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Pakistan's Biggest City Torn By Ethnic Violence

A man walks past a burning van in Karachi, Pakistan, on Aug. 4. Hundreds of extra paramilitary troops have been deployed in Pakistan's economic capital, which is struggling to end violence that has killed more than 300 people in recent weeks.
Asif Hassan
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AFP/Getty Images
A man walks past a burning van in Karachi, Pakistan, on Aug. 4. Hundreds of extra paramilitary troops have been deployed in Pakistan's economic capital, which is struggling to end violence that has killed more than 300 people in recent weeks.

Pakistan's long list of problems has a new addition this summer: vicious communal violence in Karachi.

More than 300 people have been killed in recent weeks, some under grisly circumstances that include decapitations, torture chambers and bodies placed in gunnysacks and dumped on the side of the road.

The neighborhood of Lyari, a warren of streets and rampant crime, has been a no-go zone during the escalating violence. The Date Market is a landmark in this congested part of Old Karachi. It's showing signs of life now, but some are still reluctant to venture out at a time when they should be marking the end of Ramadan, and a month of daytime fasting, with the celebration of the Eid holiday.

"It's really very bad, especially for the laborers and the working-class people, they have been crushed because of this violence," said Mohammad Naeem Baloch, a date merchant. "In such conditions, how would you celebrate Eid?"

A Pakistani paramilitary soldier frisks a man on a cordoned-off street during house-to-house search operations against criminals, gangs and extortion mafias in a troubled area of Karachi on Aug. 28.
Rizwan Tabassum / AFP/Getty Images
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AFP/Getty Images
A Pakistani paramilitary soldier frisks a man on a cordoned-off street during house-to-house search operations against criminals, gangs and extortion mafias in a troubled area of Karachi on Aug. 28.

A City Of Ethnic Tensions

Karachi was a modest port city at Pakistan's independence in 1947. It's now a sprawling, chaotic mega-city with roughly 18 million people, though no one knows the number for sure. Much of that growth has come from migrants. They include the ethnic Baloch from the rural southwest of the country. In addition, Pashtuns have come in large numbers from the war-ravaged northwest of Pakistan.

Millions more are known as Muhajirs, or Urdu-speakers who are descendants of Indian immigrants. Politically, the Muhajirs support the MQM, the dominant political group in Karachi.

The People's Party, led by President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, is also a force in Karachi. But there are many competing factions — like the gang leaders who are also lionized on billboards.

Most of the recent violence has involved the Baloch and Muhajir communities.

Baloch Men Targeted

After one recent killing spree, five young Baloch men from the same neighborhood, Lyari, were buried on the same day. In the night hours spanning Aug. 15 and 16, all five were abducted and tortured, and after they were killed, their bodies shoved into gunnysacks.

One of them, Shahnawaz Baloch, was the father of baby triplets and was going out to buy his children new clothes for Eid when he was kidnapped, according to his father, Maula Baksh.

If the murderers of a prime minister could not be arrested, then who would nab our children's killers?

Baksh said that when he saw his son's body, it bore the marks of severe torture. His face was so disfigured that one side was unrecognizable. He says his son was tall and healthy, and the killers stuffed his legs into one gunnysack and his torso in another and stitched them together. They dumped his son's body on the side of the road near a graveyard.

Maula Baksh's son was not alone that night. He had piled onto a single motorcycle with his two best friends, Kamran and Saqib. Police say the bodies of all three men were discovered on a road in an area of town dominated by Muhajirs.

Kamran and Saqib's uncle, Mohammad Hanif, saw their bodies when an ambulance service brought them home. He said they were wrapped in simple white linen but were drenched in blood, and he sent a nephew to ask a mufti, an Islamic scholar, whether the bodies should be washed. The mufti ruled that the linens could be changed, but the bodies should not be washed because he said they were martyrs.

Two more youths, who were cousins, were killed with guns and hand drills.

Motives Not Clear

Relatives say the five who were slain said they did not belong to any political party, and worked in shops and small industries.

A report published in a leading Pakistan newspaper, Daily Jang, claimed that a Baloch gangster killed the five young men on suspicion that they had been spying for a rival gang.

The families of the dead men deny this, and have accused the MQM, the Muhajir political party that has long been accused of cultivating gangs to consolidate its political power.

However, President Zardari's People's Party has been seeking to counter the power of the MQM in Karachi, according to Moin-Ud Din Haider, a retired lieutenant general who served as a caretaker governor in Karachi in the late 1990s. "Every party wants to increase its influence on its political turf," he said. "And that is also a cause of friction."

Zareena Begum and Malik Gulzar recently lost their son, Malik Irfan, 28, to the violence. They are part of the Muhajir community in Karachi, and much of the fighting has involved Muhajirs and members of the Baloch community.
Julie M. McCarthy / NPR
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NPR
Zareena Begum and Malik Gulzar recently lost their son, Malik Irfan, 28, to the violence. They are part of the Muhajir community in Karachi, and much of the fighting has involved Muhajirs and members of the Baloch community.

Muhajirs Also Targeted

Muhajirs, too, have been victims. In a Muhajir area across town, parents grieved for their murdered son, Malik Irfan. The mother, Zareena Begum, said her son was decapitated.

"Our hearts are broken," she said, adding that during Eid, a time of celebration, her family felt only sorrow.

This Muhajir family was expert in Baloch embroidery and even opened a shop in an area many Muhajirs dare not go. But as tensions rose over the murders of the five young Baloch men, 28-year-old Irfan was a convenient target for those seeking revenge.

Malik Gulzar identified his son at the morgue.

"I didn't have enough courage to look into the gunnysack of my son's remains," he said. "But others I saw had their arms and legs chopped off. Even an animal is not killed in the way my son was killed."

Malik Gulzar does not wish to avenge his son's killing. He said he has lived among the Baloch for many years, and that "the majority are good; the criminals are very few."

Still, he lacks faith in the judicial system.

"If the murderers of a prime minister could not be arrested," he said in a reference to the 2007 killing of Benazir Bhutto, "then who would nab our children's killers?"

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Julie McCarthy has spent most of career traveling the world for NPR. She's covered wars, prime ministers, presidents and paupers. But her favorite stories "are about the common man or woman doing uncommon things," she says.