Tensions are on the rise again and Pakistan’s major city of Karachi has virtually shut down in the wake of yesterday’s riots, which were precipitated by another major political assassination. Most of the city’s shops were closed and public transportation was not running.
This riot comes just over a week after the last riot, which saw supporters of the ruling party burning down cable TV offices across Karachi for refusing demands to silence a news channel that broadcast an embarrassing story about President Zardari. That riot itself came just days after a previous riot over another political assassination.
With Pakistan’s financial capital seemingly a perpetual basketcase, the Awami National Party (ANP), one of the dominance Pashtun factions in the city, has petitioned the Supreme Court to order an Army takeover of the city for the forseeable future to stop the targeted killings of Pashtun leaders.
The previous political assassination, which saw the start of the first riot in the month, was a member of the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM). That group blamed Taliban-linked Pashtuns for the killing, and some implied that the ANP may have played a role.
This is not the first time this year that officials have raised the possibility of handing the city over to the military, but with this being the third major riot in Karachi in the first 19 days of August, it seems patience for the civilian government has run out. Still it is unclear that the military can do anything different, and it seems that the tensions are bound to continue into the forseeable future.
The problem of Karachi is simple. One group (the MQM) has been the dominant political group (read gang, mafia, protection racket) for almost two decades now. With the increasing migration of Pashtuns, this group who's base was Urdu speaking people, sees its future power threatened. They want to show who is boss in the city. The leader of this group, Altaf Hussain, sits in exile in London and directs his forces to make trouble in Karachi whenever he wills.
After the assassination of the MQM leader a few weeks ago, about 80 innocent people were killed in Karachi, most of them Pashtun. Naturally, the Pashtun groups, will respond in kind, though they have been very reserved till now.
The military has attempted to solve this problem once before, in 1993, entering Karachi and taking part in a round of targeted assassinations of middle-level MQM workers, arresting lower-level ones, while the top level escaped from the country. This took the wind out of the group and since then the MQM has never again challenged military hegemony, only wished to establish their own in Karachi, with the necessary amount of sharing. If the military wills, they can engage in a civil war, as they are doing, for instance, in Waziristan (the issue is exactly the same, no writ of the state, a state within a state, a terrorist group holding a population under hostage) and do a much better job at it since they would have good intelligence, find many defectors, a supportive local population and be functioning in an easier terrain (the city of Karachi, as opposed to the mountains of FATA). But none of this will happen either because the military is pre-occupied elsewhere or because it is not in their interest to crack down on a group that will be friendly to them when they seize complete power from the civilian government, or because Altaf Hussain has good contacts in London and Washington.