“Here we are again promised that we will be protected, and still we die. Is this justice? … Is this humanity?” said Hassan Hussein — a Hazara Muslim Shi’a in Pakistan who lost a brother in a bomb attack last month.
In 2012, 1,450 Shias died in Pakistan — the worst toll since the 1990s, as reported by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The serious, ongoing sectarian conflict threatens to spiral into a much broader problem. Local human rights organizations report roughly 400 Shi’a fatalities since the beginning of the year.
“2012 was the bloodiest year for Pakistan’s Shia community in living memory and if this latest attack is any indication, 2013 has started on an even more dismal note,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan director at Human Rights Watch.
Compounding the problem is the influence of outside factors, including U.S. support for Pakistan’s military dictatorships dating back to 1958 and Saudi Arabian funding for radical religious schools that are training new generations of terrorists under the banner of Sunni Islam.
A spate of recent attacks
Last year marked an unprecedented surge in violence against Shi’a communities throughout Pakistan. Human Rights Watch and other organizations have criticized the Pakistani government for not doing enough to crack down on the killings and protect the country’s vulnerable Shiite community.
Hassan Hussein, a member of the Hazara Shi’a minority, lost his brother in a Jan. 10 attack, when members of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), a Sunni extremist group, carried out four bombings in Quetta and the Swat Valley that killed 130 and injured roughly 270.
The doctrinal differences between Sunni and Shi’a branches of Islam date back to the time shortly after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 A.D., when religious leaders disagreed as to who the next caliph or “successor” would lead the religion.
Compounding the sectarian problem are ethnic schisms. The Hazara are an ethnic minority group numbering roughly 650,000 in Pakistan and are overwhelmingly followers of Shi’a Islam. Hazara’s are demanding a widespread military campaign to round up the extremist sectarian groups responsible for the spate of violence.
“Right now in Pakistan Shi’as are 15-20 percent of total population of Muslims, they are in the minority. When Zia was ruling the country, he promoted Sunni groups to establish mujahideen for fighting in Kashmir, fighting in Afghanistan. They are in Sindh, Balochistan and Pakhtun [provinces], they are very powerful and they have their backing and big political groups that support them,” said Naseer Ahmed, a Pakistani journalist to Mint Press News.
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq was the sixth President of Pakistan, serving from 1978-1988. Many Pakistanis credit him with the Sunni Islamization of the state during his promotion of extremist groups as a means to fight in India and against the Soviet Union occupying neighboring Afghanistan.
“It was a type of Islam that was partly imposed for political interest, in order to establish Pakistan as a real Islamic state,” Ahmed said. Groups like Lakshar-e-Taiba (LeT) and other radical groups have received funding from radical groups within Saudi Arabia.
According to the Stanford University, “Mapping Militant Organizations,” research project, “LeJ has received money from several Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.”
These groups have carried out major attacks inside Pakistan and against India, a country considered an enemy country by (LeT) and (LeJ). In 2008, armed attackers killed 165 civilians at several locations in Mumbai, India making it one of the worst cases of terrorism in South Asian history.
Ethnic and religious minority groups are suffering as a result of these decisions by the Pakistani government decades ago.
Hazara communities have begun to organize militias to patrol the streets given the lack of police and military protection. “We guard these checkpoints 24 hours a day,” said Fida Hussein, a Hazara community member in an Al Jazeera interview. “We don’t trust anyone, not the police, not the frontier constabulary.”
“The political situation in Pakistan is very bad, and in these times I have lost many close and remote family members. The attacks on mosques is completely unprecedented, as it is forbidden in Islam to attack or destroy the house of God. I pray that the situation comes to an end,” said Syed Zaidi, a Pakistani-American to Mint Press News.
Bombings remain the chosen method of attack, but many attacks have involved gunmen targeting Shi’a on buses and in public spaces. The August 2012 Mansehra Shi’a massacre remains one of the worst shootings in recent years.
Shi’a residents were traveling from Rawalpindi, Punjab to Gilgit, Gilgit Baltistan in Pakistan.Their bus was stopped in an area called the Mansehra District by men dressed in military uniforms.
After checking their identification cards and verifying that the passengers were Shi’a, terrorists opened fire with automatic AK-47 rifles, killing 25 passengers on board. Terrorists from the Darra Adam Khel faction of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan claimed responsibility for the massacre described as “appalling” by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.
Tehrik-i-Taliban is alleged to be funded or supported materially by radical groups inside Saudi Arabia. This is part of a much broader Saudi support for terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East, illuminated largely through Wikileaks.
“Terrorist funding emanating from Saudi Arabia remains a serious concern,” wrote U.S. Ambassador James B. Smith in a leaked diplomatic cable. “[Saudi Arabia] continues to constitute a source of funding to Sunni extremist groups worldwide, especially during the Hajj and Ramadan.”
Smith named several terrorist groups, including Lakshar-e-Taiba, the Taliban and Hamas as recipients of Saudi funding. This is underscored by a December 2009 cable written by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, stating, “it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
Smaller shootings and bomb blasts targeting Shi’as have become a near daily occurrence throughout the country.
Sunni-Shi’a cooperation
This massacre could have been much worse were it not for the acts of non radical Sunni passengers helping fellow Shi’a in acts that survivors describe as nothing short of “heroic.”
After the Sunni extremists separated the passengers based upon who they thought were Shi’a, they began questioning all passengers to verify their religious identities.
Sunni passengers were then asked to point out people they thought were Shiites. Many could have done so because they came from the same villages. Yet they refused to cooperate, which survivors say saved at least 10 people that day.
