Hazaras: Under Al Qaeda And Taliban Fire

The massacre of 53 members of the Hazara tribe, while they were praying,  in an  imambargah,a  Shia place of worship, at Quetta, the capital of the Balochistan province of Pakistan, on July 4,2003, by three unidentified gunmen, has come close on the heels of the massacre of 11 Hazaras undergoingpolice training last month in the same city.  This  is an attempt by the Taliban and Al Qaeda dregs,who have taken shelter in Pakistan's tribal belt, to  drive out the Hazaras, who are Shias, from thisarea lest they be used by the US intelligence agencies to collect intelligence about the presence of Osama binLaden and these dregs in the tribal belt of  the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan.

All the three gunmen are reported to have perished during their attack. Two of them allegedly blewthemselves up after killing the Shia Hazaras, while the third allegedly succumbed to the injuries sustained byhim in an exchange of fire with some members of the security forces guarding the place.

The incident has led to violent disturbances in Quetta forcing the local authorities to impose a curfew,which has not yet been lifted at the time of my writing these comments. The provincial administration hasordered an enquiry into the massacre by a retired Major-General.

Since the controversial elections held in Pakistan in October last, the NWFP is being ruled by a coalitionof six pro-bin Laden and pro-Taliban religious fundamentalist parties called the Muttahida Majlis-e- Amal (MMA).It won an absolute majority of the seats in the NWFP provincial assembly.  In Balochistan, the MMA did well in some Pashtun majority areas, but not so well in the other areas inhabited by the Balochis, where theBalochi nationalist parties, demanding autonomy or independence for Balochistan, and the pro-Pervez MusharrafPakistan Muslim League (Qaide Azam), which is now in power in Islamabad at the head of a coalition, didbetter. As a result, an absolute majority eluded the MMA in Balochistan.  It had to form a coalition inassociation with the PML (QA).

When the Taliban was in power in Kabul before October 2001, it had carried out large-scale massacres of theHazaras in central Afghanistan with the help of Al Qaeda and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), the militant wing ofthe Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP). The Hazaras were targeted as the Taliban suspected their collaboration withthe Northern Alliance and the Iranian intelligence. There were, however, no attacks on their kinsmen in theNWFP and Balochistan at that time.

Now that the dregs of the Taliban and Al Qaeda are using these two provinces, with the complicity of thefundamentalist government in power in the NWFP and the coalition with fundamentalist participation inBalochistan, as sanctuaries for their operations in Afghanistan, the US intelligence has intensified itsoperations in these two provinces.  This has been particularly so since the capture in March last of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, supposedly the chief of operations of bin Laden, who had allegedly masterminded theterrorist strikes of 9/11 in the US.

Khalid was arrested by the Pakistani authorities from the house of a women's wing leader of theJamaat-e-Islami (JEI) in Rawalpindi and handed over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Immediatelyafter this, George Tenet, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had flown to Islamabad topersonally thank Musharraf  for the arrest and hand-over. The US authorities considered the arrest astheir biggest catch in Al Qaeda since 9/11. Their happiness with Musharraf over this was reflected in the redcarpet welcome accorded to him, reportedly on the CIA's advice, at Camp David on June 24 and the announcementof a US $ three billion aid package to Pakistan from 2005, subject to certain conditions.

It was reported immediately after the arrest that Khalid was operating from a hide-out in Karachi tillSeptember last year along with Ramzi Binalshibh, another important lieutenant of bin Laden.  When thePakistani authorities, prompted by the US intelligence agencies, arrested Ramzi in the last week of September,Khalid managed to escape to Quetta where he had been given sanctuary by the JEI. It is said that in thebeginning of this year, the US intelligence was tipped off  by a member of the Hazara community in Quettaabout the presence of Khalid in their city.

At the prodding of US intelligence officials, the Pakistani authorities mounted a search for him.  Heescaped to Rawalpindi and obtained shelter in the house of the JEI women's wing leader there, where he wasultimately arrested. After he was transferred to the custody of the FBI, the US authorities, with the help oftheir Pakistani counterparts, mounted a search for bin Laden and one of his sons as well as for other dregs ofAl Qaeda in the tribal belt of Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan.  Many of the dregs managed to eludecapture and crossed over into the adjoining Balochi areas of Iran, where some of them were arrested by theIranian authorities.

