The Damned City

By Amir Zia
The News on Sunday

November 4, 2012

 

Today’s Karachi seems to rest on a keg of gunpowder, ready to explode. It is not a question of ifs and buts.

 

Who controls Karachi? 

The elected government and the state institutions or the political-cum-criminal mafias, killers, extortionists, land grabbers and street criminals.

 

Ask any ordinary citizen of this restive port city of Pakistan and you will probably hear that it is the law of the jungle in all its proverbial sense. Each state or non-state player has a small or large slice of turf of the city or a particular domain — depending on its power — and calls the shots not by the book but through force, intimidation or the barrel of the gun.
 

From the so-called elite to the common man, each and every one feels insecure and professes a sense of hopelessness about the present and the future of the country’s financial and commercial hub, which has transformed into one of the most dangerous mega-cities of the world.
 

The killers strike at will and remain at large in majority of the cases to return another day. The death toll in the city’s ethnic, religious and politically-motivated violence, gang wars and the blind murder category this year now hovers at around 1,900 and there are still nearly two months to go before 2012 ends. In 2011, there were 1,924 such deaths. The killings in Karachi since January 1, 2011 to date are more than 300 times higher than deaths caused by the US drone attacks on al-Qaeda and the Taliban militants on the country’s uncontrolled northern frontier.
 

The figure of the multi-billion racket of extortion is now anybody’s guess. On October 23, the Supreme Court of Pakistan in its hearing of the suo motu case on Karachi’s law and order crisis pointed out that no trader or industrialist can do business in the city without paying protection money. No wonder businesses and industries are shifting abroad and those still operating here are threatening a shutter-down as a protest against government’s continued inaction and indifference to their plight.

The broad daylight robberies and the looting of individuals at gunpoint no longer grab the media attention even. Crime statistics and figures have become irrelevant. In most cases, victims do not even lodge a police complaint — a fact recently admitted by the Chief Minister Sindh Syed Qaim Ali Shah. The victims know that nothing will come out of their complaints as police discourage them from registering the first investigation report in an attempt to keep the crime figure low — at least on paper. People just move on with their lives, hoping not to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Land grabbing also remains one of the most lucrative ventures for those who have muscle, weapons and the right political connections under the current political dispensation. Entire neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city are now no-go areas for the security personnel where armed-to-teeth militants belonging to this or that ethnic, religious or political group hold sway.

Ethnic, sectarian, political polarisation and turf wars keep Karachi’s pot on the boil all the time, and after regular intervals there is a mega-spike in the incidents of violence and lawlessness which, as a matter of routine, is followed by reassuring statements by the top government officials — from the president to interior minister — but nothing changes on the ground.

Yes, today’s Karachi seems to rest on a keg of gunpowder, ready to explode. It is not a question of ifs and buts. The situation is known to all, but those in power are not ready to acknowledge its gravity.

The thought and action required to stem the tide of lawlessness is missing.

It was on October 6, 2011 when the Supreme Court issued a detailed judgment on Karachi’s lawlessness and violence, directing the authorities to move against the illegal trade of weapons and mafias involved in various crimes. More than 12 months down the road the city’s crisis has only aggravated, forcing a five-member bench of the Supreme Court to again highlight the government’s inaction and indifference in dealing with the situation in one of the recent hearing of its 2011 suo motu case on Karachi.

But is anyone in the corridors of power paying any heed to the Supreme Court’s concerns and directives, which reflect the sentiments of the people of this traumatised city? Definitely not! “The judgments of the courts are systematically nullified as not a single accused has been executed in the last four-and-a-half years,” said Justice Anwar Zaheer Jamali, during the October 24 hearing. The Supreme Court underlined that more than 3,000 convicts had been given death penalty for murder and terrorism, but not a single one executed by the authorities.

The irony is that while the Supreme Court has been forced to take a suo motu action on the continuing tragedy of Karachi, the government officials and elected representatives of the ruling coalition fail to give any hope to the city as on the ground, the state writ continues to recede.

The ruling coalition comprising the PPP, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and other smaller parties — some of which have recently parted ways over the new local body system in Sindh — inherited a relatively peaceful city when it came to power after 2008 elections. Barring a spike in violence in 2007 in Karachi in which 540 people were killed (the highest during Pervez Musharraf rule), the former military-led government managed to keep both killings and general crime relatively under control. Yes, al-Qaeda inspired terrorist attacks did occur at routine interval, but the political-cum-criminal mafias were kept under check — which might appear as a politically incorrect statement in this day and age of democracy. There were less crime and criminals on the road. The same police ensured that the feudal and tribal politicians, clerics, the urban elected representatives and officials move on Karachi roads without their fearsome guards openly displaying weapons and terrorising citizens.

The situation reversed with the PPP-led government in power. The workers of the PPP, the MQM and the Awami National Party (ANP) — all partners in the ruling coalition –got locked in a bloody turf war as new and much more ruthless players tried to glean their pound of flesh from the city by grabbing land and running street crime, drugs and weapons mafias and the extortion rackets. For the first time, traders, shopkeepers, businesspeople and industrialists were left with no choice but to hold shutter-down strikes as they got an introduction to the Peoples’ Aman Committee and the criminal gangs operating under the banner of the ANP. The MQM, credited for introducing organised money extortion racket way back in the late 1980s and 1990s, got tough rivals.

While today the MQM is trying to distance itself from the criminals operating in its ranks and is in the forefront of the demand to put an end to the extortion racket, the new forces have gone all out to secure and expand their turfs. The result is the wave of tit-for-tat killings among the mainstream groups and it has continued since early 2008.

Although the top leaders of these parties — President Asif Ali Zardari and the MQM leader Altaf Hussain — have managed to keep their uneasy alliance intact, they failed to fully translate their vision among their zealots, who have remained at loggerheads for most of the period.

But the presence of criminals within the ranks of mainstream political parties is only one aspect of the problem. The banned sectarian and religious militant groups are also contributing to Karachi’s bloodletting. The influx of local immigrants from the country’s troubled tribal region has resulted into strengthening of the Taliban network and al-Qaeda sympathisers in Karachi, which offers a nightmarish scenario for the police and the security agencies. The Taliban and al-Qaeda-inspired terror cells are not just to blame for terrorism and planned assassinations, especially in the Pakhtoon-dominated neighbourhoods where they are mostly targeting the ANP activists, they are also raising funds through extortion, bank robberies and kidnapping for ransom.

Politics became criminalised and crime politicised in the city due to soft-peddling of the government and state institutions because of expediency, a desire to use one group against the other and a general lack of will. By design or default, it is the ruling coalition and the state institutions which are presiding over the present lawlessness of Karachi. It remains their collective sin.

All expectations that the ruling coalition — having more than two-third majority in the Sindh Assembly — would be effective in establishing the rule of the law have come to naught. As the country lurches towards the election year, the tidings appear ominous for Karachi as political players gear up to raise election funds and secure or expand their turfs. The relatively new element of the organised Taliban and the al-Qaeda inspired network is likely to make its presence felt more in the coming months as the Pakhtoon nationalist ANP has lost ground to the religious forces.

In the remaining months, till the next government comes into power, there is little chance that the incumbents would be able to take any new initiatives to ensure supremacy of law and do what they couldn’t do all through their term, including simple steps of ensuring proper investigations and speedy justice on all criminal cases and giving police and the security forces independence to act.

The state institutions also need to redefine their rules of engagement and stop pitching one group against the other or protecting “some of the militants’ assets.”

But, is bringing peace and eradicating crime and violence from Karachi on their agenda at all? Do we have any honest players, who can deliver? One can only hope against hope. As for now, Karachi appears unmanageable.