During another bus attack along the same route, a Sunni passenger gave his life to save Shi’a passengers knowing that the gunmen would kill those on the bus. Eyewitnesses to the August 2012 event say that a Sunni college student named Ghulam Mustafa confronted militants, saying that killing Shiites was wrong. He was shot dead in a hail of bullets as a result. Police later found that he had been shot seven times in the back, chest and head.
“What the Sunni passengers from Astore did should be part of history.” Akhtar Hussain, a 37-year-old Shiite survivor. “It was heroic.”
These type of courageous acts typify once amiable sectarian relations before the influx of radical militants in the early 1990s.
“I do not mean to say that Pakistan was run by Shiites while its people were Sunnis, as this was the complete opposite. Never was whether an individual was a Shia or Sunni a question. When I went to Pakistan in 2007-2008, I was able to participate in Ashura. I would march on with the Shiites, and watch the Sunnis ready for us with food and water from our tiring reenactment of the brutal murder of the grandson of the Prophet, Hussein,” Zaidi said.
Solving the conflict
Pakistan has been marked by a turbulent history since its founding in 1948. After successfully gaining independence from the British Empire in 1948, India was partitioned to create one majority Hindu state and one majority Muslim state each designed to protect their respective religious communities.
“Pakistan was built with two goals in mind: to protect the knowledge of the Muslim people and to protect the minorities of greater India. Its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was a Shiite Muslim while many of its great leaders, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Liaquat Ali Khan, and others were also,” Zaidi said.
Experts posit that interference by outside countries, principally the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, has hindered the development of a democratic political system and a more robust response to the sectarian violence.
“When [President] Zia was ruling the country he tried to establish new madrassas [religious schools]. These groups have been encouraged by global groups, including Saudi Arabia. Some groups from Saudi Arabia are financing some madrassas, mosques and educational institutions,” Ahmed said.
Where Saudi Arabia provides funding for only terrorists, the U.S. has historically supported both tyrannical military dictatorships and radical groups as a means to further its own set of geostrategic goals of instability.
“The problem in Pakistan has been that we have been under military dictatorship for so much of our history. The actual needs of the people of Pakistan have been completely subverted over and again by military regimes and their strategic agendas. The problem has been that every single one of these military regimes has been U.S. supported and U.S. funded,” said Sadia Toor, associate professor of sociology at the College of Staten Island, CUNY to Mint Press News.
Three major coups in 1958, 1977 and 1999 were all led by elements within the Pakistani military and supported materially by the United States. The most recent coup led to the rise of Pervez Musharraf who led the country from 2001-2008 and has recently returned to Pakistan to run in upcoming general elections.
The U.S. also supported radical groups in neighboring Afghanistan during the Cold War fight with the Soviet Union. Many of these groups known as “mujahideen” are the forerunners of the modern Taliban and extremist groups in Pakistan, namely, Sipah Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and even more violent offshoot groups like the Lashkar-i Jhangvi.
The Soviet war in Afghanistan lasted from 1979-1989 and was a major proxy war leading to the eventual fall of the USSR in 1991. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) lent training, arms and billions in funding to the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
More recently, Washington’s use of lethal drones targeting suspected terrorists has further radicalized populations because of the large number of civilian casualties in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 884 civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas since 2004.
Experts posit that a more hands off U.S. foreign policy that does not place the geostrategic needs of Washington ahead of the Pakistani people will help advance peace building and democracy in the country.
Pakistan serves as an important convoy route for U.S and NATO forces fighting in neighboring Afghanistan. NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in a November 2011 attack that lasted two days. Pakistani officials claim that the attack was unprovoked and immediately closed a key convoy route used by NATO to deliver supplies to troops in neighboring Afghanistan.
The convoy route was reopened July 2012 after then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton apologized for what the U.S. has described as a “”friendly fire incident.” The U.S. considers Pakistan a close regional ally, supporting Islamabad with more than $2 billion in annual military aid.
“If politics will be not in a sect, in a group, then the politics will be in the name of the people so this kind of conflict will be solved. Otherwise this conflict is not a minor kind of conflict that one can solve in a short time. It will need time,” Ahmed said.
“The armed forces, the government and the people in the society must chose not to support these kinds of groups and extremism, a revolution is needed to clean up these things. That will be the solution I think,” Ahmed said.
Upcoming elections
More than 80 million registered voters in Pakistan will have the opportunity to pick new political leadership during general elections May 14. Assuming elections are free and transparent, several moderate candidates, including former cricket star Imran Khan of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party could be in line to lead the country toward a more peaceful future.
Pakistan has had a turbulent history of electoral fraud and violence leading up to polling. According to a 2011 report by the International Herald Tribune, 65 percent of votes cast in the 2008 general election in Balochistan province were “bogus.”
In the same election, 1.16 million fake ballots were cast in the district of Multan out of a total of 2.2 million registered voters.
Worse has been the violence associated with public political events, including speeches and rallies held by political figures. In the leadup to the 2008 general election, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated shortly after delivering a speech at a campaign rally. Police reports show that Bhutto died of a gunshot wound to the neck while waving to the crowd from her car. Twenty-two others died when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle detonated a bomb near Bhutto’s vehicle.
The election is of particular importance, marking the first period that a democratically elected government has been allowed to end its term without a coup or civil unrest. Pakistanis remain hopeful that elections can go smoothly, allowing for a nonviolent transition of power and a reduction in sectarian violence.
“We hope that elections will be allowed to go forward in a free way that there will be no unrest that will cause them to be delayed unnecessarily,” Toor said.