Clashes, violence, firing, deaths.
The Chief Justice is holed up at the airport and the streets are ruled by mobs. Aaj TV is being fired at and Talat Hussain reports that the police and rangers are unable to get their to help because the roads are blocked (to stop the Chief Justice). Of course, these road blocks have not stopped the killers who are firing at the TV station. As of now 15 are reported dead. Over 100 seriously injured. Hospitals in Karachi have declared an emergency. The Prime Minister has called an emergency meeting of his own to respond to what the government is calling a ‘security situation’ but which sounds, smells, looks and feels like the beginning of a war on the streets of Karachi. Flights in and out of the city are stalled. Train traffic is stopped. The city seems to have descended back to its darkest days of street violence.
Meanwhile, the petty blame game continues. But things are changing too fast for one to analyze them. But one thing is certain. Things have gone out of control. Totally out of control. Totally out of everyone’s control. It is a sad sad day for all of us.
I wish I had something more profound to say. All I can hink of right now is what someone wrote on our comments section recently: Khuda Khair Karray!
(Picture credits BBC and The News and pictorial story at Bilal Zuberi’s blog; great blog coverage at Karachi Metroblog).
This violence is not doing any good to Pakistan. I live in london and here i have heard that the economic activities with pakistan are going to be curtailed by US and UK.
We wont receive the World Bank and US aid, if the political situation in Pakistan.
One BBC channel also told that 20% population will starve if pakistan does not receive the international aid it is getting now.
Also, they compared Pakistan’s volatile, violent democracy to India’s stable democracy. This meant that Pakistan will lose most of its FDI to india. India is already far ahead of us. If we do not stop this violence, we may never get a chance to catch india.
sad.
zakoota
May 13th, 2007 at 12:52 am Quote
No TV channel is prepared to courageously name the perpetrators of this carnage.
Zakoota, you are right. Such is the fear of this ‘peaceful’ organisation that these TV channels, although they are seeing in black and white, have no guts to say so and take cover under their professional ethics not to name any one.
Aaj TV was targeted by the MQM but the sister channels were not able to show what was happening there although their crews were everywhere in Karachi.
Jang and News have no courage like Daily Dawn has. Jang has its money from sale more important.
Frankly, I think some of the discussion about News etc. is silly… or you think you can just pressure and intimidate it by these silly comments.
The web page really doesn’t matter and the breaking news there is not by importance it is in the order of which news is received when. Second, if you look at the real newspaper today and the main news items at the top of the page it is clear that the newspaper is doing good and bold reporting and clearly focussed on the killings and clearly blaming the sitting Sindh govt of MQM for it. The problem with you ‘keyboard pundits’ is that you cant even take the trouble of looking at the real newspaper and just need something to rant about. The danger is that you will even lose the respect of those journalists who are doing something real in this battle for democracy.
[quote comment=”47049″]i used to be a believer in tnt but in the light of evidence here i may have to change my opinion. pakistanis and indians both possess some sort of mystical sherlock holmesian deductive abilities which enables them to identify perpetrators of terrorism two second after an incident takes place.
seconds after the blast on samjhota express, indians had evidence on isi/lt involvement. similary just by watching the likes of kamran khan yesterday, people have been able to conclude that mqm/govt was the bad guy. note also that just as in india, all violence is caused by muslims even when muslims are target themselves, all violence in pak is caused by the govt even when target is the govt itself. musharraf plans suicide attack against himself and shaukat aziz and mqm rains violence on the very people who vote for it. yesterday, mqm infiltrated opposition dominated areas like patel para and started firing on opposition rally. there was absolutely no cross fire. only mqm firing on opposition from all sides. note also that other parties in pakistan are completely peace loving. karachi under bb/ns in the 90’s was as peaceful as a small town in scandinavia.
as for the chief justice, it is his right to do whatever he pleases including disregarding govt pleas for public safety. in democracies, citizens have absolute freedom and all responsibility lies with govt. so if karachites drown
while swimming in the sea during monsoon despie govt warnings, it is the fault of the government because it is the responsibility of the govt to provide life guards for every single individual who wants to swim during monsoon.
i think what you see on this website and on pakistani media is that pakistanis have no ability to analyse events without using the crutch of politics. actions are categorised as good or bad depending on the politics. people have very little knowledge of subjects like history, economics, international affairs etc because it takes too much effort to read on these subjects. much easier to only read dau takkay kay newspapers like dawn and regurgitate the bakwaas here. i have always mainted that pakistan’s backwardness is explained by the stupidity of its educated people rather than by our literacy rate. what i see on this website simply confirms my contention.[/quote]
It is so satisfying to find someone like-minded, sane and objective. I can understand the frustration one feels while arguing with the supposedly educated. You are absolutely right, we have very preconceived notions about every happening which we spread around pompously, being educated, of course. In depth knowledge, history? what is that?
