Pakistan's Hazaras killed and
cornered By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI - "I want justice," says Shukria
Jamali, 20. "But I wouldn't want my worst enemies
to feel the intense pain I am feeling now."
Shukria Jamali's fiance, Nadir Hussain,
24, a police officer who was on duty on the night
of January 10, was among those killed in blasts in
Quetta in the Pakistani province Balochistan. More
than 150 were injured. In 2012, 108 people were
killed in violence in Balochistan. On the night of
January 10 alone, 115 died.
The night
after the killing, Shukria Jamali sat in protest
along with thousands of others - men, women and
children - refusing to bury loved ones. "It was
perhaps the longest night of my life; we braved
the rain and the chilling wind in sub-zero
temperature, sitting
alongside the coffins," she
told IPS over the phone from Quetta.
Most
of the dead belonged to Pakistan's minority
Shi'ite Hazara community, numbering fewer than
600,000 in a population of 180 million. The Sunni
militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), which has
links to Tehrik-e-Taliban and was banned in 2001
by the Pakistan government, claimed it carried out
the carnage.
A suicide bomber attacked a
snooker club in the night on Alamdar Road, a
Hazara dominated area. A car bomb was detonated a
few minutes later as rescuers and media arrived at
the scene.
In a rerun of history, the
Hazaras are being persecuted again, this time in
Pakistan, because of their ethnicity and their
history of conflict with Sunni Muslims.
Shi'ites form 20% of Pakistan's population
of 180 million and have regularly been attacked
and with impunity by the LeJ. Their group's most
common target are the Hazaras, who are easily
recognizable by their Mongol-like features, as
opposed to other Shi'ites.
Most of the
world's eight to 10 million Hazaras live in
Afghanistan. But some 120 years ago, many fled
that country after being persecuted by the
dominant Sunni Pashtun tribes. In Pakistan, they
were well received at first, and some rose to
important positions in the government.
Over the years, with space for minorities
increasingly shrinking, the more educated and
affluent among the Hazara community fled to Europe
and Australia. In the last decade or so, more than
25,000 Hazaras have fled from Pakistan.
These tragedies have taken a high toll on
Hazara women. "In my lane where four other Hazara
families live, mine is the only one which still
has men. In all others men have either migrated or
been killed," Dawood Changezi, who runs a
non-governmental organization, told IPS.
Taj Faiz, who runs Shohada Welfare
Organization, told IPS that of the 500 or so
households that the charity is supporting, a
majority are headed by women.
Another
charitable organization called the Nimso
Foundation was set up in 2012. "Our main purpose
is to ensure that the children of those who have
been killed should not end education," Professor
Abdullah Mohammadi, the organization president
told IPS by phone from Quetta.
Jamali said
her fiance was the lone breadwinner of his family
because his father was sick. "I don't know who
will take care of them now; my father is not alive
either and my brothers are much younger than me."
Where men do head homes, they do not go to
work. "The affluent people who had big businesses
here have been forced to sell their property after
they were threatened with kidnapping," said
Changezi.
Altaf Safdari, who runs a
community television channel, Mechid, told IPS
that most professionals belonging to his community
have been ghettoised in the Alamdar Road and
Hazara Town area of Quetta.
"For the last
many months lawyers, doctors, professors,
lecturers and even government servants cannot
leave their homes for fear of being killed," said
Safdari. "As for government servants, for many
their superiors have granted them long leave and
they are being provided salary. The not-so-lucky
ones who were posted outside the city have had to
leave work."
Rukhsana Ahmed, general
secretary of the women's wing of the ruling PPP,
says that on visits to the city graveyard where
her husband lies buried, a victim of ethnic
killing in 2009, she sees "chadar-clad women
sitting along the road, begging". This, she says,
is a new phenomenon because Hazaras never begged
before, however destitute they may have been.
"The community pitches in, and there are
homes to which people quietly send food rations.
But the poverty levels have increased
tremendously. I shudder to think what all a woman
in desperation may have to resort to.
"The
wife of a vegetable vendor who died leaving five
young daughters now puts up a vegetable stall
outside her home; the two wives of one man await
government compensation a year after he died
because the man's body was found without a face.
In scores of households there are eight to ten
mouths to feed but with no breadwinner; and many
young aspiring students have had to leave
education half way," she said.
Ahmed
added: "After one college bus carrying Hazaras was
attacked, many non-Hazara students refuse to sit
with them any more, and many transporters refuse
them a seat. A few young girls in my neighborhood
cover their faces with Balochi chadar, wear big
sunglasses and use a three-wheeler to get to
college for fear of being recognized as belonging
to the community."
Abdul Khaliq,
chairperson of the Hazara Democratic Party (HDP),
said: "We want the army to take control of Quetta;
we want a targeted military operation against the
militants and we want the chief minister removed
from whom we have no expectations."
While
not all their demands have been met, after three
days of protest Pakistani Prime Minister Raja
Pervez Ashraf dismissed the provincial government
and imposed governor's rule in Balochistan.
Changezi has meticulously been filing away
press clippings of every attack on his community
since the first in 1998. Since then, he says more
than 800 people from his community have been
killed in attacks.
"Since the attacks on
Hazaras started two decades back, not a single
person has been charged. The government and the
army know quite well where the militants operate
from and their hideouts; then why is it so
difficult for them to catch them?" asked HDP's
Khaliq.
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