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Old Friday, December 24, 2010
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Violence in Muharram

December 17th, 2010


The month of Muharram that once brought Muslims of all religious denominations together under the symbolic flag of Imam Hussain’s martyrdom, has become a season of violence. This year, the government is spending billions of rupees cordoning off imambargahs and procession routes with the help of the police and rangers to protect the Shia community.

Last year, Ashura processions were attacked in many cities, including Lahore, where such incidents had been unknown. Karachi saw people dying from suicide bombings twice, once on the occasion of Ashura and the second time on the occasion of Chaliswan (the fortieth day of Martyrdom). The cities that lie along the road that goes from Peshawar to Kurram Agency were always under threat because of the Sunni-Shia admixture there and the persisting parallel writ of the Taliban over them.

Quetta in Balochistan, where the Hazara-Shia community is ghettoised and therefore easy to target, is once again tense as the much-weakened provincial government ensures safety to the processionists of Imam Hussain. Much violence has occurred there and in the Shia-majority areas of Parachinar in Kurram Agency and in Gilgit–Baltistan. Parachinar has been cut off from the rest of Pakistan for the past two to three years because the Tehreek-i-Taliban, and particularly Hakeemullah Mehsud, have been killing people on the basis of sect for the past decade.

Why has Muharram become such a season of tragedies for us? The people of Pakistan are not fired by sectarian hatred. Wherever there is no clerical or terrorist coercion, they coexist happily and, not so far back in the past, used to intermarry as well. Scholars who have investigated the closing of the Pakistani mind agree that Pakistan’s sectarian war is a relocated conflict and is a radiation from the fire that was lit in the Middle East and the Gulf when Arab leadership passed from secular leaders to religious ones, and Iran arose as the champion of the scattered Shia communities in the region.

One can date the participation of the state in sectarianism under General Zia in this relocated war. He got the Zakat Ordinance promulgated in 1980 and wrongly applied it to the Shia on the advice — and draft of the law itself — of an Arab jurist sent to Islamabad by Saudi Arabia. In 1987, General Zia allowed the mujahideen fighting the war against the Soviet Union to attack two Shia strongholds, Kurram and Gilgit-Baltistan. In the 1980s, Maulana Manzur Numani of a famous Lucknow madrassa was paid by Rabita al-Alam-e-Islami to get fatwas of Shia apostatisation issued from the madrassas of Pakistan. Numani wrote a book Khumaini aur Shia kay barah mein Ulama-e-Karam ka Mutafiqqa Faisala (Consensual Resolution of the Clerical Leaders about Khomeini and Shiism) and this was widely circulated in Pakistan. The Iraq-Iran war poisoned minds in the region, and organisations linked to jihad began carrying out punishments in light of these fatwas. In 2003, when the Shia Hazaras were massacred in Quetta it was revealed that the fatwas from the major Deobandi seminaries were in circulation in the city before the massacre, but no one took notice. In fact, the Hazaras later put the fatwas on their website straight from the 1988 collection of Manzur Numani, but again the jihad-weakened state took no notice.

There are two ways the state will ‘exclude’ its unfavoured communities. One is by apostatising the identity of a community it thinks deviant; the other by intensifying the identity of the majority community. Both these processes have been resorted to. The Shia have responded by retreating into the non-consensual (with Sunnis) aspects of their religion and fear losing everything if they don’t do this. This conflict is at times bilateral but in most cases it is unilateral, with terrorists killing innocent Shias. But Karachi, more than any other city, has the potential of being the largest and most fearsome arena of this battle.

WikiLeaks has revealed that the region of origin of this conflict is still embroiled in sectarian politics. As Iran moves towards its nuclear objectives, the ‘relocated war’ of Pakistan will move up the graph of intensity. And the state in Pakistan is too weak to look after its people.


Deadly doings

December 17th, 2010


Pakistan’s occupation of places of ignominy on lists rating countries in various spheres is something we are accustomed to. But the evidence that we are adding to the areas in which we rank among the worst in the world is frightening. According to the annual report released by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Pakistan is now the deadliest nation in the world for journalists. The total numbers of journalists who were killed this year is 42, out of which eight were in Pakistan, the highest number in any one country. Suicide bombings and being caught in crossfire were largely blamed for the causes of these deaths. Iraq follows Pakistan in terms of numbers of casualties, with four journalists killed this year.

The statistic is an alarming one. It shows just how unsafe journalists are on the ground. Reporters, stringers and TV cameramen are among the most vulnerable, since the nature of their job requires them to be close to the action as it happens.

It is, of course, no coincidence that a number of those killed have died in tribal areas. It is here that conditions are most hazardous and media persons on the ground are most likely to be targeted by those involved in a conflict that has many complex dimensions. The death of so many journalists is, however, not entirely a matter of accident. It is also a fact that they receive too little protection from authorities whose duty it is to ensure they are able to carry out their work safely and without hindrance. In some cases, agencies and other groups linked to authorities have actually played a part in putting the lives of media professionals at risk.

Newspapers, TV channels and other media organisations need to consider the CPJ report carefully. In the first place, their employees need insurance. What is, however, even more crucial is to work to create a safer environment for journalists to perform their professional duties. Pakistan’s ranking as the most dangerous place in the world for journalists suggests the environment has changed rapidly for reporters. A new strategy needs to be worked out to keep them safe. The government and bodies representing working journalists and media organisations must work together to achieve this.
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