Problems in Pakistan; from political killings to worker's rights

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Political massacres in Karachi for one, seemingly arranged by the main political parties there

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12850353
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12860513
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12919210

This adds to worries about minority rights and the expansion of far-right reactionaries in places like Waziristan.

And lets not forget workers in all of this:

http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/30/ignoring_baluchistan


It's official: If there's a coalmine disaster in Pakistan and no television to cover it, no one can hear a sound.
Recently a series of blasts (http://www.france24.com/en/20110320-coal-mine-blast-kills-six-traps-dozens-baluchistan-pakistan-mineral-development-pmdc) caused by the accumulation of methane gas resulted in the underground death of 43 coal miners in the Sorang area of Baluchistan. Baluchistan is the largest and least "developed" of Pakistan's five provinces, and the mine is located about 25 kilometers from the provincial capital Quetta.
But judging from the coverage the event got in local media (as contrasted by the coverage it got internationally), the tragedy never occurred. Local news was instead dominated by the release of CIA operative Raymond Davis (http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/16/behind_the_scenes_of_raymond_davis_release), a suspected U.S. drone attack that killed over 40 the day after, World Cup Cricket (and for one media group, its ongoing battle with cable operators over broadcast rights) and President Asif Ali Zardari's address to the Parliament (http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2011/03/201132072555196175.html) (he didn't mention the mining incident but did condemn the burning of a Quran in Florida (http://tribune.com.pk/story/137703/us-state-dept-condemns-desecration-of-quran/)). It's as if the mine accident didn't happen. Worse, it's as if no one cares. Yet this disaster and ensuing lack of coverage raises several important issues, none of them good.
The first is safety. The Baluchistan government has announced (http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2011%5C03%5C22%5Cstory_22-3-2011_pg1_6) a probe of the explosions after it was revealed that the provincial Mines and Minerals Department had actually ordered the mine closed on account of the accumulation of dangerous quantities of methane gas inside. There are laws, rules and regulations governing the granting of mining concessions and prescribing safety procedures. However, these are archaic and, in any event, have been observed loosely at best for so long that violations of the law are the norm, not the exception. Additionally, the working conditions in the mines are medieval. Miners, like the ones that were killed in Sorang, travel as far down as 6,000 meters with nothing but hard-hats with lights attached, and pickets to chip away at the coal. There are some 60,000 miners working in 2,300 mines in Baluchistan, and for far too many their lives are, to place Hobbes in a different context, nasty, brutish and short.
Another issue is the role of foreign investment in Baluchistan. Despite being consistently overlooked by Pakistan's central government due to its low population, the province is rich (http://www.scribd.com/doc/17393125/Mineral-Resources-of-Balochistan) in deposits of copper, gold, gas and rare earth metals. The potential of these resources have attracted giants like Canadian gold giant Barrick Gold and Antofogast PLC, the Chilean conglomerate, who have formed the Tetheyan Copper Company (Private) Limited (TCC) (http://www.tethyan.com/) to explore and mine deposits. The Supreme Court of Pakistan has been investigating (http://www.dawn.com/2011/01/26/reko-diq-project-firm-open-to-foreign-audit-court-told.html) the granting of licenses in the Riqo Diq mine to TCC. Riqo Diq is one of the largest copper deposits in the world and the Court's investigation so far has been inconclusive. This is largely because TCC has complied "with existing laws and regulations." No one questions the professionalism of TCC, but one wonders what types of laws the Government of Baluchistan is enforcing if the Sorang disaster is the outcome.
The role of the media in bringing this incident to public attention also deserves a look. The near-total media blackout of this most recent incident has less to do with censorship of any form than with viewing dynamics. Milk, soaps and mobile phones (rather than coal) are sold in Pakistani cities, and urbanites don't care what going on in the districts. The media contents itself to whip up public emotion over issues related to "national honor" as in the cases of Raymond Davis and Dr. Aafia Siddiqui (http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/04/07/not_a_daughter_of_pakistan), ignoring serious but less sexy issues like mine safety. Yet working conditions in Baluchistan are unlikely to improve without the media reporting on them.
Finally, the mining disaster sheds light on the state of governance in Baluchistan. The elephant in the room during any discussion of the province is the ongoing Baluch insurgency (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/29/balochistan-pakistans-secret-dirty-war?INTCMP=SRCH), and the resentments against the economic and political attention given to the larger provinces will only be exacerbated by the way the tragedy has been dealt with, or rather ignored. Another insight comes from the provincial government's reaction: the first minister to appear on the scene after the explosions was the Baluchistan Minister for Urban Development, an appearance that likely has less to do with the fact that the affected area may or may not have been his constituency than the fact that the nearby Quetta Municipal Corporation, which falls under the administration of the Minister's Department, is the only entity that had anything resembling the cranes and rescue equipment to recover the charred remains of the dead. The minister was likely the only person able to arrange the delivery of the necessary equipment, necessitating his appearance on site.
The Chief Minister of Baluchistan has ordered a probe into the incident. (http://kuwaitsamachar.com/index/content/coal-mine-collapse-kills-19-traps-34-sorang) A head or two will roll. A Secretary will become an "Officer on Special Duty," or OSD, the common euphemism for suspended pending a transfer. But the most terrifying insight this tragedy reveals is that, for now, Baluchistan remains a territory rich in resources, not humanity.
Ahmad Rafay Alam is a lawyer, academic and activist based in Lahore. He can be followed at www.twitter.com/rafay_alam (http://www.twitter.com/rafay_alam)


