Boat tragedy: Hazara community wants bodies back, asylum for survivors

QUETTA: Representatives of the Hazara community on Saturday appealed to the federal government to help with bringing back bodies of the victims of the Indonesian boat tragedy. They also appealed to the United Nations (UN) to help with asylum for those who survived the tragedy owing to the deteriorating law and order situation in Balochistan.
Speaking at a press conference, former provincial minister Sardar Saadat Ali Hazara said a delegation had been formed which will leave for Indonesia to identify the victims belonging to the community.
There is still some confusion over the exact number of people who were on board the boat. Sardar Saadat said that around 190 people were on the boat when it capsized.
“90 people belonged to Quetta and a majority of them were from the Hazara community,” he said.
Sardar Saadat asked the Indonesian authorities and the United Nations not to punish the survivors as they were fleeing to Australia due to the deteriorating law and order situation in Balochistan.
He also asked the government to help the victims’ families with bringing the bodies back.
According to the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA), at least 90 people from Quetta were on board the boat.
“As many as 15 families have so far approached the desk set up by PDMA to coordinate with the victims’ families. We have information that 102 bodies have been recovered and 27 were rescued, while dozens are still missing,” said Tahir Munir, Director PDMA.
He said that most of the bodies were mutilated beyond recognition and the authority had asked the families to provide details to help with identification.
Assistant Director Relief, Faisal Naseem said the Hazara community had handed over a list of 35 people. However, some names do not carry the NIC numbers and other documents.
“The bodies can be identified through DNA tests or any other information that matches since all 102 bodies are mutilated,” he told The Express Tribune. He added that Pashtuns and people from other ethnicities were also traveling on the boat en route to Australia from Indonesia.

Dozen dead in fresh Quetta firing

 At least 12 people were killed and seven seriously injured after unknown gunslingers riding motorcycles emptied their automatic weapons at a vehicle in Akhtarabad area of Quetta, Geo News reported.

Reportedly around 22 people on board a passenger bus came under fire on their way to Hazar Ganji from Quetta. It’s hard to establish the number of dead/ injured owing to scanty details, but casualties are feared to rise as some of the wounded are in critical condition.

Eyewitnesses say the gunmen stopped the bus, dragged some passengers down and shot them dead following which they opened indiscriminate fire on the bus making more kills.

Police have cordoned off the area and the dead/injured are now being rushed to Combined Military Hospital (CMH) as Bolan Medical Complex to which they were shifted earlier lacked emergency treatment facilities, said last reports.

The attackers made their escape before the police could arrive at the scene. 

Attack on Hazara community in Quetta: 13 dead

QUETTA: At least 13 people of Hazara community were killed and seven seriously injured after unknown gunslingers riding motorcycles emptied their automatic weapons at a bus in Akhtarabad area of Quetta, Geo News reported.

Reportedly around 20-30 people on board a passenger bus came under fire on their way to Hazar Ganji from Quetta. It’s hard to establish the number of dead/ injured owing to scanty details, but casualties are feared to rise as some of the wounded are in critical condition.

Eyewitnesses say the gunmen stopped the bus, dragged some passengers down and shot them dead following which they opened indiscriminate fire on the bus making more kills.

Police have cordoned off the area and the dead/injured are now being rushed to Combined Military Hospital (CMH) as Bolan Medical Complex to which they were shifted earlier lacked emergency treatment facilities, said last reports.

The attackers made their escape before the police could arrive at the scene. Later, some enraged people set the ill-fated bus on fire.

Why Pakistan's Shiites are worried to death

With barely a month going by without a sectarian attack, Pakistan’s Shiite minority is now a terrified community. But are the Pakistani state and the all-powerful military to blame?

By Leela JACINTO (text)

It was a dreaded midnight call, as chilling as it was brief, that upended Amjad Hussein’s world, forcing him to flee the city of his birth, leaving his wife and two young children behind.

On April 16, just hours after a suicide attack at a hospital in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta killed 10 people, Hussein got an anonymous phone call.

“The caller, who I could not trace, said, ‘this time, you escaped. Next time you won’t,” recalled Hussein in a phone interview with FRANCE 24 from Pakistan. “That’s it. It was just two or three sentences.”

Hussein decided he wasn’t going to stick around for the next time.

Terrifying though it was, the call was not surprising.

