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KARACHI FACING ITS WORST VIOLENCE, ECONOMIC WOES


By Manzoor Ahmed


Karachi and Mumbai are South Asia’s two pre-eminent port cities that grew in prosperity and prominence simultaneously. Commercial capitals of Pakistan and India respectively, they have, however, moved on different trajectories.

While Mumbai, howsoever grubby and congested, is pulsating with life, even as it survives repeated terror attacks and moves on, Karachi has become a sick city, afflicted by sectarian and ethnic violence, extortion of the business class and the power-play by political parties jockeying for advantage.

A report in British journal Economist last month brings out the horrific situation wherein Karachi’s ambulance service has to send out a driver matching the racial make-up of the destination district to pick up the victims of gang attacks. Otherwise, the district’s gunmen will not let the ambulance through. Ambulances themselves are coming under fire, as gangsters try to stop them saving the lives of their enemies.

Karachi’s ethnic wars have claimed some 1,000 lives this year. By contrast the Taliban and other religious extremists kill tiny numbers, at least in Karachi. One is not listing here the mayhem in the northwestern and northern tribal areas.

A grisly new feature of the Karachi carnage is that people are not just being shot. They are being abducted and tortured; then their bullet-ridden, mutilated bodies are dumped in sacks and left in alleyways and gutters. Victims’ limbs, genitals or heads are often severed.

“Torture cells operate across Karachi. The butchery is filmed on mobile phones and passed around, spreading the terror further. Most victims are ordinary folk randomly targeted for their ethnicity,” says Economist.

At the city’s Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, a public facility, doctors treat only Mohajirs – those who settled after the 1947 Partition, who dominate the local district and are the biggest ethnic group in Karachi. Ambulance crews must determine the ethnicity of patients and take them to the right hospital.

Each gang has the patronage of a mainstream political party, in a fight that exploded in 2008 when an election was held to end Pakistan’s latest period of military rule.

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a party established in the 1980s that claims to represent the Mohajirs, once had an iron grip over Karachi. That monopoly is now being challenged by the Awami National Party (ANP), which says it speaks for the ethnic Pushtun population, who migrated from the north-west of the country, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) of President Asif Zardari, which heads the ruling coalition in the capital, Islamabad. Its gang following is ethnic Baloch, from the neighbouring province of Balochistan. It is the MQM versus the rest.

The conflict’s ferocity may yet threaten Pakistan’s fragile return to democracy. In recent days Karachi businesses have called for the army to restore order. Violence in Karachi was repeatedly used as part of the justification for toppling four national governments in the 1990s. This city of 18m people is Pakistan’s economic lifeline, and the port through which most supplies reach NATO forces in Afghanistan.

While Karachi’s rich live in Defence and Clifton districts, its poor live in decrepit homes and apartment blocks set on narrow, filthy streets, where gangs rule with near impunity. Trouble often flares when one ethnic ghetto abuts another.

For more than two decades the MQM has collected extortion money, known as bata, from businesses and homes across the city. Now, using the political backing they acquired in the 2008 election, gangsters associated with the PPP and the ANP, in a loose alliance, also demand their share of cash.

Businesses now have to pay off up to three rival groups. In the past week Karachi’s markets selling marble, bathroom tiles and medicines have separately staged protests against bata.

As for the political parties, they seem to be able to turn the violence off and on as it suits them. This suggests that these are not mere criminals draping themselves in the party flag, but rather integral parts of the parties’ political machines.

Karachi’s 5 industrial zones and more than 360 markets had already been hurt by extortion carried out in the name of charity organisations backed by various political parties. In the port city’s largest export zone SITE, both the ANP and the MQM receive donations through government officials and political workers. Sunni Tehrik and the Amn Committee of Lyari receive money from traders in Saddar and Central Karachi.

All this has obvious impact on the economy of the megapolis, and hence of Pakistan itself. Karachi is going through what is probably its worst economic crisis in history, and growth has slowed down from 4% last year to only 2% in 2011. There is little hope the Sindh government will be able to meet its growth goal of 4.5%.

Being the only functional port of Pakistan, Karachi contributes to more than 65% of the country’s GDP, 70% of its income tax revenue and 62% of its sales tax revenue. It employs 75% of the country’s total industrial labour in its 45,000 industrial units, a report in The Friday Times says.

“Karachi loses more than Rs 12 billion daily thanks to strikes and political turmoil,” Khalid Tawab, chairman of the Pakistan Industrial Forum, says.

The most significant long-term economic fallout is being felt in education. According to statistics published by KCCI, more than 35,000 students and 700 teachers from violence-hit areas are not attending classes.

Karachi has seen a 47% decline in direct foreign investment and major industrialists, affected by poor law and order and chronic energy shortage, are shifting their investments, especially textile units, to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Jordan and Malaysia

The situation has also hurt the services sector that provides the largest number of white-collar jobs in Karachi, and the very important IT industry of the city that is responsible for over two-thirds of Pakistan’s $1.2 billion IT exports.

Karachi has had more than one phase of being controlled by the army. The situation is underscored by the fact that there are repeated demands from various sections  for the beleaguered and over-worked army, busy fighting the tribals and the Taliban – not to speak of the guarding the borders with Afghanistan and India – to yet again manage this unmanageable city. (ends)

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