‘As long as the parties deny responsibility, killings will continue’

Karachi’s open secret is slowly tearing it apart.

Even by Karachi standards, it has been a disastrous summer. Nearly 300 people have been killed.

National Public Radio’s Morning Edition show host Steve Inskeep and reporter Julie McCarthy in Karachi discussed the violence on their September 1 programme.

A single neighbourhood buried five young Baloch men on the same day. Sometime between August 15 and 16, the five were abducted, tortured and killed, their bodies shoved into sacks. Shahnawaz Baloch was among the dead - a father of baby triplets. His father, Maula Baksh, says Shahnawaz went out to buy his children new clothing for Eid when he was kidnapped.

When Maula Baksh saw his son, his body bore the marks of severe torture. His son was tall and healthy, which is why the killers had to use not one, but two gunnysacks stitched together. They dumped his body on the side of the road near a graveyard. His two best friends, Kamran and Saqib, met the same fate.

Kamran and Saqib’s uncle, Mohammad Hanif, saw their bodies when an ambulance brought them home. They were wrapped in simple, white linen, but were drenched in blood. When Hanif sent a nephew to ask a mufti whether the bodies should be washed, the word came: No. You can change the linen, but the bodies should not be washed, because they are martyrs.

The same night, two more youths - cousins - were killed. The weapons this time: guns and hand drills.

Relatives say none of the five slain Baloch youths belonged to any political party. They laboured in shops and small industries to feed their families. Their deaths, like so many in Karachi, are shrouded in mystery.

A newspaper report claims that a Baloch gangster killed the five men on suspicion that they had been spying for a rival gang, an insinuation the families deny. Relatives put the blame on criminals inside the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), Karachi’s largest political party, whose roots lie in the Urdu-speaking migrant community. Rival political parties are challenging the MQM’s authority, says Lieutenant General (retired) Moin-ud Din Haider, who once served as governor of Sindh. He says the Pakistan Peoples Party is alleged to have supported its own criminal mafia. “And, you know, propping them up as a counterforce, counterweight to MQM,” he says. “So, every party wants to increase its influence on its political turf, which sometimes become no-go areas for others, and that is also a cause of friction.”

Across town, in an Urdu-speaking migrant area, a mother and father grieve for their murdered son, Malik Irfan. Irfan’s mother, Zareena Begum, says her son’s head was separated from his body. “Our hearts are broken, and our food is colourless in this season of Eid,” she says.

This family opened a shop in Lyari, a place many Urdu speakers dare not go. When tensions over the murders of the five young men from Lyari exploded, 28-year-old Irfan was engulfed in the frenzy.

Malik Gulzar identified his son at the Edhi morgue. “I didn’t have enough courage to look into the gunnysack of my son’s remains,” Gulzar told NPR. “But others I saw had their arms and legs chopped off. Even an animal is not killed in the way my son was killed.” Yet Gulzar does not wish to avenge his son’s death. But neither does he have faith he’ll find justice. Gulzar asks: “If the murderers of a prime minister could not be arrested - a reference to the slain Benazir Bhutto - then who would nab our children’s killers?”

Meanwhile, in surgical strikes the police and Rangers round up people who they believe are the killers. But they’re also under an enormous amount of pressure. The Supreme Court has convened in Karachi to take up this question, and has directed the government to find who is behind the killings.

At one point, the chief justice asked why the police didn’t know that torture chambers existed in the city. Thus there is an attempt being made to assign accountability and to try to stop this ethnic hostility. But there has to be political will. The PPP and MQM deny any responsibility or connection to the killings. As long as that continues, the killings in Karachi will continue.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 7^th,  2011.