Journalist Amjad Hussein had to leave his family and flee Quetta for Islamabad after receiving an anonymous death threat.
An ethnic Hazara, a historically persecuted, predominantly Shiite Muslim minority, Hussein was a reporter at a Pakistani national news station. The Quetta hospital attack had occurred as local journalists were interviewing the family and friends of a Hazara businessman who had been killed earlier that day.

As a journalist, Hussein had extensively covered the rise in deadly anti-Shiite attacks in the northwestern province of Baluchistan, of which Quetta is the provincial capital.

There were not too many Hazara journalists working for the mainstream Pakistani media and Hussein was a high profile figure - which can be a dangerous thing in Pakistan today.

Shortly after the call, the 38-year-old father of two decided it was time to leave Quetta for the relative safety of the Pakistani capital of Islamabad. But on his reporter’s salary, he could not afford to bring his wife and children along and so, he says, he lives in a constant state of anxiety about their security.

Fear and loathing among Pakistan’s Shiites

The level of fear and loathing has been steadily rising among Pakistan’s Shiite community, which comprises around 20 percent of the population in this predominantly Sunni Muslim nation.

Last week’s attack on a group of Hazara pilgrims - who were forced off a bus, lined up and shot dead execution-style in Baluchistan - was particularly shocking even by the grim standards of violence-riddled Pakistan.

A virulently anti-Shiite extremist group, the Lashkar-e-Janghvi, claimed responsibility for the attack. A particularly vicious offshoot of the banned Sipah-e-Sahaba group, the Lashkar-e-Janghvi – or LeJ – has worked closely with al Qaeda networks in Pakistan, according to security experts.

But unlike al Qaeda, the LeJ gets scant attention in the international community – and even, it seems, in Pakistani government and law enforcement circles.

In a flurry of statements condemning the attacks, international and domestic human rights groups blasted “the Pakistan government and its security forces” for “abdicating their responsibility” to defend its citizens from a “deadly form of discrimination”.

‘Deep state’ fuels the Pakistani rumor mill

But within the Shiite community – and in some non-Shiite circles as well - there is a widespread belief that Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex, the real power in this South Asian nation, is not just amiss at protecting minorities, but is actively supporting virulently sectarian extremist groups.

The release in July of the virulently anti-Shiite LeJ chief only appeared to confirm their fears. Malik Ishaq, the controversial LeJ leader, was re-arrested Wednesday following the international outcry over the September 20 attacks on the Hazara pilgrims.

When it comes to proving the involvement of Pakistan’s famously shadowy military-intelligence network though, most analysts and human rights experts admit that such allegations can be as challenging to discount as they are to prove.

“Trying to present evidence as to the direct linkage – by that I mean evidence presentable in a court of law – is difficult,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, a leading Pakistani security and military commentator whose book, “Military Inc.” is considered a reference on the Pakistani military’s substantial business empire.

“But there certainly is circumstantial evidence. The very fact that the military is supporting some groups, which in turn have linkages with groups with deeply sectarian agendas, is considered a linkage. Don’t forget that Pakistan has grown as a Sunni state where some of the foreign policy tools and the security policy tools are militant outfits that are considered state assets,” Siddiqa added.

The historic weakness of Pakistani civilian governments combined with the all-powerful military’s alleged “double-game” of cooperating with international anti-terror efforts while supporting certain militant Islamist groups has not only affected Pakistan’s standing in the international community, it has also fostered a culture of conspiracy and mistrust among its citizens.

Faced with a vast military intelligence apparatus that includes the infamous ISI spy agency and a variety of security directorates from whose cells many opposition and dissident figures have not emerged alive, the Pakistani rumour mill is alive with allegations that the “deep state” – a popular term for the shadowy military intelligence apparatus – is responsible for a variety of ills that have beset the nation in recent times.

Charged for murder – and released

For many Pakistani Shiites, LeJ chief Malik Ishaq’s release from prison in July after spending 14 years in jail was proof – if it were necessary - of complicity between Pakistani authorities and anti-sectarian groups.

A native of Punjab, Pakistan’s most-populated province, Ishaq was accused of killing 70 people and faced 44 criminal charges, 34 of which have been dropped due to lack of evidence.

One of the charges against Ishaq is for involvement in the planning – while in prison – of the March 2009 attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore. Security experts say the group also collaborated with al Qaeda in the deadly September 2008 attack on Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel.

While little is known about Ishaq in the West, most Pakistanis know him as the militant who was reportedly flown out of jail by the Pakistani military to negotiate with assailants during the hours-long, hugely embarrassing 2009 attack on the Pakistani Army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Shortly after his release in July, Ishaq embarked on an incendiary public speaking tour, addressing crowds of fired-up, slogan-chanting supporters.


