CHENNAI -
The Shi'ites of Pakistan and Afghanistan have a long
memory for the insults and brutalities inflicted against
them. It now appears they're on the hunt for their sworn
enemies, and Osama bin Laden is among them.
That
might be because they haven't forgotten what he did to
them in 1988. It was then that hundreds of Shi'ites of
the Northern Areas (NA - Gilgit and Baltistan) of
Pakistan, known before 1947 as the Northern Areas of
Jammu and Kashmir, were massacred after a demand
raised by them for the creation of an autonomous Shi'ite
state called Karakoram, consisting of the Shi'ite
majority areas of the NA, Punjab and the Northwest
Frontier Province (NWFP). Military ruler General
Zia-ul-Haq called in bin Laden, then living in Peshawar,
and his Sunni tribal hordes to carry out the massacre.
To avenge these deaths, a Shi'ite airman is
believed to have caused an explosion on board the
aircraft in which Zia was travelling from Bahawalpur to
Islamabad in August 1988. This was followed in 1991 by
the assassination in Peshawar of Lieutenant-General
Fazle Haq, a retired army officer, close to Zia and
hated by the Shi'ites because of his suspected role in
the assassination of a respected Shi'ite leader.
The Taliban rule in Afghanistan from 1994 to
October 2001, particularly after it captured Kabul in
September 1996, saw the large-scale massacre of Shi'ites
belonging to the Hazara tribe. These strikes were
carried out by al-Qaeda as well as Pakistan's
Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and its militant wing, the
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ).
Angered over this, the
Shi'ite community refrained from participating in large
numbers in the anti-US demonstrations that were
organized in different parts of Pakistan by the Sunni
religious organizations to protest the US military
strikes against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan
after September 11, 2001.
Since the beginning of
2003, there have been indications that sections of the
Shi'ite community have been doing their own hunt for bin
Laden and his No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri. It was reported
that the arrest at Rawalpindi, Pakistan in March 2003 of
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who had allegedly orchestrated
the September 11 terrorist strikes in the United States,
was made possible by intelligence provided by some
Shi'ites in Quetta, Balochistan province, where Khalid
was living before fleeing to Rawalpindi.
After
hearing these reports, the SSP and the LEJ, both members
of bin Laden's International Islamic Front, retaliated
by massacring a large number of Hazara Shi'ites in the
Quetta area in July 2003. This was followed by many
anti-Shi'ite incidents in Karachi and other parts of
Pakistan.
The Shi'ites struck back by helping
the Pakistani authorities arrest Massob Arooshi,
described as Khalid's nephew, on June 13 this year
following an unsuccessful attempt to kill the corps
commander of Karachi on June 10. Arooshi was arrested at
the house of one Abbas Khan, a former divisional
engineer of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited,
and reportedly the father of Javed Abbas, a serving
deputy superintendent of police of Sindh.
According to the Daily Times, the prestigious
Lahore daily, a Shi'ite cleric from Gilgit working in
Karachi tipped off the police about Arooshi's presence
in the house of Abbas Khan. The paper said it was
another Shi'ite cleric who had tipped off the police in
March last year about Khalid's presence in Rawalpindi.
Arooshi's arrest led to the arrest on
July 12 of 25-year-old Muhammad Naeem Noor
Khan, a Pakistani national described as an al-Qaeda
computer expert; the arrest on July 25 at the home of an LEJ
member in Punjab of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian
national born in Zanzibar and wanted by the US's
Federal Bureau of Investigation in connection with the
explosions near the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam
in 1998, and his Uzbeck wife; the arrest on August
6 of Qari Saifullah Akhtar, the
amir of the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI)
and his subsequent deportation to Pakistan; and the death
in an alleged encounter at Nawabshah in Sindh on September
26 of Amjad Hussain Farooqi, alias Mansur Hasnain,
who, according to Pakistani authorities, was the
mastermind behind two abortive attempts to kill
President General Pervez Musharraf last December and in the kidnapping
and murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.
The SSP and the LEJ once again sought revenge
against the Shi'ites through a suicide bombing at a
Shi'ite place of worship in Punjab on October 1,
resulting in the death of 30 Shi'ites. The Shi'ites
retaliated on October 7 with a cab-bomb attack that
killed 40 Sunnis near a religious function organized in
Punjab by Sunni members of the SSP and the LEJ. The
function marked the first anniversary of the death of
Azam Tariq, the former head of the SSP, who was
assassinated last year allegedly by a Shi'ite gunman in
Islamabad.
Azam Tariq was close to Musharraf,
who had the cases pending against him under the
Anti-Terrorism Act withdrawn, enabling him to contest
and win the October 2002 National Assembly elections.
The SSP retaliated against the October 7 attack by
causing an explosion in a Shi'ite place of worship at
Lahore on October 10, killing four Shi'ites.
And
so it goes; attack and revenge. And so it will go on,
until the Shi'ites of Pakistan and Afghanistan have
smoked out bin Laden, al-Zawahiri and Mullah Mohammad
Omar, the amir of the Taliban, and dispatched them to
their maker or, worse still, to the Americans at
Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Shi'ites have a long
memory for the insults and brutalities inflicted against
them, as Zia, Fazle Haq, Khalid, Amjad Farooqi and many
others have learned, at great cost. They hunt
relentlessly for their suppressors and for those who
massacred their near and dear ones - no matter the
price.
They have not forgotten what bin Laden,
at Zia's insistence, did to them in Gilgit in 1988. They
have not forgotten what bin Laden, the Taliban and
al-Zawahiri did to them in Central Afghanistan. They
have not forgotten the role of the SSP and the LEJ in
the massacre of the Shi'ites in Pakistan and
Afghanistan.
They are on the hunt for
their sworn enemies. They are unlikely to rest until they
get them. They are doing this not because of any love
for the US or Musharraf, but to avenge the deaths of
their near and dear ones at the hands of al-Qaeda and the
Taliban.
Unlike Iran, which is allegedly not
cooperating with the United States in its hunt for the
dregs of al-Qaeda, the Shi'ites of Pakistan have mounted
their own hunt for bin Laden and his cohorts. It is not
a coordinated operation with the US or Pakistan. It is
an independent operation in parallel, whose objective is
not to make the world safe for the Americans, but to
avenge the deaths of their brothers and sisters and to
make the world safe for the Shi'ites. No amount of
brutality and retaliatory killings by the SSP and the
LEJ will deter them from this.
If bin Laden is
still alive, don't be surprised if his greatest nemesis
proves to be the Shi'ites of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
B Raman is a retired additional secretary, Cabinet
Secretariat, government of India, New Delhi, and
currently director of the Institute for Topical Studies,
Chennai and distinguished fellow and convenor at the
Chennai chapter of the Observer Research Foundation.
E-mail: corde@vsnl.com.
