Pakistan is reverberating with shock after an official investigation held ranking members of Karachi’s most popular political party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), responsible for a September 2012 arson attack on a garment factory that killed 259 workers. It was alleged that the attack was carried out after the factory’s owners refused to meet demands for a Dh7.35 million extortion payment.
Submitted to the Sindh High Court on Friday, the findings of the investigation conducted jointly by police, paramilitary and military intelligence officials are based on a June 2013 confession by a detained MQM activist. He alleged, in some detail, that the proprietors were threatened by the party’s top officials in the Baldia Town area of Karachi, where the garment factory was located. The businessmen supposedly took their complaint to officials at MQM party headquarters, only for one set of extortionists to be replaced by another.
When they persisted with their refusal to pay, the factory premises were purportedly sprayed with flammable chemicals by party activists, who set it on fire just as workers were gathering to collect their pay. The workers could not escape because the factory’s exits had been blocked.
The factory proprietors were blamed for the fire and charged with manslaughter. According to the informant, the owners were then blackmailed into making a somewhat reduced extortion payment by an MQM official, who had supposedly abused his authority as a Sindh provincial government official to have their bail cancelled.
The investigation report makes for gruesome reading, and it would be easy to conclude that the MQM was responsible for a ruthless act no less barbaric than the Taliban’s massacre of 148 people, mostly children, at a Peshawar school in January.
In the interest of objective assessment, it is pertinent to ask: Does the MQM have a track record of extortion and murder? The answer would seem to be “yes”.
Indeed, the investigation report was not so much the big story in Pakistan’s social media community as was the fact that Dawn, the country’s leading English-language newspaper and a Karachi institution, had shown great moral courage by naming the MQM and its officials.
However, the disclosures in the High Court did not take place in isolation.
When the news broke, the MQM was on the verge of rejoining the Sindh provincial government, after a protracted disagreement with former president Asif Ali Zardari, chief of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). The PPP could well have backed out because it didn’t want to be seen to be providing immunity from prosecution to the MQM. Instead, the deal went ahead, because of the inherently cynical nature of Pakistan’s power politics.
Nonetheless, events since Friday suggest that a decision has been taken in Islamabad to permanently defang the MQM.
On Sunday, the military-led paramilitary force deployed in Karachi since 2013 announced it had obtained a confession from a senior MQM official that he had ordered the killings of political party activists and lawyers in May 2007. The killings were carried out to prevent a rally of support for a Supreme Court chief justice who had rebelled against the junta of General Pervez Musharraf.
Here, there is considerable room for scepticism. Journalists, including myself, who had the unfortunate duty of covering the events of May 12, 2007, are in no doubt that the military was complicit in disarming the police and handing over the streets of Karachi to roaming packs of armed MQM activists. About 60 people died that day in the most blatantly public demonstration of political cold-bloodedness any living Pakistani could recall.
That is just one instance in a complicated history between the military and the MQM. Another dictator, General Zia Ul Haq, nurtured the creation of the party as a counterweight to the PPP’s political domination of Sindh province. However, the military soon came to regret creating a monster, and in 1992 launched a brutal crackdown. When, in 2002, Musharraf set about building a civilian facade for his junta, he quickly concluded that he needed the MQM block of seats in parliament if his allies were for form a government in 2002. So, the party re-emerged from the ashes.
The culpability extends to Mr Zardari, who has played good cop-bad cop with the MQM to keep it on his side since the restoration of democracy in 2008. The MQM’s armed militant wing has since been matched, bullet-for-bullet, by Karachi gangsters publicly patronised by the PPP’s provincial ministers, as a means of containing the MQM and gradually weakening its grip on Karachi.
According to underworld sources, those gangsters had issued a concurrent extortion demand to the owners of the ill-fated garment factory – a commonplace occurrence that frequently sparks deadly exchanges of gunfire between rival extortionists.
Such sinister “politics of corpses”, as Pakistani commentators have come to call it, provide the backdrop for the meeting of political party chiefs and top military officials scheduled for Friday, jointly ordered on Monday by prime minister Nawaz Sharif and the army chief of staff, General Raheel Sharif.
Tom Hussain is an independent journalist and political analyst based in Islamabad