Will this country be the next to have civil unrest? It's been on edge for a while, but it doesn't seem to have been getting any better. The country is more politically divided while life gets harder for its people. Not a good mix with nuclear weapons of course.

[t.shonku]

Ohhhhhh please !

It's neighbour India is no better ! It crushes down it's workers ! Kills Dalits,Muslims, Tribals. Currently it is busy with Operation Greenhunt aka Massacre of Tribal Adivasis

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

T. Shonku-I was in no way comparing Pakistan to India. But the problems of Pakistan have been receiving no attention on this forum, despite widespread slaughter or repression of religious minorities within Islam towards sufis, ahmadiyas and shias, and outside Islam, toward christians, sikhs and hindus.

Should we really ignore the plight of people being repressed in Pakistan, simply because the Indian state/bourgeois mistreats Muslims, Sudras, Dalits, Adivasis? Should we ignore Pakistani Imperialism because India is a bigger country?

http://www.economist.com/node/18488344


“TYPICAL Blackwater operative,” says a senior military officer, gesturing towards a muscular Westerner with a shaven head and tattoos, striding through the lobby of Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel. Pakistanis believe their country is thick with Americans working for private security companies contracted to the Central Intelligence Agency; and indeed, the physique of some of the guests at the Marriott hardly suggests desk-bound jobs.
Pakistan is not a country for those of a nervous disposition. Even the Marriott lacks the comforting familiarity of the standard international hotel, for the place was blown up in 2008 by a lorry loaded with explosives. The main entrance is no longer accessible from the road; guards check under the bonnets of approaching cars, and guests are dropped off at a screening centre a long walk away.
http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2011/04/02/as/20110402_asm900.gif
Some 30,000 people have been killed in the past four years in terrorism, sectarianism and army attacks on the terrorists. The number of attacks in Pakistan’s heartland is on the rise, and Pakistani terrorists have gone global in their ambitions. This year there have been unprecedented displays of fundamentalist religious and anti-Western feeling. All this might be expected in Somalia or Yemen, but not in a country of great sophistication which boasts an elite educated at Oxbridge and the Ivy League, which produces brilliant novelists, artists and scientists, and is armed with nuclear weapons.
Related topics

Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (http://www.economist.com/topics/pakistani-inter-services-intelligence)
Afghanistan (http://www.economist.com/topics/afghanistan)
Terrorism (http://www.economist.com/topics/terrorism)
Government and politics (http://www.economist.com/topics/government-and-politics)
War and conflict (http://www.economist.com/topics/war-and-conflict)



