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Pakistan’s Shias Face Double Threat: Extremists and Their Own Government

By Jaffer A. Mirza With their safety at stake, Pakistan’s beleaguered Shia community is seeking justice from the country’s founder.

“We are here to tell the founder of this country that we are being persecuted and discriminated in your country.” That is the message from the families of Shia missing persons, who have been holding a sit-in outside M. A. Jinnah’s Mausoleum in Karachi since April 2. A Shia activist informed The Diplomat that the community has tried to seek assistance from every government and civilian institution, and held sit-ins outside the Chief Minister’s House, the Governor’s House, and all the relevant authorities, but to no avail. The Shia community, the activist said, has come to the realization that these institutions are either apathetic or incapable of addressing their plight. Therefore, a group of Shias resorted to a sit-in outside the final resting place of the country’s founder – more of a public confession of their defenseless and unprotected condition than a protest.

In August 2020, Pakistan witnessed a surge in anti-Shia politics. At least six huge anti-Shia rallies were carried out by different Sunni groups in five different cities, including the capital of the country. At least five Shias were killed in different incidents, more than 40 blasphemy cases were registered against Shias, and a place of worship was attacked. The rise in online hate speech was also alarming. Between August and September 2020, the Minority Rights Group reported that a sentiment algorithm documented an increase in negative tweets about Shias, which “collectively reached millions of social media users in Pakistan.” Fully 46 percent of social media mentions of Shias examined during that period were negative. The most frequent word used to refer to the community was the Urdu word for “infidel.”

For Shias, the negative perceptions make them a target not only for extremists but for the security forces. In May 2018, estimates for the number of forcibly “disappeared” Shias ranged from 140 to around 300. In April 2019, the Shia community, led by the Joint-Action Committee for Shia Missing Persons, held a two-week-long sit-in outside the President’s House in Karachi. As a result, some 17 Shias were freed and 16 appeared in court, officially charged with. Currently, there are 34 recorded cases of Shia missing persons from different parts of the country who have been missing for two years or more, some as many as six years.

Pakistan’s track record on enforced disappearances has been an issue of grave concern for the international community. In September 2020, four U.N. Special Rapporteurs demanded the end of enforced disappearances in Pakistan. According to one estimate, more than 700 people are still missing. Yet Pakistan has been ignoring these humanitarian appeals. The government’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, formed in 2011, seems helpless to prevent these disappearances. The International Commission of Jurists shared its disapproval of the commission and stated that it has “enabled and entrenched impunity for enforced disappearances instead of providing redress to victims.”

The practice of enforced disappearances is targeted at particular groups, mostly ethnic minorities such as Balochs, Sindhis, Pashtuns, Seraikis, and Urdu-speaking Muhajirs. Lately the abductions have expanded to include Punjabi dissidents. The state sees their legitimate political demands as a “national security threat” and uses extrajudicial and illegal tactics to silence them. However, with the addition of Shias to the missing person list, it seems the state has expanded its scope and is now aiming to target religious minorities, starting with Shias.

It is not clear why and on what grounds Shias are being “disappeared.” The abductors – presumably the security agencies – claim that the missing persons were involved in the Syrian civil war and sectarian violence in the country. According to an unofficial and unverified estimate, between 700 and 5,000 Pakistan Shias from Karachi, Parachinar, and Gilgit-Baltistan, recruited by Iran, went to Syria to fight against the Islamic State. The security agencies fear that Shias who returned from Syria pose a threat to Pakistan’s stability.

Under this pretext, the security agencies have picked up Shias who returned from Syria. Police and the paramilitary often raid homes and tell the families that their loved ones will be sent back once the investigation is done. But the people are moved to undisclosed locations, with no information given to their families. Family members are left to search at local police stations, hospitals and even morgues for some news of their loved ones.

More concerningly, some of those who have been “disappeared” never went to Syria, Iraq, or Iran. The reason for their abduction is still a mystery for the families. For example, Shamim Haider, a resident of Karachi, who was a puncture repairer on the edge of poverty, has been missing for the last six years, his family presuming him detained by security forces. He had never been to Syria. Nor had Azhar Hussain and Ebad-ul-Hassan, both residents of Karachi, who were picked up by the law enforcement agencies in 2017. Similarly, Ali Mehdi, also from Karachi, has been missing for the last two years. Mehdi, who played for the junior national hockey team, had never been to Syria and did not have any criminal record.

