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The anatomy of a sectarian killing
By B Raman
A group of three
unidentified terrorists struck again in Karachi in
Pakistan on February 22 when they opened fire on some
Shi'ites watching a World Cup cricket match outside an
imambargah, a Shi'ite place of worship. Nine
persons were killed, eight of them Shi'ites, all
Kashmiris belonging to Gilgit in the Northern Areas
(NA). Subsequently, there were violent disturbances in
Gilgit when the bodies of five of them were taken there
for burial. To understand the background to this, one
has to go into the history of the NA and the
Sunni-Shi'ite divide.
Of the Kashmiri territory
occupied by Pakistan in 1947-48, the Sunni majority
areas (4,144 square miles) were constituted into a
separate administrative unit which Pakistan calls Azad
Kashmir ("Free Kashmir") and which India calls the
"Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir" (POK). The Shi'ite majority
areas of Gilgit and Baltistan (29,814 square miles),
which were known before 1947 as the Northern Areas of
Jammu and Kashmir and which had been given on lease by
the pre-1947 ruler of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to the
British, were incorporated into Pakistan and are
directly ruled from Islamabad. The government of the
late Zia ul-Haq renamed the area as the Northern Areas
of Pakistan, thus dropping the reference to its having
been part of J&K.
It is out of this Shi'ite
majority territory that Islamabad transferred 1,868
square miles to China in 1963 under a Sino-Pakistan
border agreement and it is through the NA, which borders
on China's Xinjiang province, that the Chinese, in
collaboration with Pakistani army engineers, built the
Karakoram highway. While this highway was built
ostensibly to promote overland trade and tourism between
Pakistan and Xinjiang province, its alleged misuse by
the Tableeghi Jamaat (TJ) and the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI)
of Pakistan to infiltrate jihadi cadres under the garb
of tourists into Xinjiang to join the fight of the
Uighurs for the conversion of Xinjiang into an
independent Islamic state led to the Chinese abandoning
plans for the upgradation of the highway drawn up during
the second tenure of Benazir Bhutto as prime minister
(1993-97).
They also stopped issuing tourist
visas to Pakistanis for overland travel to Xinjiang.
After coming to power in October,1999, President General
Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military dictator,
initiated exploratory talks with North Korea on possible
North Korean assistance for the upgradation of the
Pakistani portion of the highway. A team of North Korean
army engineers visited the NA in this connection in
2001.
Since the late 1990s, this highway has
been used by the Chinese for the overland transport of
M-11 and M-9 missiles to Pakistan in order to avoid
their transport by sea lest the shipments be detected by
US intelligence. Despite this, the Washington Times,
quoting US intelligence sources, reported in 2001 that
US satellites had detected the movement of convoys
carrying missiles/missile spare parts along the highway.
During the visit of Prime Minister Zhu Rongji of
China to Pakistan in the beginning of 2001, the
Musharraf government asked him for permission to move
North Korean missiles and related equipment too by the
overland route via China and then the Karakoram highway
to avoid their movement by sea, lest the ships be
detected and intercepted by the US navy, just as they
intercepted a cargo of missiles going by sea to Yemen
last year.
Beijing agreed to this, and since
last year all missile-related movement from North Korea
has also been along the Karakoram highway. Similarly,
Pakistani equipment meant for North Korea's uranium
enrichment facility presently under construction has
also been sent via the highway. It is very unlikely that
the Chinese were not aware of this, though during their
interactions with the rest of the world on the latter's
concerns over North Korea's attempts to acquire a
military nuclear capability, the Chinese have given the
impression that they themselves were taken by surprise.
After India mobilized and moved its troops to the
Pakistan border following the terrorist attack on the
Indian parliament on December 13, 2001, China and North
Korea organized emergency supplies of missiles and spare
parts and other military equipment to the Pakistani
military via the Karakoram highway.
In view of
the strategic importance of this highway, the Pakistani
military-intelligence establishment maintains a tight
control over the NA. After the Iranian Revolution of
1979, the Shi'ites of the NA became politically active
and started a movement for the conversion of the NA into
a separate Shi'ite state to be called Karakoram
province. A revolt by the Shi'ites of Gilgit was
ruthlessly suppressed by the Zia ul-Haq regime in 1988,
killing hundreds of Shi'ites. An armed group of tribals
from Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province
(NWFP), led by Osama bin Laden, was inducted by the
Pakistan army into Gilgit and adjoining areas to
suppress the revolt.
Even though the report of the
enquiry into the crash of the plane carrying Zia, and
the then US ambassador to Islamabad and other senior
officials in August 1988 has not been allowed to be
released by the Pakistani army, it is believed by many
in Pakistan that the crash was caused by a Shi'ite
airman from Gilgit aggrieved over the bloodbath
unleashed on the Shi'ites by bin Laden's tribal hordes
at the insistence of Zia.
