Free Aboard the Democracy Train by Nafisa Hoodbhoy Page A
Authors: Nafisa Hoodbhoy
that there would be a backlash in Karachi where the MQM had, for the last three years, flexed muscles mainly against the ethnic groups – Pashtuns and Punjabis – for control of the city.
The timing of the incident gave us pause. Gen. Zia ul Haq’s plane had crashed six weeks before and the military had announced a timeline for elections. Benazir Bhutto – whose father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been executed nine years earlier by Gen. Zia – had received a rapturous welcome home as she prepared to take her “Democracy Train” across Sindh to mobilize supporters for the forthcoming elections.
Quite tellingly, the killings had happened shortly before the two ethnic groups in Sindh – the Sindhis and Mohajirs – were scheduled to vote and make a choice between the MQM, led by its Mohajir chief, Altaf Hussain and the PPP, led by its Sindh-born leader, Benazir Bhutto.
The Islamic Democratic Alliance or IJI, which Pakistan’s generals subsequently admitted was created to stop Bhutto’s election, had not yet been formed. Instead, Gen. Zia’s sudden plane crash appeared to have pushed the intelligence agencies into a hurried plan of action that would foment lines of blood between Sindhis and Mohajirs and give the aspiring woman prime minister a split mandate in Sindh.
The September 30 massacre – or Black September, as it is called – had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy. It was dusk when the masked militants alighted from their vehicles in Hyderabad market place. They had prepared for the operation by shutting off the electricity throughout the market, so that it was dark when they were ready to shoot.
Then, as swarms of people – mainly Mohajirs – jostled unseeingly in the crowded bazaar, the shots rang out at random. Even as people writhed under the bullets, the terrorists kept firing. Apparently satisfied with the large-scale devastation they had caused, they calmly clambered back into their vehicles and melted back into the population.
As news of the terrorist killings came in from Hyderabad, I felt a premonition of the inevitable response that would come from Karachi. Personally, I wasn’t worried that the Urdu-speaking militants would retaliate against my family and relatives – among the relatively few Sindhi families left behind in Karachi after partition. But I knew that for other less privileged Sindhis, revenge was coming.
It was brutal and swift. The next day, I woke up to a Karachi where armed assailants had throughout the night ferreted and killed Sindhis in their homes and work places. At the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC) in Karachi, corpses covered with white sheets lay on stretchers pasted to the floor. Harassed young resident doctors in white coats wheeled victims of gunshot wounds to operation rooms, even as life-saving equipment and blood fell into desperately short supply.
With some trepidation, I asked about the ethnicity of the dead and wounded. They were Sindhis from the low-income suburbs of Karachi. Among the victims sprayed with bullets were Sindhi Hindus who ran a confectionary store in the fashionable Tariq Road shopping area. They were targeted not on account of religion but ethnicity. As masked armed men burst into their store, the Hindu Sindhis tried to duck behind the counters. But seconds later, they lay helpless in pools of their own blood.
Later, I heard stories of how innocent Sindhis had been hunted down by their Urdu-speaking neighbors in homes marked the night before for revenge. Many more were gagged, bound and killed before being stuffed in gunnysacks. Despite the terrifying nature of the incident, they would get only one paragraph in the long list I compiled from the hospitals. There was no space for the human-interest stories; instead I was engaged in a sordid compilation of the dead.
The killings of so many innocent Sindhis touched a raw nerve. My family was Sindhi and my parents – as well as grandparents – had, for generations, lived peacefully
The timing of the incident gave us pause. Gen. Zia ul Haq’s plane had crashed six weeks before and the military had announced a timeline for elections. Benazir Bhutto – whose father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been executed nine years earlier by Gen. Zia – had received a rapturous welcome home as she prepared to take her “Democracy Train” across Sindh to mobilize supporters for the forthcoming elections.
Quite tellingly, the killings had happened shortly before the two ethnic groups in Sindh – the Sindhis and Mohajirs – were scheduled to vote and make a choice between the MQM, led by its Mohajir chief, Altaf Hussain and the PPP, led by its Sindh-born leader, Benazir Bhutto.
The Islamic Democratic Alliance or IJI, which Pakistan’s generals subsequently admitted was created to stop Bhutto’s election, had not yet been formed. Instead, Gen. Zia’s sudden plane crash appeared to have pushed the intelligence agencies into a hurried plan of action that would foment lines of blood between Sindhis and Mohajirs and give the aspiring woman prime minister a split mandate in Sindh.
The September 30 massacre – or Black September, as it is called – had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy. It was dusk when the masked militants alighted from their vehicles in Hyderabad market place. They had prepared for the operation by shutting off the electricity throughout the market, so that it was dark when they were ready to shoot.
Then, as swarms of people – mainly Mohajirs – jostled unseeingly in the crowded bazaar, the shots rang out at random. Even as people writhed under the bullets, the terrorists kept firing. Apparently satisfied with the large-scale devastation they had caused, they calmly clambered back into their vehicles and melted back into the population.
As news of the terrorist killings came in from Hyderabad, I felt a premonition of the inevitable response that would come from Karachi. Personally, I wasn’t worried that the Urdu-speaking militants would retaliate against my family and relatives – among the relatively few Sindhi families left behind in Karachi after partition. But I knew that for other less privileged Sindhis, revenge was coming.
It was brutal and swift. The next day, I woke up to a Karachi where armed assailants had throughout the night ferreted and killed Sindhis in their homes and work places. At the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC) in Karachi, corpses covered with white sheets lay on stretchers pasted to the floor. Harassed young resident doctors in white coats wheeled victims of gunshot wounds to operation rooms, even as life-saving equipment and blood fell into desperately short supply.
With some trepidation, I asked about the ethnicity of the dead and wounded. They were Sindhis from the low-income suburbs of Karachi. Among the victims sprayed with bullets were Sindhi Hindus who ran a confectionary store in the fashionable Tariq Road shopping area. They were targeted not on account of religion but ethnicity. As masked armed men burst into their store, the Hindu Sindhis tried to duck behind the counters. But seconds later, they lay helpless in pools of their own blood.
Later, I heard stories of how innocent Sindhis had been hunted down by their Urdu-speaking neighbors in homes marked the night before for revenge. Many more were gagged, bound and killed before being stuffed in gunnysacks. Despite the terrifying nature of the incident, they would get only one paragraph in the long list I compiled from the hospitals. There was no space for the human-interest stories; instead I was engaged in a sordid compilation of the dead.
The killings of so many innocent Sindhis touched a raw nerve. My family was Sindhi and my parents – as well as grandparents – had, for generations, lived peacefully