The Ghosts Of Gilgit

The explosion in the midst of a Shia congregation at a shrine in Islamabad on May27, 2005, which resulted in the death of 25 Shias and injuries to about 80 others has been attributed by the local police to an unidentified suicide bomber. No organisation has so far claimed responsibility for the blast, but the needle of suspicion strongly points to the Sunni extremist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), which is the militant wing of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan(SSP).

The shrine is dedicated to a 17th century Sufi saint, Shah Abdul Latif Kazmi, popularly known as Bari Imam. Bari Imam is considered the patron saint of Islamabad.

The LEJ is a member of Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) for Jihad against the Crusaders and theJewsish People. The SSP, formerly known as the Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba, has been in the forefront of the anti-Shia violence and acts of terrorism since the 1980s in retaliation for the political and religious assertiveness of the Shias of Pakistan following the triumph of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.

The LEJ played an active role in the 1990s in helping the Taliban and the Al Qaeda in carrying out a massacre of the Shias (Hazaras) of Afghanistan. This had its impact in Pakistan, resulting in an aggravation of the tensions between the Sunnis and the Shias and an escalation in the acts of violence and terrorism directed against each other.

Suspicions entertained by the LEJ that the Shias (Hazaras) of Balochistan had played a role in helping the authorities in the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) at Rawalpindi inMarch, 2003, led to anti-Shia terrorism spreading to Balochistan in July, 2003. According to the Americans, KSM had co-ordinated the 9/11 terrorist strikes in the US on behalf of bin Laden.

Reprisal attacks by the LEJ and other anti-Shia groups against the Shias in other parts of Pakistan have been stepped up following the revival of the movement for the independence of the Northern Areas (Gilgit and Baltistan) last year. The revived movement initially started as a campaign by the Shias of Gilgit against the school curriculum.

The LEJ and other Sunni fundamentalist groups retaliated with a campaign against the local Shia political and religious leaders in Gilgit. They also started a campaign against the Aga Khan Foundation, which is very active in the educational and other social fields in the Northern Areas. They accused the Foundation of trying to secularise the local educational system by de-emphasising the religious aspect in the schools controlled by it.

During the first four months of this year alone, 35 persons, the majority of them Shias, have died in acts of terrorism in the Northern Areas. Prominent among those killed in these acts of terrorism were Agha Ziauddin Rizvi, a highly respected Shia religious leader of Gilgit, in January,2005, and the retaliatory killing by the Shias of Sakhiullah Tareen, the Inspector-General of Police of the Northern Areas, and four of his bodyguards in March, 2005.

The News, the prestigious Pakistani daily, reported as follows on May 1,2005: 

" The situation (in the Northern Areas) is far from stable as even the Government officials, including those of the Army, the Northern Light Infantry and the police were identified and murdered while travelling in buses in areas falling under the control of rival sectarian militia. Casualties due to bomb explosions, ambushes and sniper firing in Nultar have become a daily routine and so is the blockade of the Karakoram Highway ( to the Xinjiang region of China). The Government has failed to enforce its writ. "

The cycle of attacks and retaliatory attacks have continued despite the claim of the Pakistani authorities that normalcy has been restored following their acceptance of the Shia demand for a change in the school curriculum in the Northern Areas. The worsening situation in the Northern Areas has had its impact in Sindh and Pakistani Punjab where a large number of Shias from the Northern Areas live and work. There have been suicide attacks by the Sunni extremists in Shia places of worship in these two provinces resulting in the deaths of dozens of innocent Shias. The Shias have retaliated through the targeted killings of individual Sunni leaders in other parts of Pakistan.

While the killing of the Shias by the LEJ and other anti-Shia organisations has been indiscriminate, the reprisal attacks by the Shias have avoided Sunni places of worship. Concerned over the escalating violence, Gen.Pervez Musharraf banned the Sunni and Shia sectarian organisations on August 14,2001. This was followed by a ban on their militias, including the LEJ, in January,2002. The US State Department also designated the LEJ as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO) in 2003.

