Dambura takes centre stage at fundraiser

DateDecember 13, 2012 - 7:43PM

Annabel Ross



Murtaza Jafari with Tiger and Me. Photo: Simon Schluter

Murtaza Jafari plays the dambura. It's a curious, long-necked, light wooden instrument, somewhere between a banjo and a guitar, and is popular among the Hazaras of central Afghanistan, where Jafari is from.

On Friday night, the dambura will take centre stage when Jafari performs with Melbourne six-piece band the Tiger and Me at Hamer Hall. Jafari and the band are two of the artists involved in the Key of Sea, a fundraiser in which local musicians are paired up with asylum seekers to create songs, which are recorded on an album and performed at a concert.

The Tiger and Me first caught wind of the project when the inaugural Key of Sea was being developed by Hugh Crosthwaite in 2010.

"I asked Hugh about it when the Key of Sea 1 was being made and he said, 'I don't think you're quite there yet,' but then when the second one rolled around we'd had a really good year, so he gave us a call and invited us to be on it," says Ade Vincent, one of the band's lead vocalists.
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Tomorrow night, The Tiger and Me and Jafari will perform alongside fellow Key of Sea artists including Chet Faker and The Royal Swazi Spa and Brous and Awaz.

Jafari, who has played the dambura in front of big crowds in Melbourne and back in Afghanistan, was noticed by Crosthwaite after contributing his music to a documentary that chronicled his journey to Australia from Indonesia by boat ten years ago.

Crosthwaite paired Jafari up with the band, they met up for a cup of tea and a chat, and the next day, devised and recorded a song for the album in the space of 13 hours. Together they created an updated version of an Afghan love song, based on an ancient Afghan poem.

"The song's called Az Eshq Tho, which means 'because of your love', says Jane Hendry, fellow vocalist in the band. "We got a loose translation from Murtaza on what the song was about, and then chose English lyrics to try and convey that and mirror the Afghan lyrics."

"I think it sounds like the Tiger and Me and it sounds like Murtaza," says Vincent. "That's why we're all really proud of it, because it sounds like both acts."

The Key of Sea is at Hamer Hall this Friday the 14th of December at 8pm.

SMH

Two gunned down in Quetta

December 13, 2012, 6:27 pm



At least two persons were gunned down while one sustained severe injuries in separate target killing incidents on Thursday.

In the area of Jinnah road some unknown armed persons opened unprovoked firing on shopkeeper Shabir Hussain resultantly he died on the spot.

In second incident some unknown armed personals opened indiscriminate firing on shops as a result the shopkeeper namely Gul Shereen died on the spot.

In another incident, some unknown armed personals opened firing on Taj Muhammad khan resultantly he sustained severe injuries in the area of Quandari Bazar and the criminals fled away from the scene successfully.

On getting information police reached on the spot and shifted the dead bodies to hospital for autopsy.

After completing legal formalities the dead bodies were handed over to his heirs.

Police claimed that the incident is the result of discrimination target killings.

Police registered the case and started thorough investigation of the case.

The Nation 

Doctor shot dead in Mastung; two others gunned down in Quetta

DawnNews



In the most recent incident, unidentified gunmen shot dead renowned local doctor Lakhmi Chand in Balochistan’s Mastung district, about 25 kilometres south of Quetta.—File Photo

QUETTA: At least three people were killed and three others injured in a series of shooting incidents on Thursday in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province.

Three separate shooting incidents in the span of an hour claimed two lives and injured three other people in Quetta, the provincial capital.

According to police, the first incident took place at the city’s busy market Qandahari Bazar when unknown gunmen riding motorcycles opened fire, severely injuring three people. At least two of the three injured were identified as locals belonging to the minority Hazara community.

In a similar incident, another man, said to be a public servant and also belonging to the Hazara community, was gunned down by unidentified armed assailants.

Meanwhile, another man lost his life when gunmen opened fire at a tailor shop at Sarki Road.

In the most recent incident, unidentified gunmen shot dead renowned local doctor Lakhmi Chand in Balochistan’s Mastung district, about 25 kilometres south of Quetta.

Earlier on Thursday, a local court sentenced to life imprisonment three suspects for the murder of Baloch leader Habib Jalib Baloch. The sentence was handed down by sessions judge Rashid Mehmood.

Habib Jalib Baloch, a former senator and secretary-general of the Balochistan National Party-M, wasassassinated on Quetta’s Sariab Road in July 2010.

DAWN 

Australia’s Deadly Game

The face of an assassinated asylum seeker: Ali Shah tried to escape Pakistan’s sectarian violence and come to Australia, but he was murdered en route.

By Aubrey BelfordDecember 12, 2012

The Global Mail investigates how Australian authorities are co-operating with corrupt local authorities who bend the law to keep would-be refugees trapped in a country that they desperately want to escape.

Ali Shah was not meant to die in Pakistan. He should have already been out of the country, somewhere on the long smugglers’ route to safety in Australia.

But a bullet got to him first.

Shah was a 28-year-old from Quetta, a restive city near the Afghan border, haunted by Sunni Muslim death squads that are allied to the Taliban and which kill with near total impunity. As a Shia and a policeman, Shah was automatically in danger. As a Hazara — a Shia minority with east-Asian features distinct from surrounding ethnic groups — his face betrayed him.

