Sunday, April 15, 2012
Strike in Quetta, life comes to a standstill
DAWN.COM
Security official stand alert to avoid any untoward incident as violence erupts in city after incidents of target-killings in Quetta. —(Arsalan Naseer/PPI Images).
QUETTA: Life came to a standstill as a wheel-jam and shutter down strike continues in the city on the call given by the Hazara Democratic Party and the Balochistan Shia conference over the killing of 9 members of the Shia Hazara community in the city on Saturday, DawnNews reported.
Shops and markets were shut all across the city and traffic vanished from the roads as the city wore a deserted look.
The call for strike was supported by various other parties in the province who also demanded for Governor’s rule to be imposed over the province.
Provincial Governor Nawab Zulfiqar Ali Magsi ordered an immediate crack-down against terrorists.
The Chief Minister of Balochistan Nawab Aslab Raisani called for a high level meeting regarding the law and order situation of the province which would be attended by both shia and sunni clerics.
Lawlessness and target killings have become a routine in Quetta due to which businesses in the provincial capital are suffering from stagnation as the day to day deteriorating law and order situation and strikes are causing losses worth millions of rupees
Security is essential for trade and businesses to flourish but it remains only a dream for the residents of Balochistan especially in its provincial capital city of Quetta.
Though people from all walks of life are affected by the strikes but it’s the daily wage earners who suffer the most. Daily producers of perishable items usually have to suffer more losses as their products are not sold due to untimely closure of business in the largest but least developed province of the country.
Security official stand alert to avoid any untoward incident as violence erupts in city after incidents of target-killings in Quetta. —(Arsalan Naseer/PPI Images).
QUETTA: Life came to a standstill as a wheel-jam and shutter down strike continues in the city on the call given by the Hazara Democratic Party and the Balochistan Shia conference over the killing of 9 members of the Shia Hazara community in the city on Saturday, DawnNews reported.
Shops and markets were shut all across the city and traffic vanished from the roads as the city wore a deserted look.
The call for strike was supported by various other parties in the province who also demanded for Governor’s rule to be imposed over the province.
Provincial Governor Nawab Zulfiqar Ali Magsi ordered an immediate crack-down against terrorists.
The Chief Minister of Balochistan Nawab Aslab Raisani called for a high level meeting regarding the law and order situation of the province which would be attended by both shia and sunni clerics.
Lawlessness and target killings have become a routine in Quetta due to which businesses in the provincial capital are suffering from stagnation as the day to day deteriorating law and order situation and strikes are causing losses worth millions of rupees
Security is essential for trade and businesses to flourish but it remains only a dream for the residents of Balochistan especially in its provincial capital city of Quetta.
Though people from all walks of life are affected by the strikes but it’s the daily wage earners who suffer the most. Daily producers of perishable items usually have to suffer more losses as their products are not sold due to untimely closure of business in the largest but least developed province of the country.
Nitin Pai: Put Pakistan on a genocide watchlist
Nitin Pai / Apr 16, 2012, 00:36 IST
Earlier this month, provoked by a grenade attack, hundreds of militants affiliated to radical Sunni groups stopped buses in Gilgit-Baltistan (a part of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir under Pakistani control), rounded up Shia passengers and executed them. Similar incidents in the region over the past few months have claimed scores of lives. We do not know how many exactly, because Pakistan has imposed a media blackout. It is already clear though, that the killings of Shias were systematic and carried out with the connivance of the Pakistani state authorities.
That’s not all. All of Pakistan’s religious and ethnic minorities are under attack.
While the lot of religious minorities in Pakistan was never pretty, it has gotten far worse in the last few years. The brazen, unpunished and celebrated assassinations of personalities like Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti divert attention from the violence against minorities on a day-to-day basis. There are reports of several dozen Pakistani Hindu families seeking asylum in India. Compiling figures from Sindhi language newspapers, Marvi Sirmed, a Pakistani writer and activist, has estimated that 3,000 Hindu girls have been abducted and converted to Islam in the province. Christian families have been forced to flee after charges of blasphemy were levelled against their members.
It’s a similar situation for ethnic minorities. In Balochistan, the Pakistan army’s counter-insurgency strategy includes terrorising the population through enforced disappearances, torture and killing of citizens followed by the dumping of their bodies as a warning to the rest. The Shia Hazaras are not only a religious minority, but also an ethnic one. Over the last two years there has been an escalation in violence against them in Balochistan, in FATA and Gilgit-Baltistan.
The perpetrators and immediate motives in each of these cases are different. They range from Sunni jihadi groups targeting people they consider apostates, to rival communities seeking domination, to the Pakistani armed forces fighting insurgents. They are called sectarian violence, gang warfare, ethnic cleansing, kill-and-dump or counter-insurgency. It is perhaps because there are individual names for these crimes that we are missing the possibility that they might amount to a bigger one — genocide.
