Songs Of Blood And Sword: A Daughter'S Memoir (53 page)

In 1993, however, the MQM was without establishment strength. It was the second-largest party seated in the Sindh Assembly but had lost its power to ‘make or break’ governments on account of its lack of ministries and national clout.
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The MQM, desperate not to be deprived of its strength, turned into a militant street party and launched an armed movement in Karachi to wrest back its grassroots power and maintain its grip on the city. Benazir, already antagonized by the MQM, seized the opportunity to fight the party that had betrayed her. And she was prepared to fight dirty.

Instead of entrusting the judiciary to tackle the criminal and political thuggery of MQM, she bypassed the courts and directed her Interior Minister, General Naserullah Babar, to teach the MQM a lesson. General Babar, a cruel man with shady Afghan connections said to be so strong that he often publicly referred to the Taliban as ‘my boys’, launched an attack on the MQM and Karachi’s Muhajirs so brutal that even its name, ‘Operation Clean-Up’, does not do justice to the level of violence the state employed.

Karachi’s security forces, largely the police and the elite Ranger squads, became an uncontrollable force. Anyone who didn’t fall into line with the Sindh government led by the PPP was declared a ‘terrorist’ or a criminal. The MQM became known simply as a party of terrorists and all Muhajirs as ‘supporters of Altaf’. Altaf Hussain is undoubtedly a man with a criminal past, but he is not the sole – or most credible – representative of the Muhajir community by any means. The most infamous of the methods employed by Operation Clean-Up was the notorious ‘police encounter’, extrajudicial killings disguised as shoot-outs. Assassinations, torture, mutilation and blackmail were also popular with Karachi’s security forces charged with ‘cleaning up’ the city.

The violence of Operation Clean-Up was so extreme it paralysed the city for the two years that it was officially in force. Schools shut
down, certain neighbourhoods became out of bounds, and the economy shrank to such an extent that the ‘flight of domestic capital due to the violence was Rs. 102 billion in the first three months of 1995 alone.’
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Karachi had never before, and has never since, been so crippled by random and arbitrary displays of violence or so ably brought to its knees by the unchecked powers of the state and the police.

I remember weeks would pass when Zulfi and I would be stuck at home, school shut owing to the violence in the city. When things quietened down again we’d return to our classes, making up for lost time with lessons on Saturdays and Sundays and extra minutes added to our regular school time.

Once, as I rushed to my eighth-grade French class with Madame Hadi, a Francophile who had taught at the school for years, wondering how I was going to explain my incomplete homework assignment that had completely slipped my mind the night before, the sound of gunshots rang out. The slap of sneakers on KAS’s cement floors, the hum of students going to class, the sound of lockers opening and closing – all disappeared around us, penetrated by the burst of gunfire.

KAS was an open-plan campus-style school. The shooting could have come from anywhere. Everyone, all of us middle- and highschool students, froze. Finally, a tenth-grader, a tall and lanky boy I quite liked at the time, yelled at us. ‘Get down!’ he screamed. ‘Everybody get down now!’

I didn’t want to seem afraid, not in front of the tenth-grader, so I took my time crouching down outside Madame Hadi’s classroom. The shooting sounded as though it was coming from outside the school’s main gate and the shots were sporadic. We lay on the cold floor for some fifteen minutes before the sound of shooting receded. I finished my French homework on the floor, trying stupidly to appear nonchalant and unaffected by the shooting, even though my hands were shaking.

That afternoon as we ate lunch on the long dining table in 70 Clifton, I told Papa what had happened at school. He was not at all entertained by my story of (a) not having finished my French homework as assigned and (b) my feigned coolness at the shooting.

School wasn’t safe, but at least it was open and functioning again. I remember a three-week period earlier in the year when I was kept at home because of the shooting and rioting in the city. I was not missing more school, I warned Papa sternly; I had been bored to death sitting at home during those earlier three weeks. He had already sent Mummy, Zulfi and me to Damascus for a quarter of the school term (which I secretly delighted in, meeting up again with my old school friends) because Karachi had become too dangerous. OK, Papa said, you don’t want to miss school? Don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.

The next morning our car had bulletproof vests taped to the back windows. Papa had turned Joonam’s old brown Mercedes into a makeshift bulletproof vehicle. I had a fit. ‘How can I go to school like that?’ I moaned. ‘People will laugh at me!’ I had no real con-ception of just how dangerous our lives were. They couldn’t be real, all those threats. Nothing was that bad, was it? Papa said he’d only move the vests from the windows if I wore them instead. ‘But my head will be exposed!’ I complained. I may have been a self-conscious brat but I didn’t want to die, myths or no myths. We reached a weird settlement. Sometimes I wore the vests, sometimes they hung over the windows. Nobody laughed me. Boys ran to ask me just how much Kevlar was in the vests and to ask what sort of impact my bulletproof windows could withstand.

A year into Operation Clean-Up,
Herald Magazine
, a local publication that was printed in English and thus less censored than the more widely read Urdu magazines, launched a thorough and hard-hitting investigation into the Prime Minister’s programme of genocidal violence in Karachi. The
Herald
report is thirteen pages long, filled with specific police encounters that a distinguished and respected investigative journalist, Ghulam Hasnain, helped by Hasan Zaidi, examined, taking apart the official version of events carefully and thoroughly.

The issue, whose cover featured a grisly photograph of the supposed
MQM terrorist Naeem Sharri, who had been killed by the police, concentrated on the operation as it moved into its second year.