Just days after the September 20 attack on the Hazara pilgrims, Ishaq was put under a 10-day preventative detention – a period of house arrest during which time a detainee has access to communications via cell phones and the Internet – allegedly for his own safety.

It was a protection that, some critics noted, was not adequately provided to terrified witnesses during his trial, one of many factors in the Pakistani prosecution’s dismal record on attempting to convict Ishaq.

By Wednesday though, Ishaq was back behind bars, detained – but not yet charged – under a public order act, according to police officials.

‘Good’ militant groups vs. ‘bad’ militant groups

Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Islamabad-based Pak Institute for Peace Studies, speculates that Ishaq’s July release was possibly linked to a much-touted government militant rehabilitation programme, or that his release was a part of a political compromise with the Punjab provincial government.

“Ishaq has the capacity to activate terrorist cells although he has promised not to get involved in violence. But what is the guarantee of this, the government has not revealed,” said Rana.

Rana believes that in its attempts to counter rising Islamist violence, the Pakistani government should tackle the ambiguity between terrorists and sectarian organisations on a policy level.

“The Pakistani government needs to evolve a multifold approach to tacking this problem,” said Rana. “It’s important to differentiate between terrorist organisations and sectarian organisations.”

But Siddiqa is extremely critical of such an approach.

“It’s as if sectarian violence has a less serious connotation, it shows you how seriously they take this,” she fumed. “Such an argument completely misconstrues the various dimensions of the ideology of Sunni Deobandi militant organisations, which view attacks on religious minorities or attacking the US as various dimensions of the same central point.”

The new powerbrokers

A longstanding reason for the Pakistani state’s soft approach to anti-Shiite groups has been the pervasive Arab-Iranian jostling for influence which gets played out in a Sunni majority nation that shares a 900-kilometer border with Iran, the world’s Shiite powerhouse.

But many Pakistani experts believe the answer to the state’s indulgence of groups such as LeJ lies closer to home.

The LeJ, the argument goes, has a growing core of loyal supporters who represent a sizeable vote bank, which makes figures such a Ishaq powerbrokers in regional and national elections.

With presidential and parliamentary elections tentatively set for 2013, Siddiqa believes their influence will only increase.

“They are the new arbiters, the local players who are fast replacing the state,” said Siddiqa. “If anyone imagines that Malik Ishaq will have no role to play in the next elections, they’re only fooling themselves.”

With a prognosis like that, the future does not look bright for Hazaras such as Hussain.

Originally hailing from central Afghanistan, the Hazara community in Pakistan is primarily comprised of migrants who fled persecution more than a century ago as well as newer migrants who fled the Taliban regime. While they hold Pakistani nationality, Hazaras are often easily identified by their central Asian features and have historically borne the brunt of religious persecution in the region.

With the Muslim holy month of Muharram starting end-November, human rights groups such as Amnesty International have warned that sectarian violence could rise.

“Worried? Of course we’re worried,” said Amjad Hussain, on the line from Islamabad. “Even talking to the press is dangerous. But what can I do? I can’t just watch my community being killed. Our only options are to appeal to the international community – and if we’re lucky enough, to immigrate to other [Western] countries such as Australia and Canada.”