Early this year, Shah paid $6,000 to smugglers, who would fly him legally to Thailand and then smuggle him over land and sea to Indonesia; once there he would search for another smuggler with a boat to Australia.

“Definitely they do have a profiling... There’s no strictly legal regime for this.”
− AZAD KHAN, PAKISTAN’S FEDERAL INVESTIGATION AGENCY

He travelled first to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad and waited with five other Hazara men for a flight to Bangkok. But this plan was foiled when the smuggler returned to the men who were waiting in Islamabad, and told them the way would be blocked: airport officers would not let the men board unless they paid a hefty extra bribe to pass through. The smuggler suggested the men travel by train to Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, where a cheaper pay-off at the airport could be arranged.

At about 1.30am on April 4, the Hazara group arrived by rail in Karachi, and began to wander the streets in search of a hotel. Suddenly two men, their faces covered, pulled up on a motorbike and opened fire. Shah dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. Another man, Ismat Ullah, was shot through the leg.

Ullah watched as the men rifled through Shah’s clothes, stealing money and a phone. As they sped off, Ullah recalls, the attackers gave a clue to their motivations, yelling out “Shia are infidels!”

Months later Ullah, 25, is back in Quetta and still injured. But he says he wants to try the trip to Australia again.... Continue Reading... 

For Some, Quetta Is A Deadly Prison

BANARAS KHAN/AFP/GETTY
Billboard warning asylum seekers against taking “illegal routes to Australia” looms over the scene of a 2010 suicide bombing in Quetta.

By Aubrey Belford

Once a haven for refugees from Afghanistan, the Pakistani city of Quetta has turned into a deathtrap. Many see escape to Australia as their only hope.

For years, the Pakistani city of Quetta has been studded with billboards put up by Australia.

When a suicide bomber detonated himself in a Shia Muslim rally on September 3, 2010, killing more than 70 people, photographs of the carnage showed one of these signs in the background. Behind the welter of torn bodies, black smoke and sheared metal, the message was clearly visible: “All illegal routes to Australia are closed to Afghans.”

This city near Afghanistan has long been a transit point for would-be asylum seekers from across the border, many of them Shia Muslim ethnic Hazaras. The Afghans would enter, make contact with smugglers and arrange documents, and head on to Australia. Many of those in transit would stay with relatives among the half-million-strong local community of Hazaras who have settled in the city over more than a century — seeking refuge from waves of massacres and oppression in Afghanistan.

But Quetta is no longer a haven. Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in the killing of Hazaras and other Shias by the extremist group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, which is allied to the Taliban. The killers, who often strike in the daytime and brazenly leave their faces exposed, carry out their work with little hindrance from the authorities. Some allege they have state support.

Quetta has now become a place that Hazaras are desperate to leave.... Continue Reading.... 

Worry Grows Over Rising Sectarian Attacks In Pakistan

Shi'ite Muslims shout slogans as they carry coffins of co-religionists during a funeral ceremony in Quetta. (file photo)

By VOA's Ayaz Gul

December 11, 2012
Sunni-dominated Pakistan has seen an unprecedented spike in religious violence this year, with at least 375 minority Shi'ite Muslims killed across the country.

Government critics say the violent conflict is likely to intensify if authorities do not do more to improve local governance and punish those who carry out sectarian attacks.

Sectarian bloodshed in Pakistan had peaked in the 1990s, and the violence subsided after the country joined with the U.S.-led coalition 10 years ago to fight terrorist and extremist groups.

Under pressure from the United States and other allies, Pakistan banned several Shi'ite and Sunni militant groups for having links to Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan.

But sectarian violence has returned this year with targeted attacks on Shi'ite Muslims. Official figures indicate that since the start of 2012, at least 134 people have died in sectarian attacks in Balochistan, mostly in the provincial capital, Quetta. Nearly all of those killed were Shi'ite Muslims and a majority of those were members of the Hazara community, a Persian-speaking Shi'ite population that immigrated to Pakistan from neighboring Afghanistan more than a century ago.

Community leaders say the growing sense of insecurity has forced thousands of young Hazaras to turn to human smugglers and try to reach countries like Australia by undertaking an expensive and dangerous journey across the Indian Ocean.

Abdul Khaliq Hazara, a senior Hazara activist in Quetta, says that the journey in small boats has already taken hundreds of lives and those who survived have ended up in jails abroad. He says that sectarian attacks have become routine in the city but authorities have so far not made a single arrest.

"The [Pakistani] government and law enforcement agencies, they do not pursue them [attackers], and they openly do whatever they want; and after that we don’t know where they vanish and where they go," Hazara says. "That is why I think the [Hazara] people prefer [to emigrate]. Many of them have migrated because their life, education, their business, their property, it is not safe."...Continue Reading...

Cop injured in Quetta firing dies

December 11, 2012 - Updated 2336 PKT
From Web Edition


QUETTA: A police constable who was injured in firing in the provincial capital one week ago died in Combined Military Hospital on Tuesday.

Police sources said that unknown armed men riding bike had opened indiscriminate fire at police constable Altaf and his brother Ashfaq near Askari Park Quetta, due to which Ashfaq was killed on the spot while Altaf received serious bullet wounds and was rushed to CMH for treatment.

The body of the deceased has been handed over to the heirs. He belonged to local Hazara community.

The police had already registered a case against unknown suspects and investigation into the incident was underway. (APP)

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