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Dangerous phase of sectarianism

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  • Dangerous phase of sectarianism

    According to our security agencies, three incidents of terrorism in Karachi in 2006 — the blast at the US Consulate, the Nishtar Park massacre and the murder of Allama Hasan Turabi — were all carried out by the sectarian militia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and were planned in South Waziristan under the tutelage of Al Qaeda. The new combination is Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Wana and Al Qaeda. One can also say that Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is the blanket term now used for all manner of jihad in which all the Deobandi-Ahle Hadith militants have made common cause.

    We also know that all three incidents were staged through the device of suicide-bombings. This is clearly the Arab signature in the violence spreading in Pakistan. The same signature was appended to the attempts made on the lives of President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz earlier. Therefore one of the lessons that those who object to the hanging of Saddam Hussein on the day of Hajj should remember is that sectarianism is blind to such considerations: the Nishtar Park massacre in which scores of Barelvi leaders died took place on Eid Miladun Nabi!

    All three incidents have been traced to Wana by the investigators: one ostensibly committed for Al Qaeda and two for the local sectarians. The bombing jacket of the boy who killed Allama Turabi was made in Darra Adam Khel at the behest of Al Qaeda, now spearheaded by Abdullah Mehsud who was released by the Americans from Guantanamo Bay in 2003. He returned to Pakistan and took his first revenge for the death of his mentor Mufti Jamil at the Banuri Mosque by abducting two Chinese engineers in the Tribal Areas, one of whom was killed during the rescue operation.

    The Lashkar-e-Jhangvi has finally moved to centre stage. Past news of its demise after the capture of Akram Lahori were, it seems, highly exaggerated. In fact now the entire conglomerate of jihadi militias has accepted a common sectarian banner, and this has come in the wake of Al Qaeda’s own transformation from an intellectually fashioned anti-American organisation into an intra-Islamic exterminator of the Shia. This has been done through the mental somersault of equating the Shia — the government in Iraq plus, strangely, Iran — as allies of the United States!

    To understand what is going on we have to go back to the late 1980s when Al Qaeda was formed in Peshawar in the midst of a gathering sectarian storm in Pakistan. Because this wave was orchestrated by Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda tried to keep away from it. But later, starting with the return of Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda elements to Jalalabad from Sudan after 1996, Al Qaeda had to accept a kind of coexistence with the sectarian militias which were taking training in its camps. That is why whenever Pakistan demanded the return of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi killers from the ‘friendly’ Taliban government, a deaf ear was turned to it, and the Lashkar terrorists continued to live in Al Qaeda camps outside Kabul.

    There were times when Al Qaeda was actually helped by Iran, especially during the tenure of Abu Musab Zarqawi as head of a training camp in Herat from where he infiltrated into Kurdistan through Iranian territory. After 2003, however, there was a cleavage of opinion inside Al Qaeda. Mr Zarqawi spearheaded the new trend of viewing the Shia of Iraq — and Iran itself — as the beneficiaries of the American invasion. At first Mr Al Zawahiri resisted this trend and Al Qaeda officially advised him in Iraq to stay away from Shia-killing, but later the prospect of a grand Sunni Arab consensus against Iran became irresistible and Mr Zarqawi was hailed as a martyr when he finally died in Iraq.

    Now Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is supposed to have planned a fresh targeting of the Shia community in the cities where they are found in large numbers: Lahore, Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Multan, Khanewal, Layya, Bhakkar, Jhang, Sargodha, Rahimyar Khan, Karachi, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Kohat, Parachinar, Hangu, Hyderabad, Nawabshah, Mirpur Khas and Quetta. This is certainly a new challenge for the government in charge of facing up to sectarian violence in the country. Both the mainstream parties — the PPPP and the PMLN — faced it when they were in government but failed because of the exclusive handling of jihad by the intelligence agencies. Today all parties must stand united to reject what is coming.

    Above all, it is the MMA which has to look deep into its conscience and separate the biggest curse of religion, sectarianism, from the Taliban-style governance it supports. The alliance has lost many of its leaders to this curse without taking any effective action against some of its own members. It must not exploit the new situation by pinning the blame on the current government alone. If the opposition takes some sneaking pleasure in the rise of sectarianism in Pakistan as an instrumentality of removal of government, it will live to regret it. Pakistan is a large Muslim state with Shias that outnumber the Shias of Iraq. Its population has never been sectarian but is now gradually succumbing to the fear of violence.

    All politicians must come together to save the next generation of Pakistanis from the new orientation spreading in the Muslim world. Already, in some of the cities — like Gilgit, Parachinar, Bannu, etc — a kind of sectarian war among the people seems to have started. It must not spread further. So far the venting of anger has been targeted and not general. But the very foundation of a state founded by a Shia leader — the Quaid — is now at risk. Once they throw down roots these budding ethnic and sectarian conflicts never go away. And the states that allow them to become embedded are then faced by their own annihilation. We must learn this lesson before such a fate befalls us. *

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