This is not a word to be used loosely. Genocide specifically means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It includes killing people on account of belonging to a group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions to destroy the group in whole or in part; preventing births and transferring children by force. The situation in Pakistan today satisfies many of these criteria, and to varying degrees.
How many people have died? The blackout, censorship and violent intimidation of journalists makes it hard to estimate even the order of magnitude. Baloch nationalist groups, for instance, have criticised the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan for reporting 35 disappearances and 173 dumped bodies in 2011. They claim over over 14,000 disappearances since 2005 and 400 dumped bodies since July 2010. It would be wrong, though, to wait for the body counts to rise to some arbitrary level for the world to take action.
A genocide takes place in stages. These can be rapid or drawn out in time. Gregory Stanton, an American human rights scholar and president of Genocide Watch, has identified eight stages, starting from classification of people into “us and them” and ending in extermination followed by denial. Pakistan is already through many of the early stages. Instead of waiting until it is too late for too many, the proper thing to do now is to squarely place Pakistan in a genocide watchlist and bring the intense focus of international public opinion to bear. It is understandable that the governments of the United States and India are unwilling to take up the violence against minorities for reasons of realpolitik. It is understandable that China and Saudi Arabia don’t care. It is therefore understandable that the UN Security Council doesn’t care. What is not understandable is that international media and human rights groups appear oblivious to this ongoing tragedy.
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) and the International Coalition for The Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP) — two prominent international NGOs that champion the Responsibility to Protect populations against mass atrocities as an international norm — do not even list Pakistan in the crises they are tracking. Organisations like Human Rights Watch are bravely reporting events on the ground, but their wide mandate precludes them from focusing on this one issue.
The UN Human Rights Council is more interested in outlawing giving offence to religion than killing in its name. The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), always ready to talk about the world’s oppressed Muslims, can be trusted to maintain a resolute silence in this case.
Closer home, the Indian media stands indicted too. So completely are our television channels beholden to the narrative of the peace process that they are, literally, overlooking mass murder.
The white stripe on Pakistan’s flag is being eaten up. The geopolitical implications come later. At this time it is already a human tragedy that is unconscionable for Indians to ignore. In Bob Dylan’s sublime words, “Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows/That too many people have died?”
The author is founder and fellow for geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution, an independent think tank on strategic affairs
Earlier this month, provoked by a grenade attack, hundreds of militants affiliated to radical Sunni groups stopped buses in Gilgit-Baltistan (a part of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir under Pakistani control), rounded up Shia passengers and executed them. Similar incidents in the region over the past few months have claimed scores of lives. We do not know how many exactly, because Pakistan has imposed a media blackout. It is already clear though, that the killings of Shias were systematic and carried out with the connivance of the Pakistani state authorities.
That’s not all. All of Pakistan’s religious and ethnic minorities are under attack.
While the lot of religious minorities in Pakistan was never pretty, it has gotten far worse in the last few years. The brazen, unpunished and celebrated assassinations of personalities like Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti divert attention from the violence against minorities on a day-to-day basis. There are reports of several dozen Pakistani Hindu families seeking asylum in India. Compiling figures from Sindhi language newspapers, Marvi Sirmed, a Pakistani writer and activist, has estimated that 3,000 Hindu girls have been abducted and converted to Islam in the province. Christian families have been forced to flee after charges of blasphemy were levelled against their members.
It’s a similar situation for ethnic minorities. In Balochistan, the Pakistan army’s counter-insurgency strategy includes terrorising the population through enforced disappearances, torture and killing of citizens followed by the dumping of their bodies as a warning to the rest. The Shia Hazaras are not only a religious minority, but also an ethnic one. Over the last two years there has been an escalation in violence against them in Balochistan, in FATA and Gilgit-Baltistan.
The perpetrators and immediate motives in each of these cases are different. They range from Sunni jihadi groups targeting people they consider apostates, to rival communities seeking domination, to the Pakistani armed forces fighting insurgents. They are called sectarian violence, gang warfare, ethnic cleansing, kill-and-dump or counter-insurgency. It is perhaps because there are individual names for these crimes that we are missing the possibility that they might amount to a bigger one — genocide.
This is not a word to be used loosely. Genocide specifically means “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It includes killing people on account of belonging to a group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions to destroy the group in whole or in part; preventing births and transferring children by force. The situation in Pakistan today satisfies many of these criteria, and to varying degrees.
