Violence and vendettas

It’s déjà vu all over again. Just three weeks ago, the murder of MQM legislator Raza Haider sparked a spate of revenge killings that shut down Karachi for over three days and caused the deaths of almost a hundred people in its wake. The tension had barely dissipated when, on August 19, the ANP’s Sindh security in-charge Ubaidullah Yousafzai and his friend were shot dead. His murder led to violent protests throughout the city, with another dozen or so killed.  Three were killed as they bought fruit while one man was dragged out of a minibus and stabbed. What this latest burst of violence shows is that the parties who are in Sindh’s coalition government are either unable or unwilling to abide by the code of conduct they had recently signed. And it also shows that the senior partner in the coalition, the PPP, does not have the answer to Karachi’s political, ethnic and sectarian violence.

There is no guarantee that Yousafzai’s killers will ever be apprehended. Earlier, Interior Minister Rehman Malik had also claimed that sectarian and militant groups were trying to destabilise the city by igniting an ethnic war between the various communities that make up the country’s largest city. If that is true, though, the MQM and ANP need to show greater maturity and not lash out against each other – both physically and rhetorically – whenever one of their men is killed. Instead, they need to abide by the terms and spirit of the code of conduct and fight the extremist menace together. The killing of the ANP official should also be seen in conjunction with the possible influx of flood-affected people into the city from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. When IDPs from Swat tried fleeing to Karachi, they met with great resistance from those who don’t want the ethnic make-up of the city to be altered. Even if Yousafzai’s murder is not a warning shot to Pakhtuns coming into the city, it will surely be perceived as such.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 21^st, 2010.