I earnestly pray that we realize that it is the so called educated of this country, who are responsible for all its woes. Could it be we are genetically ‘miswired’.
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Pakistan on brink of disaster as Karachi burns
By Isambard Wilkinson and Massoud Ansari in Karachi, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 11:37pm BST 12/05/2007
In pictures: Violence in Karachi
Chaos gripped the streets of Karachi yesterday as gun battles left at least 31 people dead and hundreds more injured, threatening a complete breakdown of law and order in Pakistan’s largest and most volatile city.
With plumes of black smoke billowing over the city of 12 million people, there were extraordinary scenes as gunmen on motorbikes pumped bullets into crowds demonstrating against Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, while police stood by and watched.
Gun battles left at least 31 people dead and hundreds more injured
In images more reminiscent of Baghdad, bloodstained corpses lay where they had fallen in the streets and bodies piled up in hospital morgues. As the sense of crisis deepened, a crisis meeting between Gen Musharraf and the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, resolved to send in paramilitary troops to restore order, and to place the army on standby. The men agreed that a state of emergency would be imposed if the first two options failed.
It was the bloodiest escalation of the two-month long saga which began when the president attempted to sack the country’s chief justice in March. The ensuing challenge by lawyers and opposition parties to Gen Musharraf’s eight-year rule has left the president – a key Western ally in the “war on terror” – desperately clinging to power.
Opponents believe he had hoped to create a compliant judiciary ahead of elections which he has promised to hold later this year. But what started as a political confrontation has now lit Karachi’s tinderbox of ethnic rivalry.
Yesterday’s violence erupted as Iftikhar Chaudhry, the suspended chief justice, flew in to Karachi Jinah International Airport to address a rally.
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Many of the 15,000 police and security forces deployed in the city stood idly by as armed activists from Karachi’s ruling party, Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a coalition ally of Gen Musharraf, blocked Mr Chaudhry’s exit from the airport and took control of the city’s central district.
The movement’s leader, Altaf Hussain – who lives in self-imposed exile in London – co-ordinated opposition to Mr Chaudhry’s arrival and addressed crowds gathered on the streets of Karachi in a mobile phone call relayed by loudspeakers.
He called on supporters to be peaceful but to show whose city it was. Instead, violence reigned.
Gunmen tore off on motorbikes after brazenly firing AK-47 rifles at opposition supporters. One report described MQM gunmen exchanging gunfire for an hour with activists from the exiled former premier Benazir Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party.
Road blocks, including trucks with deflated tires, prevented most of Mr Chaudhry’s supporters from reaching the airport to greet him. But a few dozen lawyers who reached there on foot chanted, “We are with you. Down with Musharraf.” Dozens of vehicles and petrol pumps were set alight by the angry mobs.
Vehicles were set alight as clashes broke out between political activists
Inside Mr Chaudhry’s intended destination, Sind’s high court, hundreds of lawyers, some of them bloodied after being beaten up by MQM supporters, milled about chanting slogans and receiving news on their mobile phones about the trouble engulfing them. Outside, MQM activists with pistols tucked into their jeans, blocked the entrance.
Lawyers railed against the government. “This is a shocking attempt by the government to suppress the people,” Iqbal Haider, a human rights lawyer and former senator, told The Sunday Telegraph. “Musharraf is making all sorts of mistakes to save himself from sinking.”
As fans stirred the humid air, news poured in of unrest spreading to other parts of the country. Convoys of buses, cars and rickshaws festooned with flags of political parties careered through Karachi’s main thoroughfares.
Tension has been simmering in Karachi for the past week, with rumours swirling round that Mr Musharraf had allowed conflicting rallies to go ahead to create the requisite level of disorder to justify the declaration of an emergency. The prelude to violence was familiar to Karachi, where hundreds of people were killed in ethnic violence in the 1990s.
Exacerbating the political furore in Karachi over the sacking of Mr Chaudhry is a decades-old and simmering feud between the MQM, a movement supported by the city’s mohajir population who migrated from India at Partition in 1947, and ethnic Pathans, who were originally from Pakistan’s North West Frontier province.
Opponents of the MQM claim that its actions yesterday were ordered in micro-detail by the movement’s autocratic leader, via telephone, from Edgware in north London.
Lawyers surround suspended Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry
Altaf Hussain wields great influence from afar over Karachi, a city of 15 million. Amid the chaos and bloodshed, the MQM chief addressed tens of thousands of his followers gathered along one of Karachi’s main streets.
As his speech echoed over its audience, in other parts of the city gunmen from both heavily armed factions took up positions on rooftops and sprayed streets with automatic gunfire. Dozens of wounded were treated in hospitals.
Last night paramilitary troops were preparing to be deployed in the city as the possibility of a curfew being imposed grew.