While the Iranian authorities have not so far revealed the identity of those allegedly held by them, therehas been media speculation that the arrested included some top leaders of Al Qaeda, including possibly a sonof bin Laden and Ayman-al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, who was No. 2 to bin Laden. This media speculation has not sofar been confirmed.

The  arrests of Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, Waleed bin Attash, a suspect in the caserelating to the attack on the US naval ship USS Cole at Aden in October, 2000, in April in Karachi, and twoother dregs of Al Qaeda made the Al Qaeda leadership suspect that the Shia members of the Hazara community inBalochistan and of the Kashmiri community in Gilgit in the Northern Areas (NA) had been collaborating with theUS intelligence in its hunt for the dregs of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

While the Shia Hazaras had grounds for anger against Al Qaeda and the Taliban for the reasons mentionedabove, the Shia Kashmiris had grounds for anger due to the role played by bin Laden and his Sunni tribalsupporters in helping the Pakistan army in ruthlessly suppressing a Shia revolt in Gilgit in 1988, resultingin hundreds of deaths of the local Shias.

On February 22, 2003,a group of three unidentified terrorists opened fire on some Shias watching a WorldCup cricket match, outside an Imambargah,in Karachi.  Nine persons were killed, eight of them Shias, allKashmiris belonging to Gilgit . Subsequently, there were violent disturbances in Gilgit when the bodies offive of them were taken there for burial. 

In an article titled Kashmir,Karachi, Iraq ... I had commented as follows on the incident:

The Shias of Pakistan by and large kept away from the street protests against the US bombing of Afghanistanbecause they had not forgiven the massacre of the Shias of Afghanistan (the Hazaras) by Al Qaeda and theTaliban.  They  have not joined the recent street demonstrations against the planned US attack onIraq either.  The TEJ and the Sipah Mohammad have maintained a studied silence on Iraq and have refrainedfrom criticising the USA on its attitude towards the Saddam Hussein Government.

The Sunni extremist elements belonging to the LEJ, which was declared by the US State Department as aForeign Terrorist Organisation under a 1996 law last month, have started depicting the Shias of Pakistan tooas US surrogates and have been accusing them of helping the US intelligence in their actions against the LEJand other Pakistani components of the IIF.  It has also been alleged that some members of the Shiacommunity of  Gilgit, presently living in Karachi, have been actively involved in assisting the USintelligence in the hunt for Sheikh Rashid Mohammad, a Pakistani supposedly  of Iraqi origin, who isconsidered to be  the master-mind of 9/11.

Two members of the LEJ were recently arrested by the Karachi Police.  The attack on the group ofKashmiri Shias from Gilgit at Karachi on February 22 is probably in retaliation for what the LEJ views astheir collaboration with the US intelligence and their support to the Shia leaders of southern Iraq who havebeen collaborating with the US.

In the past, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP), a Sunni extremist organisation demanding the declaration ofPakistan as a Sunni state and of the Shias as non-Muslims, had carried out the massacres of a large number ofShias, including the educated leaders of their community, in the Pakistani Punjab, the NWFP and Karachi, butthey had not indulged in any violent activities in Balochistan.  Public shock and Iranian anger over themurder of a number of Shia doctors in Karachi forced Musharraf to declare the LEJ and the Sipah Mohammad asterrorist organisations and ban them on August 14, 2001. When this did not stop the attack on the Shias andthe reprisals by the Shias against the Sunnis, he declared the SSP and the TEJ also as terrorist organisationsand banned them on January 15, 2002.

Despite these bans, the LEJ, which is a member of bin Laden's IIF, actively participated, along with otherPakistani components of the IIF such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (Al Alami--International),the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM)and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist, thesuicide car bomb explosion outside a Karachi hotel which killed some French engineers working in a submarineassembly project, the hand grenade attack on a group of foreigners worshipping in an Islamabad churchresulting in the death of the wife and daughter of a US diplomat, the car bomb explosion outside the USconsulate in Karachi in which some Pakistanis were killed and in the attack on a group of European touristsmoving by the Karakoram Highway to Xinjiang in China.

