Deweaponisation: ‘Gun culture in Karachi poses threat to political activities’

MQM MPA stresses need to cut the supply line of arms smuggled into Karachi.

KARACHI: With the Karachi operation under way and alleged criminals being detained regularly, political parties feel that peace would not be restored until the city is deweaponised.

Addressing a conference organised by the National Organisation for Working Communities under its project, Peace My Right, at Regent Plaza on Sunday, Muttahida Qaumi Movement’s (MQM) Erum Farooqi said that her party was being criticised at every forum despite the fact that a large number of their party workers had been gunned down.



“It is because of the gun culture,” she said, adding that the MQM had introduced a bill for deweaponisation in the national assembly in 2011 but apart from 25 MNAs of their party no members of the other parties signed the bill. “These weapons produced in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and smuggled into Karachi. The supply line should be cut off,” she stressed. On the other hand, Jamat-e-Islami’s leader Muslim Pervez blamed the MQM for the bloodshed and violence in Karachi since 1985.

Latif Mughal of the Pakistan Peoples Party said that the party was the most affected one as over 600 workers have been shot dead in the last few years, adding that bloodshed in Karachi started in 1985. He not only agreed that the PPP government had failed to bring peace to the city but was of the view that no government had succeeded in achieving this goal due to multiple factors. Denying any links with Lyari’s gang war elements, Mughal said that it started during the Ayub Khan era.

Samar Ali Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf expressed exasperation on bringing any change in Sindh as, his party had only four elected members in the provincial assembly, he said. “The PTI received 750, 000 votes in Karachi and this proves that citizens really want change,” he said, advising the political parties to change their strategies and focus on politics of peace so that citizens could be brought out of the perpetual state of fear.

Awami National Party’s Bashir Jan said the prevalence of weapons in Karachi was a problem for political parties because their workers were on the field and not in air conditioned offices. Naeem Sadiq, an expert on deweaponisation laws, in his presentation, disclosed that there are an estimated 20 million weapons in circulation in Pakistan. Of these, seven million are licensed and 13 million are unlicensed. “The government had issued 69,000 licences of weapons of prohibited bore to parliamentarians and others. This makes Pakistan’s parliament the most dangerous among the parliaments of the world,” he alleged.

Sadiq said the country’s Constitution prohibited formation of any private army but there existed over 1,000 private armies in Pakistan. Tracing the history of anti-arms laws, he said British rulers introduced a law in the subcontinent in 1877 under which a man possessing an illegal weapon could have been sentenced to up to three years in prison.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 28^th, 2013.