The politically motivated blood bath in Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi has turned this commercial hub into a city of death. Armed gangs on motorcycles and cars roam the streets targeting innocent people whose only fault is their ethnicity or membership of a particular community. More gruesome is the brutality with which people are tortured, tied up, executed and thrown in the streets. Much of this happens in dark alleys and quiet streets though drive-by shootings in crowded places are also common. Two areas of the city dominated by rival parties and notorious for gang warfare and criminal hang-outs have emerged as the bases from where the killers are launched to kill specific targets. Criminals with scores to settle have joined in the mayhem and are adding to the street body count. All this happens as political parties wrangle with each other and a government-judiciary struggle sets off pathetic debates about the political future with the past being dredged up to create scandals. The dead of Karachi are being ignored.
Violence is not new to Karachi. It has a twenty year old history of ethnic, sectarian and political violence. At one time when doctors of a particular sect were being targeted many of them left the country for good. Most corporate headquarters moved out of the city and relocated elsewhere. Like all big cities it has criminal gangs and mafias with connections to law enforcers, politicians and officialdom. These gangs control prostitution, gambling and drugs—they also provide guns for hire and arrange funds through extortion, bank robberies and kidnappings for ransom. Just before the present surge of violence there was a spate of bank holdups, kidnapping and armed robberies. This time the Taliban and their local extremist partners are an added presence with destabilization and economic destruction as their main thrust. At various times one or other ethnic community or political grouping has dominated the Karachi scene and whenever Karachi has been in the grip of violence the rest of the province of Sindh has been almost without governance and law enforcement---it is no different this time as total anarchy prevails in an environment where the flood hit people are most vulnerable to predators.
The present provincial government is representative of the coalition that rules the country. The general opinion is that this provincial government has failed. There is also a view that in-fighting among the political parties is responsible for the violence. The surprise is that neither the economic decline, nor the devastating floods nor the insurgency in the west nor the extremist threat within the country, nor the destruction by floods and nor the threat to Baluchistan has led to the sort of drastic measures that are needed to stem the tide that has all but engulfed Pakistan. The spectacle that the world sees is horrifying and there is astonishment at the trivialities in which the internal debate within Pakistan is engaged. If this were a film the director would call ‘CUT’ and get down to sorting out all the problems before moving further. The tragedy is that this is not a film—it is real life and real people are dying Statements that ‘take notice’ of killings help neither the dead nor the living and only add to the rage that is building and it is this rage that many are waiting to exploit through a bloody revolution—something that should never happen in a nuclear armed state. When people cower in fear, when children and women are not safe, when streets are killing zones, when terror stalks the land, when hunger and poverty are the lot of the majority---what should you expect? Do we need a rocket scientist to give us the answer? <<via>>
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