These incidents brought pressure on Musharraf from the West to act decisively against these organisations. He did act vigorously against the LEJ, which is not involved in terrorist violence against India in Jammu& Kashmir (J&K) and the HUM (Al Alami), but avoided action against the JEM and the LET, which are usedby Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in its operations in Indian territory.

The action against the LEJ did lead to a drop in anti-Shia violence in Pakistan in the second half of lastyear. But the situation started hotting up again after the October elections. Musharraf ordered the withdrawalof terrorism related cases against Maulana Azam Tariq, the leader of the SSP, which has since changed its nameto avoid action under the Anti-Terrorism Act, to enable him to contest the elections to the National Assembly,which he won.  Since his election, he has been travelling frequently all over Pakistan to revive theactivities of his followers.

While Musharraf has been taking strong action against the members of Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People'sParty Parliamentarians (PPPP) and Nawaz Sharif's PML (N) even for firing with air guns on festive occasionssuch as marriages, he has not taken any action against the Maulana and his followers, who have been movingaround with AK-47s and other deadly weapons in violation of the laws banning the carrying of weapons bycivilians.

Balochistan has been on the boil since October last year. In addition to the anti-Hazara anger referred toabove, another reason for the disturbed situation in the province, unrelated to the presence of the Al Qaedaand the Taliban dregs, is the growing anger of the Balochi nationalist elements over the payment of inadequateroyalty by the Islamabad Government  to the Balochi tribes for the oil and gas found in their territoryand over the re-settlement of a number of Punjabi ex-servicemen in the Mekran coast to work in theChinese-aided project for the construction of the Gwadar port and a high way along the coast connecting thearea to Karachi.

The Gwadar port has great strategic importance for Pakistan.  It would reduce the present dependenceof the Pakistan economy and Navy on the Karachi port, which is within striking range of the Indian Navy.Following the mobilisation of Indian troops and their deployment on the India-Pakistan border in the wake ofthe attack by the LET and the JEM on the Indian Parliament in December,2001, Beijing had agreed to a requestfrom Musharraf to expedite the construction of the Gwadar port in order to complete it in four years insteadof five as originally planned.

To enable this expedited construction and to prevent any sabotage of the project by Balochi nationalistelements, he has given preference to the employment of Punjabis imported from other parts of the country. Theresulting anger in the Balochi community has taken an anti-Islamabad turn. While there has been a number ofattacks by unidentified elements on the gas pipelines supplying gas from Balochistan to Punjabi industries,there has so far been no acts of violence directed against the Gwadar project.

The Corps Commanders of the Pakistan Army as well as the Cabinet of Prime Minister Mir Zafarullah KhanJamali had held a number of meetings earlier this year to consider the worrisome situation in Balochistan. Oneof the options considered was to dismiss the provincial government and impose army rule in the province.Jamali, a Balochi himself, is viewed by the Balochis as an army stooge and, as such, does not command muchrespect and authority from fellow-Balochis.  Musharraf appointed Lt Gen Abdul Qadir,  who retired asthe Corps Commander recently, as the Governor of Balochistan, to keep a strict watch over the activities ofthe provincial Cabinet headed by Chief Minister Jam Mir Muhammad Yousuf and to ensure the restoration of lawand order. He has not so far been effective. One should not be surprised if Musharraf resorts to the militaryrule option.

To keep the non-Punjabi areas of Pakistan under effective control, a stock response of the Pakistan Armyhas always been to re-settle Punjabis, particularly ex-servicemen, in non-Punjabi areas. Zia-ul-Haq had alarge number of Punjabis re-settled in Sindh, in the Northern Areas and in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK).Musharraf has embarked on a similar policy of re-settling a large number of Punjabis in Balochistan. Thispolicy is expected to be expedited in the wake of the disturbed situation there.

(B.Raman  is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently,Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Observer Research Foundation (ORF), ChennaiChapter.)