Pervez Musharraf. PHOTO: REUTERS
Former military ruler General (retd) Pervez Musharraf on Saturday called for sifting the pawns from the more potent forces on Karachi’s political chessboard in the effort to bring peace to the violence-wracked city.
Musharraf also said that the time had come to identify the real players and end the violence in Karachi. “We need a leader to catch the big fish and bring them to justice.”
“They [Saulat Mirza and Uzair Baloch] are just pawns in the big game who play for others and get killed,” the former president said when asked if he knew who Saulat Mirza and Uzair Baloch were. He was talking to anchorperson Gharida Farooqi on the Express News show ‘G for Gharida’ on Saturday.
Instead of targeting any single person, Musharraf said, people need “to take a broader view of the situation and question all the corrupt people”.
He claimed he had never heard about the Saulat Mirza case in his tenure, because he was running a country and such cases never came up before him.
At the same time, the ex-military chief refuted all rumours of him joining the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). He did however admit that there were recent meetings between him and MQM leaders, but he described the contacts as mere “courtesy calls”. “We talked about a lot of things, even politics, but that’s it.”
TTP seen as the biggest threat
Musharraf made it clear that he thought the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan was the single biggest threat to the city.
“The issue [of violence] goes back to the early ‘90s when the MQM split up and the Haqiqi faction was born… then again there have been the Pashtun/Urdu-speaking strife and the Sindhi/Baloch and Urdu-speaking tension,” he recalled.
“But let me be clear that all these issues are political which can be resolved politically. Religious terrorism is the most dangerous, because it is against all political forces.”
He refuted the claim that “no-go areas” in Karachi came into existence during his tenure. “We had finished the no-go areas in 1999-2000. They came up again after 2008,” he said, asking the host if she had ever been to one.
Without elaborating if the neighbourhood around MQM headquarters Nine-Zero was a no-go area, he said there were many localities in Lyari, Orangi Town and Banaras where people could not go freely and were asked about their identity.
‘Nawaz can deliver’
Despite his grave differences with Nawaz Sharif, Musharraf believed the prime minister, being the chief executive, could deliver in the current situation. “The prime minister has all the systems at his behest. All he has to do is to commit himself earnestly, though he has done no such thing.”
Skirting a question about MQM’s activities, he said a lot of things had happened historically and there were realties that should be taken into consideration for governance. “MQM is a political force having millions of followers. It should not be isolated.”
About the MQM complaining the Karachi operation was targeting the party alone, Musharraf hesitated in commenting, saying the operation was also under way in Lyari while raids had taken place in the city’s outskirts also. “I think the operation is even-handed,” he added.
“Operations should not only be limited to Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa or Karachi,” he said. “There should be an operation in Balochistan against the separatists and in southern Punjab against the sectarian terrorists.”
On MQM without Altaf Hussain, the former president said it was not easy to believe. “Altaf Hussain founded the party and led it from APMSO to MQM; it has been over 25 years now and it will not be easy to find his replacement.”
Published in The Express Tribune, March 22nd, 2015.
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