Giving shoot-at-sight orders may be a short-term solution but will not achieve much in the long run.
KARACHI: Close to a hundred people have been killed in Karachi over the past four days and even more have been injured. It is sad to see Muslims killing one another and clearly the reason that lives are being taken has to do solely with the victim’s ethnicity. All this suggests that the Sindh government, and the law-enforcement agencies and police under its command, are powerless to stem the violence and mayhem.
Giving shoot-at-sight orders may be a short-term solution but will not achieve much in the long run. The violence may subside but the reasons why it keeps recurring will not go away, and some days or weeks hence, it will resurface. In any case, the day after the Sindh government issued these shoot-at-sight orders, dozens more were killed.
Short-term measures might mean the imposition of a curfew and house-to-house searches in the most-troubled neighbourhoods, but the only thing that can bring peace in the long run to the city is if the political and religious parties that have a following among its residents learn to live in peace with one another.
Mohammad Ali Siddiqui
Published in The Express Tribune, July 9th, 2011.
