Pakistan: Sectarian war spreading

Since Friday, the air has hung heavy with the stench of sectarian ire in Lahore and across the country. The provincial president of the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat (ASWJ), Maulana Shamsur Rehman Muaviya, was gunned down by unidentified gunmen in what can only be called a targeted killing, the latest in a horrifying series of sectarian attacks since the incident that occurred in Rawalpindi on the 10th of Muharram. Just last Tuesday, prominent Shia community leader Allama Deedar Ali Jalbani was assassinated in Karachi, leading to a 1,200 strong Shia protest in the city. Now we have the murder of the ASWJ Punjab president, and who is to say what will come next?

Since the tragedy that occurred in Rawalpindi, we are seeing a pattern emerge of tit-for-tat killings, with Shias and Sunnis both being targeted in equal measure. We are now seeing Shias take up arms and resort to violence, which, while in no way condonable, is sadly understandable — decades of being abandoned by the state and its law enforcement agencies has seen this community pushed against the wall with no other choice but to fight back. Anti-Shia extremist organisations like the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) have been conducting a slow genocide against the Shias in this country for years now, thinking and preaching that the Shia minority in the country resides outside the fold of Islam and, as such, should be extinguished. It should be noted that the ASWJ is the new face of the SSP. The SSP is a banned organisation and so has reinvented itself as the ASWJ to continue with its dastardly mission under a different guise. And herein lies the problem. Sectarian bloodshed is alive and well in this country, with only the slightest provocation required to stir it in violent ways. The fact that only lip service has been paid by the authorities to actually do something about the situation is at the root of the situation: if these ‘banned’ organisations still continue to fester and propagate their hateful ideologies with tragic consequences, what was the point of banning them in the first place? Why has the government failed to follow up and crack down on these bodies, no matter what the name they operate under? Each and every sectarian killing that is taking place — not just in an individual province because the fire has spread throughout the country — must be sorted out by the provincial and federal governments together. There is no question of working in isolation as the sectarian war looks ready to write another bloodied chapter in our history.