Demonstrations in support of the murderer of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, in January, startled and horrified Pakistan’s liberals. Mr Taseer was killed by his guard, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, who objected to his boss’s campaign to reform the country’s strict blasphemy law. Some suggest that the demonstrations were whipped up by the opposition to frighten the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government, since Mr Taseer was a member of the party. Others say the army encouraged them, because it likes to remind the Americans of the seriousness of the fundamentalist threat. But conversations with Lahoris playing Sunday cricket in the park beside the Badshahi mosque suggest that the demonstrations expressed the feelings of many. “We are all angry about these things,” says Gul Sher, a goldsmith, of Mr Taseer’s campaign to reform the law on blasphemy. “God gave Qadri the courage to do something about it.”
http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2011/04/02/as/20110402_asc397.gif
Pakistani liberals have always taken comfort from the fundamentalists’ poor showing in elections and the tolerant, Sufi version of Islam traditionally prevalent in rural Pakistan. But polling by the Pew Research Centre suggests that Pakistanis take a hard line on religious matters these days (see chart 1). It may be that they always did, and that the elite failed to notice. It may be that urbanisation and the growing influence of hard-line Wahhabi-style Islam have widened the gap between the liberal elite and the rest. “The Pakistani elites have lived in a kind of cocoon,” says Salman Raja, a Lahore lawyer. “They go to Aitchison College . They go abroad to university…A lot of us are asking ourselves whether this country has changed while our backs were turned.”
The response to another death suggests that the hostility towards Mr Taseer may not have been only about religion. Two months later Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister for minorities, was murdered for the same reason. Yet his killing did not trigger jubilation. Mr Taseer’s offence may have been compounded by the widespread perception that he, like most of the elite, was Westernised. His mother was British, he held parties at his house, and he posted photos on the internet of his children doing normal Western teenage things—swimming and laughing with the opposite sex—that caused a scandal in Pakistan.
The West in general, and America in particular, are unpopular. It was not always thus. Before the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, around a third of Pakistanis regarded Americans as untrustworthy. Since then, a fairly stable two-thirds have done so. The latest poll on the matter (see chart 1) suggests that Pakistanis see America as more of a threat to their country than India or the Pakistani Taliban. It was carried out in 2009, but anecdotal evidence confirms that the views have not changed. “America is behind all of our troubles,” says Mohammed Shafiq, a street-hawker. That may be because America is thought to have embroiled Pakistan in a war which has caused the surge in terrorism; or because many Pakistanis, including senior army officers, genuinely believe that the bombings are being carried out by America in order to destabilise Pakistan, after which it will grab its nuclear weapons.
Four horsemen
From the complex web of factors that have fostered intolerance and violence in Pakistan, it is possible to disentangle four main strands. The first is Pakistan’s strategic position. Big powers have long competed for control of the area between Russia and the Arabian Gulf, and the unresolved tensions with India have dogged the country since its birth in 1947. Nor has Pakistan tried to keep out of its neighbours’ affairs. It was America’s enthusiastic ally in the war to eject the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s, which it sold to its people as a [I]jihad. “We used religion as an instrument of change and we are still paying the price,” says General Mahmud Ali Durrani, former national security adviser and ambassador to Washington. Pakistan helped create the Taliban in the 1990s to try to exert some control over Afghanistan. And with much trepidation on the part of its leaders, and reluctance on the part of its people, it has supported America in its war against the Taliban over the past decade.
By trying to destabilise India, Pakistan has undermined its own stability. “When the Soviets went away,” says a senior military officer, “we had a very large number of battle-hardened people with nothing to do. They were redirected towards India. The ISI was controlling them…20:20 hindsight is very good, but this decision was perhaps wrong.” According to the officer, after al-Qaeda’s attacks against America on September 11th 2001 the army decided to wind down the policy. “We started taking them out. But many of them said, ‘Nothing doing.’ They had contact with people in the Afghan [I]jihad, and they joined those people again.” Because the Pakistanis were helping the Americans in their fight against the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani jihadis turned their fury on the government.
The second strand is the unresolved question of Islam’s role in the nation. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder, made it clear that he thought Pakistan should be a country for Muslims, not an Islamic country. But since then, according to General Durrani, “Every government that has failed to deliver has used Islam as a crutch.” Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, for example, though fond of a drink himself, banned alcohol. Zia ul Haq, his successor, tried to legitimise his military coup by pledging to Islamise the country.
The relationship between religion and the state is not an abstruse question of political philosophy. A treatise on the Pakistani constitution published in 2009 by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s number two (who is believed to be in North Waziristan), argues that the Pakistani state is illegitimate and must be destroyed. This tract is widely read in the madrassas from which the terrorist groups draw their recruits. Its popularity exercises Qazi Hussein Ahmed, the grand old man of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the most fundamentalist of the political parties, for the Jamaat works within the state, not against it. He argues that Pakistan’s failure to adopt an Islamist constitution “has given the Taliban and such extremist elements a pretext: they say the government will not bow to demands made by democratic means, so they are resorting to violent means.”
The third strand is the uselessness of the government. Democracy in Pakistan has been subverted by patronage. Parliament is dominated by the big landowning families, who think their job is to provide for the tribes and clans who vote for them. Except for the Jamaat-e-Islami, parties have nothing to do with ideology. The two main ones are family assets—the Bhuttos own the PPP, and the Sharifs (Nawaz Sharif, the former and probably future prime minister, and his brother Shahbaz, chief minister of Punjab) own the Pakistan Muslim League (N). The consequence is dire political leadership of the sort shown by Asif Ali Zardari, who is president only because he married into the Bhutto dynasty. When Pakistan desperately needed a courageous political gesture in response to the murders of the governor and minister, the president failed even to attend their funerals.