How many people have died? The blackout, censorship and violent intimidation of journalists makes it hard to estimate even the order of magnitude. Baloch nationalist groups, for instance, have criticised the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan for reporting 35 disappearances and 173 dumped bodies in 2011. They claim over over 14,000 disappearances since 2005 and 400 dumped bodies since July 2010. It would be wrong, though, to wait for the body counts to rise to some arbitrary level for the world to take action.
A genocide takes place in stages. These can be rapid or drawn out in time. Gregory Stanton, an American human rights scholar and president of Genocide Watch, has identified eight stages, starting from classification of people into “us and them” and ending in extermination followed by denial. Pakistan is already through many of the early stages. Instead of waiting until it is too late for too many, the proper thing to do now is to squarely place Pakistan in a genocide watchlist and bring the intense focus of international public opinion to bear. It is understandable that the governments of the United States and India are unwilling to take up the violence against minorities for reasons of realpolitik. It is understandable that China and Saudi Arabia don’t care. It is therefore understandable that the UN Security Council doesn’t care. What is not understandable is that international media and human rights groups appear oblivious to this ongoing tragedy.
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P) and the International Coalition for The Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP) — two prominent international NGOs that champion the Responsibility to Protect populations against mass atrocities as an international norm — do not even list Pakistan in the crises they are tracking. Organisations like Human Rights Watch are bravely reporting events on the ground, but their wide mandate precludes them from focusing on this one issue.
The UN Human Rights Council is more interested in outlawing giving offence to religion than killing in its name. The Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), always ready to talk about the world’s oppressed Muslims, can be trusted to maintain a resolute silence in this case.
Closer home, the Indian media stands indicted too. So completely are our television channels beholden to the narrative of the peace process that they are, literally, overlooking mass murder.
The white stripe on Pakistan’s flag is being eaten up. The geopolitical implications come later. At this time it is already a human tragedy that is unconscionable for Indians to ignore. In Bob Dylan’s sublime words, “Yes, and how many deaths will it take till he knows/That too many people have died?”
The author is founder and fellow for geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution, an independent think tank on strategic affairs
Targeted operation against culprits to be launched in Quetta
DAWN.COM |
Chief Minister of Balochistan Aslami Raisani – APP (File Photo)
QUETTA: The Chief Minister of Balochistan Aslam Raisani said on Sunday that the government will launch a targeted operation in Quetta for the restoration of peace in the city, DawnNews reported.
After a fresh wave of ethnic and sectarian killings in Quetta, Raisani made the immediate decision in a high level meeting with the Provincial Home Minister Zafarullah Zahri, Ali Madad Jatak, religious leaders and representatives of law enforcement agencies.
Raisani was also briefed about the Quetta’s situation. Raisani said that the police department will be restructured and non-discriminate measures will be taken against culprits and target killers in the city
Hazara killings: Complete strike observed in Quetta
By Shehzad Baloch
Published: April 15, 2012
Police and security forces also booked over 200 people for violating the ban on pillion riding in the city. PHOTO: PPI/ FILE
QUETTA: A complete shutter down and wheel-jam strike was observed in the provincial capital, paralysing the business activities on Sunday.
Stringent security measures were taken to maintain law and order, with the deployment of paramilitary troops Frontier Corps (FC), police and other law enforcing agencies in and around Quetta.
The strike was called by the Hazara Democratic Party (HDP) and was backed by the Balochistan National Party (BNP) and Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam-Fazal (JUI-F) to protest against the recent wave of sectarian targeted killings that left 18 killed in the last four days.
All the shops, markets, eateries and even chemists shops in Liaquat Bazar, Mezan Chowk, Abdul Sattar Road, Prince Road, Jinnah Road, Zarghoon Road, Brewery Road, Hazara Town and Marriabad remained closed.
The strike was observed partially in Saryab and the nearby areas as markets and shops were functional as usual.
It is pertinent to mention that half of the business community in Quetta observe weekly holiday on Friday while remaining shut their businesses on Sunday.
Police and security forces also booked over 200 people for violating the ban on pillion riding in the city.
Security personnel increased their patrolling in Quetta to restore order. However, panic and fear continued to plague the city as people preferred to stay indoors and most of the streets and roads presented a deserted look, with very thin traffic plying on the roads.
Chief Minister Nawab Aslam Raisani presided over a high level meeting to review the law and order situation in the aftermath of targeted killings of Hazara community members.
Provincial Ministers, Inspector General Police (IG) Balochistan, Home Secretary and other senior officials attended the meeting, which was convened to devise a strategy to deal with the situation. The meeting was underway when this report was filed.
The HDP Chief Abdul Khaliq Hazara in his statement said his community was being compelled to pick up arms to protect its members from the targeted attacks.
The Express Tribune
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