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Karachi’s ethnic faultlines widen

ISLAMABAD: As hundreds and thousands of people displaced by the military operation in regions of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province desperately seek food and shelter in other parts of the country, the unfolding humanitarian crisis has brought out the country’s ethnic faultlines.

In Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city and the Sindh provincial capital, Pashtun refugees arriving hungry and homeless are finding themselves pitted against the city’s majority Urdu-speaking population and Sindhis.

Overnight on Friday, four people were killed and over a dozen vehicles set on fire in rioting spurred by protests against the influx of refugees from Swat and other places in Malakand where the Army is engaged in anti-Taliban operations.

Earlier on Friday, hundreds of displaced people fleeing the fighting between the military and the Taliban in Swat and other places in Malakand region, were stopped from entering Sindh following a directive by the provincial government.

They spent the night at the provincial border with the NWFP as Sindh’s Pakistan People’s Party-led government succumbed to political pressure from Sindhi nationalist parties and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a party that represents urban Sindh’s Urdu-speaking population to prevent their entry.

As an alarmed Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani urged Pakistanis to “embrace the refugees, don’t shun them”, Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah on Saturday set aside the clearly unconstitutional directive announced a day earlier by Information Minister Shazia Marri and permitted the refugees into the province.

But the protests continued. Several cities in Sindh province remained paralysed on Saturday in response to a strike call by Jeyay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz, a Sindhi separatist group.

With the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, urban Sindh’s dominant political force, joining the strike call, Karachi and Hyderabad, the party’s citadels, remained shut down along with other cities across the province including Larkana and Naudero.

The protesters say Sindh’s cities are already reeling under power and water shortages and cannot afford to take on the added pressure of the displaced. They are particularly riled that Punjab province has said a firm no to the refugees and got away with it.

The Pakistan People’s Party, which leads the provincial coalition government, is under tremendous political pressure — on the one hand, it has its predominantly Sindhi base to safeguard in the province; at the same time, it has to go with the PPP-led federal government, which has pitted the ongoing operation in Swat as a battle for the survival of Pakistan. The controversy over the refugees comes fast on the heels of the late-April anti-Pashtun riots in Karachi in which at least 40 people were killed.

The MQM, which raised the spectre of the “Talibanisation” of Karachi several months ago, had already demanded an end to “unchecked” Pashtun migration, alleging that Taliban terrorists were using this method to infiltrate the city.

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