http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2011/04/02/as/20110402_asc457.gif
Pakistan’s rotten governance shows up in its growth rates (see chart 2). In a decade during which most of Asia has leapt ahead, Pakistan has lagged behind. Female literacy, crucial as both an indicator of development and a determinant of future prosperity, is stuck at 40%. In India, which was at a similar level 20 years ago, the figure is now over half. In East Asia it is more like nine out of ten.
Given the government’s failings, it is hardly surprising if Pakistanis take a dim view of democracy. In a recent Pew poll of seven Muslim countries they were the least enthusiastic, with 42% regarding it as the best form of government—though, since the country has spent longer under military than under democratic rule, the army is at least as culpable.
The armed forces’ dominance is the fourth strand. Tensions with India mean that the army has always absorbed a disproportionate share of the government’s budget. Being so well-resourced, the army is one of the few institutions in the country that works well. So when civilian politicians get them into a hole, Pakistanis look to the military men to dig them out again. They usually oblige.
Terrorism is strengthening the army further. In 2009 it drove terrorists out of Swat and South Waziristan, and it is now running those areas. Last year its budget allocation leapt by 17%. Nor are the demands on the armed forces likely to shrink. Although overall numbers of attacks are down from a peak in 2009, they have spread from the tribal areas and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), along the border with Afghanistan, to the heartland. Last year saw an uptick in attacks on government, military and economic targets in Punjab and Karachi, the capital of Sindh province. Since then, security has been stepped up; and with the usual targets—international hotels, government buildings and military installations—surrounded by armed men and concrete barriers, terrorists are increasingly attacking soft targets where civilians congregate, such as mosques and markets.
Exporting terror
Pakistani terrorism has also gone global. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Pakistani Taliban), announced when it was formed in 2007 that it aimed to attack the Pakistani state, impose sharia law on the country and resist NATO forces in Afghanistan. But last year Qari Mehsud, now dead but thought to be a cousin of the leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who was in charge of the group’s suicide squad, announced that American cities would be targeted in revenge for drone attacks in tribal areas. That policy was apparently taken up by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born naturalised American who tried to blow up New York’s Times Square last year.
http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2011/04/02/as/20110402_asp004.jpgPakistan’s new face?
That prompted an increase in American pressure on the army to attack terrorists in North Waziristan. The army is resisting. The Americans suspect that it wants to protect Afghan Taliban there. The Pakistani army says it is just overstretched.
“We are still in South Waziristan,” insists a senior security officer. “We are holding the area. We are starting a resettlement process, building roads and dams. We need to keep the settled areas free of terrorists. It is not a matter of intent that we are not going into North Waziristan. It is a matter of capacity.”
The growth in terrorism in Punjab poses another problem for the army. “What we see in the border areas is an insurgency,” says the officer. “The military is there to do counter-insurgency. What you see in the cities is terrorism. This is the job of the law-enforcement agencies.” But the police and the courts are not doing their job. One suspected terrorist, for instance, a founder member of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, was charged with 70 murders, almost all of them Shias. He was found not guilty of any of them for lack of evidence. In 2009 the ISI kidnapped 11 suspected terrorists from a jail in Punjab, because it feared that the courts were about to set them free.
So where does this lead? Not to a terrorist march on the capital. Excitable Western headlines a couple of years ago saying that the Taliban were “60 miles from Islamabad” were misleading: first because the terrorists are not an army on the march, and second because they are not going to take control of densely populated, industrialised, urban Punjab the way they took control of parts of the wild, mountainous frontier areas and KPK.
Yet even though they will not overthrow the Pakistani state, the combination of a small number of terrorists and a great deal of intolerance is changing it. Liberals, Christians, Ahmadis and Shias are nervous. People are beginning to watch their words in public. The rich among those target groups are talking about going abroad. The country is already very different from the one Jinnah aspired to build.
http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2011/04/02/as/20110402_asc455.gif
The future would look brighter if there were much resistance to the extremists from political leaders. But, because of either fear or opportunism, there isn’t. The failure of virtually the entire political establishment to stand up for Mr Taseer suggests fear; the electioneering tour that the law minister of Punjab took with a leader of Sipah-e-Sahaba last year suggests opportunism. “The Punjab government is hobnobbing with the terrorists,” says the security officer. “This is part of the problem.” A state increasingly under the influence of extremists is not a pleasant idea.
It may come out all right. After all, Pakistan has been in decline for many years, and has not tumbled into the abyss. But countries tend to crumble slowly. As Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” The process could be reversed; but for that to happen, somebody in power would have to try.


http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-02-22/news/28419930_1_aurakzai-agency-taliban-jiziya-or-religious-tax

Is this the face of Pakistan if the Taliban take over?


Three Sikhs beheaded by Taliban in Pak

ET Bureau, Feb 22, 2010, 04.11am IST
NEW DELHI: In what threatens to cast a shadow on the upcoming Indo-Pakistan talks scheduled for February 25, three Sikh youths were beheaded by the Taliban in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) region after they allegedly refused to convert to Islam. Their severed heads were dumped at a gurudwara in Peshawar.
The Sikh youths — identified as Jaspal Singh, Sarabjit Singh and Baronat Singh — had gone to realise the money owed to them by some people in the FATA region adjoining Afghanistan, when they were abducted by the Taliban militia. They were allegedly told by the Taliban to embrace Islam or face death. When the Sikh youth refused, their heads were chopped and sent to the Bhai Joga Singh Gurudwara in Peshawar.