To keep the Shi'ites
under control, the military-intelligence establishment
encouraged the Sunni extremist Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan
(SSP) and its militant wing the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ)
to open branches in Gilgit. This led to the import of
sectarian clashes, which frequently take place in
Pakistani Punjab and Karachi, into the NA too. To
counter the SSP and the LEJ, the Tehrik-e-Jaffria
Pakistan (TEJ), a Shi'ite organization, and its militant
wing, the Sipah Mohammad (SM), too, opened branches in
the NA to help the local Shi'ites.
While the SSP
and the TEJ came into existence in the 1980s, their
militant wings came into existence in the 1990s. The SSP
was financially assisted by the intelligence agencies of
the US, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the 1980s to
counter the activities of Teheran in the region. Iran
retaliated by assisting the TEJ and the Sipah Mohammad.
Being better trained and armed than the TEJ and
the Sipah Mohammad and enjoying the official patronage
of the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment,
the SSP and the LEJ went on a rampage not only against
the Shi'ites of the NA, but also against those living in
Punjab and Karachi, killing hundreds of Shi'ite since
the late 1980s.
Embarrassed by this, the
intelligence agencies of the US and Saudi Arabia cut off
contact with them, but Pakistan's Inter-Services
Intelligence (ISI) and the Iraqi intelligence continued
to support them - each for its own reason. The ISI
needed them for keeping the Shi'ites of the NA under
control. The Iraqis helped them because they not only
targeted the Shi'ites of Pakistan, but also Iranians
living/working in Pakistan, including some Iranian
military officers undergoing training in Pakistan.
After bin Laden formed his International Islamic
Front (IIF) in 1998, the SSP and the LEJ joined it. A
large number of their cadres went to Afghanistan and
helped the Taliban and al-Qaeda, initially in their
fight against the Northern Alliance and subsequently in
their fight against the US-led coalition after September
11. After the coalition and the Northern Alliance
overran the areas controlled by the Taliban and
al-Qaeda, the survivors of the SSP, the LEJ and other
Pakistani constituents of the IIF, such as the
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), the HUM-International (Al
Almi), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-Al-Islami (HUJI) and the
Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LET) retreated into Pakistan, along
with the dregs of al-Qaeda and the jihadi groups from
Southeast Asia.
While the jihadi elements from
Southeast Asia returned to their respective countries,
the dregs from al-Qaeda and the Pakistani components
took shelter in the NWFP, the Federally-Administered
Tribal Areas (FATA), Karachi, POK and the NA. The SSP
and the LEJ, along with the other components of the IIF,
were involved in a number of terrorist attacks on
Christians in different parts of Pakistan, whom they
held to be the surrogates of the US, as well as in the
kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the American
journalist, the attack on the French submarine
construction experts in Karachi and the explosion
outside the US consulate in Karachi last year.
Many of those involved in these incidents have
since been arrested or killed by the ISI and the police,
often acting on tip-offs from US intelligence officers
posted in Pakistan. Musharraf had banned the LEJ and the
Sipah Mohammad on August 14, 2001, and he extended this
ban to cover the SSP and the TEJ on January 15, 2002.
Despite this, they continue to be as active as before.
Moreover, the ban was confined only to Sindh, Punjab,
the NWFP and Balochistan, but was not made applicable to
the FATA, the POK and the NA.
The Shi'ites of
Pakistan by and large kept away from the street protests
against the US bombing of Afghanistan because they had
not forgiven the massacre of the Shi'ites of Afghanistan
(the Hazaras) by al-Qaeda and the Taliban. They have not
joined the recent street demonstrations against the
planned US attack on Iraq either. The TEJ and the Sipah
Mohammad have maintained a studied silence on Iraq and
have refrained from criticizing the US 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 a foreign
terrorist organization under a 1996 law last month, have
started depicting the Shi'ites of Pakistan, too, as US
surrogates and have accused them of helping the US
intelligence in their actions against the LEJ and other
Pakistani components of the IIF. It has also been
alleged that some members of the Shi'ite community of
Gilgit, presently living in Karachi, have been actively
involved in assisting the US intelligence in the hunt
for Sheikh Rashid Mohammad, a Pakistani supposedly of
Iraqi origin, who is considered to be the mastermind of
September 11.
Two members of the LEJ were
recently arrested by the Karachi police. The attack on
the group of Kashmiri Shi'ites from Gilgit at Karachi on
February 22, then, is probably in retaliation for what
the LEJ views as their collaboration with the US
intelligence and their support to the Shi'ite leaders of
southern Iraq who have been collaborating with the US.
B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret),
Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also
head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research
& Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence
agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
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