Herald Magazine
revealed that Benazir had attended a political seminar in Karachi and had been angrily questioned over the ‘government’s apparent policy of eliminating suspected “terrorists” by summarily executing them’. In response, the Prime Minister ‘praised the heroic efforts of the security forces and countered the allegations of extrajudicial killings by claiming that out of the more than 2,000 people killed last year [1995] only 55 were “terrorists” of the “Altaf Group” and that all of them were killed in real gun battles with the Rangers or the police’. ‘She could not have been more wrong,’ the article stated.
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The Prime Minister’s fuzzy logic and her fervent praise for the operation make clear her role; she was aware of what was happening on the ground. She was aware that Babar had turned Karachi into a killing field.

In 1994, 1,113 people were killed in what
Herald Magazine
called a ‘bloody trail’ that had turned Karachi into a ‘virtual city of death’.
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The city was on fire. The police acted with impunity and brazenly killed those who got in their way. No arrests were made – not legally at least; warrants were not produced in the event of detentions, those who were seized by the security forces were hardly ever taken before the courts.

Top-level officials in the government spoke anonymously to the
Herald
about the state’s decision to target their enemies by assassination rather than through legal action and parroted the government’s official line. ‘Look at what happened when we tried to seek justice through the courts,’ a senior police official told Hasnain and Zaidi. ‘We used to arrest these terrorists but the courts let them go.’ Another well-placed policeman defended Operation Clean-Up by insisting that the extrajudicial murders were actually ‘the most cost-effective way of tackling crime’.
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Publicly, of course, ‘there is an outright denial of any such policy, since it amounts to premeditated murder by the state’.
¹⁰
Furthermore, to admit that gunning their enemies down was their modus operandi would openly ‘express the executive’s ultimate contempt for the
judiciary, which in theory at least, is supposed to balance the powers of the state’.
¹¹

Naserullah Babar, the retired army general who ran the operation, spoke to the
Herald
, attacking it for its coverage. ‘I don’t know why you should talk all the time about people who in any case have a large number of killings to their name,’ General Babar said. ‘Every man killed in an encounter had a record of murder.’
¹²

‘Encounters’ were elaborate police set-ups that always followed the same pattern. The police or Rangers would claim to turn up at location X with the intent of arresting terrorist Y who would inevitably ‘fire’ at the police and so had to be killed on the spot rather than be taken in. It bears noting that the dead terrorist was usually shot very precisely, often in the head or the chest. They were never shot in the back, for example, which might have given credence to the claim that they were running away or trying to evade arrest. Their bodies often bore countless bullet wounds, evidence of torture, broken bones and other signs that their attackers had mutilated them. Witnesses, other than those within the police contingent, could never be found to testify that an actual gun battle had taken place. The police officers involved in ‘encounters’ were rarely investigated, internally or otherwise, for their excessive use of force – only twenty cases of internal investigation into encounters and deaths in police custody were opened and the results were never made public
¹³
– and none were ever punished for their actions.
¹⁴

In 1995, Karachi’s death toll rose considerably: 2,095 people were killed under Operation Clean-Up.
¹⁵
The
Herald
published a list of people killed by the law enforcement agencies from the official start of the operation in July 1995 to March 1996. The tally is disconcerting. Executions take place almost daily, several murders per day. The victims, all men, are described by name when known or by epithets such as ‘unknown (alleged bandit)’ or ‘so and so (MQM)’.
¹⁶
Except for a few cases of alleged carjackers or thieves, the official list confirmed by the police is
exclusively
MQM victims. As always, the numbers on the police list and the number of actual dead bodies varied hugely.

The Prime Minister and General Babar, who both played for
sympathy by dredging up stories of how nasty the dead men had been and how much better the city was now that they were gone, rejected the moral ambiguity of the state. ‘We are all idealists when it doesn’t hurt us,’ General Babar explained in his interview, ‘but when it directly affects us, we have totally different values.’
¹⁷

Hasnain and Zaidi went so far as to visit mortuaries to see the victims for themselves. They discovered that ‘extreme forms of torture’ had been used on many of the victims, ‘with detainees being burnt with cigarettes and iron rods, beaten, cut with razors, having their flesh gouged out and their bones broken’. The mutilated bodies were, they said, ‘the norm rather than the exception’.
¹⁸
The investigation detailed how thoroughly outside the parameters of the law the police were operating. Operation Clean-Up was murder sanctioned by the state. Now any and all acts of police brutality and illegality could be condoned as ‘politically necessary’.

Karachi’s police were getting away with murder. The elite Rangers squads had even more freedom, fearing no repercussions from the law. When Rangers picked someone up, since they were not registered to specific stations or neighbourhoods as the police were, there was virtually no record. ‘While the police also regularly detain people illegally,’ the
Herald
team wrote, ‘the mere fact that a
thana
[police station] is a public place makes it nominally easier to trace those arrested and usually – unless they are killed immediately – their arrest is admitted by the police in three or four days. Rangers’ premises, on the other hand, are considered to be “security” establishments and are barred to the public.’
¹⁹

Legally, Rangers were not empowered to perform arrests – only to maintain order. Tasleemul Hasan Farooqui, a former MQM councillor, was – according to the
Herald
investigation – ‘one of the lucky ones’ who left the Rangers custody alive. ‘He was dumped in a shopping area in Buffer Zone after being tortured, during which hot iron rods were inserted into his ear and he was slashed by knives on his back and on his inner leg.’
²⁰
Farooqui had no criminal background; no allegations of ‘terrorism’ were levelled against him. He was a political worker. After he was released, Farooqui
moved his family out of Karachi. No Rangers were questioned for their role in his detention and torture.