Despite these actions, the LEJ continues to be as active as before in the Northern Areas, Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan. This is largely due to the considerable support for it at the lower and middle levels of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment and the police. Alarmed by the increasing resort to suicide terrorism in the Pakistani territory not only by the LEJ, but also by other Pakistani jihadi organisations associated with the Al Qaeda in the IIF, the Government pressurised a group of 68 religious leaders to issue a fatwa against suicide terrorism on May 17. While the fatwa condemned suicide terrorism in Pakistani territory, whether directed against Muslims or non-Muslims, against Pakistanis or foreigners, it refrained from condemning suicide terrorism in India, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

Even this fatwa has had no effect as evident from the Islamabad blast of May 27,2005.Till the 1970s, the village where the targeted Bari Imam shrine is located used to be known as Noorpur Shahan. Small groups of people used to come there once a year to pay their respects to the memory of the much-revered sufi saint, who belonged to the Shia sect. A four-day religious festival used to be held on the occasion. While on the first three days, the festival used to attended by all Muslims---Sunnis as well asShias--the last day was largely attended by Shias from nearby areas.

As the shrine started attracting devotees from other parts of Pakistan, the income from the earnings during the festival increased and the village came to be known as Bari Imam. The annual festival used to be free of religious or sectarian poison until the late Gen.Zia ul-Haq seized power in 1977 and imposed his military rule in the country. As the income of the shrine increased, the right to control it became an increasingly contentious issue and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), on the orders of Zia, started interfering in the internal affairs of the shrine in order to assist its surrogates seize control of themanagement. The Zia regime imposed Raja Akram, a Barelvi Sunni, as the custodian of this Shia shrine. He was murdered in February last for reasons, which are not clear.The control of the shrine, which used to be in the hands of the descendants of the Shah family,and their supporters in the village, passed into the hands of Muslims brought from outside with the ISI's protection. As the local villagers resisted, more and more Muslims were brought from outside and settled in the area, thereby reducing the original inhabitants to a minority in their own village.

While this politicised a largely religious festival, it did not introduce the sectarian poison. The Sunnis, who control the shrine, belong to the Barelvi sect, which is in a majority in Pakistan. It is reputed to be a largely tolerant sect, which does not look upon the Shias as apostates and has generally been getting along well with theShias.

The anti-Shia campaign and violence in Pakistan have been largely the handiwork of the Sunnis belonging to the militant Deobandi-Wahabi sects. They denounce the Shias as apostates and have been carrying on a campaign for nearly three decades for declaring the Shias as non-Muslims and Pakistan as a Sunni State. The Deobandis and the Wahabis are in a minority in Pakistan, but enjoy tremendous influence because of the support of the military-intelligence establishment and the seemingly inexhaustible flow of funds from Saudi Arabia for them.

The Deobandis and the Wahabis, assisted by the ISI and the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), spearheaded the jihad against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops, the CIA discarded them, but the ISI continued to patronise them and diverted them to India to wage a jihad against the Indian securitry forces in Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) and other parts of India. The ISI also used many of these jihad-hardened Deobandis and Wahabis for assisting the Taliban to capture power in Kabul in September,1996.

When Osama bin Laden shifted to Afghanistan from the Sudan in 1996 and formed his International Islamic Front (IIF) in 1998, many of the Deobandis and Wahabis flocked to him. Their organisations such as the anti-Shia Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), its offshoot the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the HUM's two offshoots the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) became members of the IIF and accepted bin Laden's leadership.

All these organisations except the LET are strongly anti-Shia and share the LEJ's characterisation of the Shias as apostates. The LET, though strongly influenced by the Wahabi ideology, at least openly avoids giving the impression of being anti-Shia. Antri-Shia violence and terrorism have been a defining characteristic of the Pakistani society ever since 1979, when the local Shias, inspired by the success of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, became politically and religiously assertive. To counter them, Zia used the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and its ISI-trained cadres. The LEJ was an offshoot of theSSP. 

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies, Chennai, and Distinguished Fellow and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), Chennai Chapter.