FRANCE 24

The suicide path

A SERIES of atrocities recently committed against members of minority communities shows that the canker of sectarian violence is posing for Pakistan a much greater threat than is generally realised, especially by the establishment.
The killing of 29 Shia pilgrims near Mastung set some kind of a record in bestiality; the innocent travellers were forced to alight from their bus, lined up and cut down in cold blood. That this was no isolated act by some mentally deranged gangsters was soon confirmed when a similar event, though on a smaller scale, was reported from Quetta and an extremist organisation, supposedly banned by the government, accepted responsibility for both outrages.
These incidents should be seen in the context of the killing and harassment of the Hazara community in Quetta, that have been going on for years, and the excesses being committed against the Shias in Kurram Agency.
Three conclusions are obvious. First, the size of the population threatened by the wave of sectarian violence has increased by a wide margin. Secondly, the targeted groups are no longer threatened with loss of job or property; their right to life itself is denied. And, thirdly, the addition of minority-bashing to the Al Qaeda’s agenda has greatly enhanced the strength of the forces that are challenging the state of Pakistan in this regard.
Discrimination including violence against communities that are non-Muslim by choice (Hindus, Christians, Sikhs et al) and those put in this bracket against their will (Ahmedis) has been on the increase for several years. That meant about five per cent of the population, or nine million people, were threatened. Even that was not a small number. The addition of the Shias to the people earmarked for extermination should raise the figure of endangered Pakistanis to 15 to 20 per cent of the population — 27 to 36 million people. Does it not put the need to combat sectarianism at the top of the national agenda?
Traditionally, attacks on minorities were limited to demands for their purge from services, denial of promotion or recruitment, exclusion from housing colonies and similar forms of economic and social discrimination. Now the target groups are threatened with physical liquidation. In some cases, the possibility of one escaping death by ‘conversion to Islam’ is not even mentioned. Such threats carry seeds of pogroms that no sane person can possibly contemplate with equanimity.
So long as violence against the Shia community was the work of local hate-preachers employed or aided by some politicians in the Khanewal and Jhang districts any conscientious district official could deal with them. Now there is considerable evidence of organisational link-ups between anti-Shia militants of Punjabi origin and the Sunni extremists in the Al Qaeda-Taliban high command.
The danger of the anti-Shia drive being made into a duty under jihad cannot be ignored. That could increase sectarian prejudices among the government personnel. The religio-political parties that do not oppose militants and inwardly support them are unlikely to protest against Shia killings (as they do not condemn killers of Ahmedis or those who defend the blasphemy accused), leading to a wider acceptability of Shia killings. The government’s ability to deal with violators of the law will surely decline.
The increase in anti-Shia sectarian violence is fuelling intolerance in other areas. The excesses against the Ahmedis are on the increase. Every now and then an Ahmedi is killed for his belief. The intimidation and harassment of an Ahmedi couple who burnt their savings to set up a college in Duniyapur, in Lodhran district of Punjab, continues unabated. The latest is a movement for a complete social boycott of Ahmedis in Pachnand, Chakwal district, that includes expulsion of Ahmedi boys and girls from schools, boycott of Ahmedi shops and refusal to allow them seats on buses. The persecution of a Christian student by unjustly accusing her of blasphemy is just one of the many forms anti-minority mania can take.
Many factors have contributed to the growth of sectarian violence in Pakistan, beginning with flaws in the theory of the state and the various steps taken towards its theocratisation. But one of the main factors has been the state’s failure to deal with the element of criminality in sectarianism. Most of the perpetrators of horrible crimes against the minorities have remained untracked.
Many instances of collusion between sectarian killers and law-enforcement agencies have come to light. Cases against leaders of sectarian gangs have failed because of police reluctance to place evidence against them before the courts. But while failure to arrest sectarian killers can be understood because of difficulties in identifying them, no excuse is available in the case of known instigators of sectarian hatred.
All over the country, bookshops are full of publications that preach hatred against non-Muslims and the various Muslim sects and call for violence. Oral statements are made to the same effect from a variety of forums. Members of minority communities are receiving death threats through letters signed by persons who can be identified by the addresses of their organisations and phone/fax numbers. By declining to proceed against these hate-preachers the state indicts itself of complicity with some of the most despicable criminals in the country.
And this despite the fact that hate-preaching and incitement to sectarian violence have been recognised as crimes for 150 years. Action can be taken under a variety of laws, including the Pakistan Penal Code and Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance. Suppression of sectarian violence and hatred was in fact one of the objectives for which the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1997 was enacted. It defines an action as terrorism if it “incites hatred and contempt on religious, sectarian or ethnic basis to stir up violence or cause internal disturbance”. One does have serious reservations about this law but if it can be invoked against students (for making modest demands) and lawyers (for demanding the rule of law) its non-application to those who propagate sectarian hatred is a scandal of the first order.
True, violence and discrimination against the minorities is only a part of the mess that has been created in Pakistan by systematic abuse and exploitation of people’s belief. It will take a lot of concerted effort over a long time to restore sanity of thought, but there can be no delay in guaranteeing the minorities the protection of the law.
The point cannot be over-emphasised. If the state of Pakistan cannot afford the protection of law to the Shia, the Ahmedi and any other community, no additional evidence will be required to brand it as a failed state. Indeed, a state that puts five to 20 per cent of its population at the mercy of bloodthirsty goons forfeits its claim to be accepted as a modern state. What is at stake is not only the life and liberty of a Hazara, or an Ahmedi or a Christian citizen; at stake is the survival of the Pakistani nation. Denial of minorities’ rights has always meant that the majority has taken the suicide path.