Let us us assume for a moment that the security agencies have undeniable proofs of all the abducted Shias’ involvement in criminal and terror activities. Even if that’s the case, why did they resort to enforced disappearances? Why have the missing Shias not been officially charged with crimes, and their cases handed over to the police and courts? Although the families have their reservations about court cases – some of those who were previously presented in the courts after many years were linked to crimes that had happened while the accused were being illegally detained by the security agencies. Despite the risk of bogus charges, the families demand that their loved ones either be officially brought to court or released.

The increase in illegal detentions is a worrying sign is that there is a section within the state that still views Shias as a security threat – a suspicion that was embraced after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The recent abductions make Shias a doubly persecuted community that is simultaneously facing genocidal violence from the state-backed religious militants and harassment and intimidation from the state. Shias have already been questioning the state’s neutrality vis-à-vis banned anti-Shia outfits roaming free. The ongoing issue of enforced disappearances reaffirms the existence of anti-Shia paranoia among some state actors who are apparently unaccountable and unanswerable to any authority. https://thediplomat.com/2021/04/pakistans-shias-face-double-threat-extremists-and-their-own-government/

'Every year we dig mass graves': the slaughter of Pakistan’s Hazara

Shah Meer Baloch

Decades of persecution has left the Shia minority with little space left in its graveyards but prime minister Imran Khan is in no hurry to listen.

A

hmed Shah had always dreamed of bigger things. Though just 17, the high school pupil had taken a job in the coalmines of Balochistan, Pakistan’s south-western province, one of the harshest, most dangerous working environments in the world. Shah was determined to earn enough to educate himself, so he could escape the tough life of the Hazara Shia community, the most persecuted minority in Pakistan.

But Shah never saw a brighter future. He was among 10 miners who were resting in their mud hut near the mines in the small Balochistan town of Mach when armed militants burst in. A gruesome video from the scene shows the young men blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. A security official said their throats had been slit. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the massacre.

The prime minister, Imran Khan, called it an “inhumane act of terrorism”, but for the Hazara, minority Shia Muslims who have been targeted for three decades in Pakistan by extremists among the majority Sunni Muslims who view them as heretics, this was not enough.

Shah’s mother, Amina, was on her rounds as a healthcare worker in the nearby provincial capital of Quetta when she heard about the massacre.

“I wanted to see my son one last time, but I was told that I would not be able to bear that,” says Amina. “The killers were not humans. They killed them so brutally.”

The Hazara community, after decades of injustice and neglect by the state, were driven to act, and in a protest unlike anything seen before in Pakistan, the families of the 10 men brought the dead bodies out on to the streets, and sat beside them, in the freezing cold, to demand protection and justice.

For a full week, they did not move, stating they would not bury the bodies until the prime minister listened to their demands.

In response, Khan accused them of trying to “blackmail” him, and said he would not visit until the bodies were buried.

Ahmed Shah was one of four from his family to die in the Mach massacre. So too did his cousin Sadiq, the sole breadwinner for his wife, children and six sisters.

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Sadiq, a father of two daughters, had had breakfast with his wife before dawn at his home in Quetta before leaving for Mach. One sister, Masooma Yaqoob Ali, saw the news of the Hazara miners on Facebook and stumbled upon the picture of her brother’s blindfolded body.

“These monsters have not only killed 10 people, they have killed 10 families,” she says. “It has been two decades that we are being mercilessly killed but no one has been arrested yet.”

 The Hazara Shia have been targeted over many years by Sunni extremists, such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Sahaba and now Isis. According to a 2019 report by Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, an independent watchdog, at least 509 Hazara have been murdered for their faith since 2013. The non-profit Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that from 2009 to 2014, nearly 1,000 Hazaras died in sectarian violence. Thousands have been injured.

 

Our men and young can’t go outside. If they go, they will be killed. Our graveyards are full of young men

Masooma Yaqoob Ali

To curb attacks on the 600,000 Hazaras living in the towns of Mariabad and Hazara Town in Quetta, authorities have built military checkpoints, roadblocks and walls around the areas.

In 2014, the international organisation Human Rights Watch published a 62-page report on the persecution of Hazara Shia in Balochistan entitled We are the walking dead.

“We are living in two prisons. Our men and young can’t go outside. If they go, they will be killed. Our graveyards are full of young men with barely any space left,” says Ali. “We are tired of carrying their coffins. Every year we dig mass graves. Yet prime minister Imran Khan says we are blackmailers. Khan is heartless.”

The majority of Hazara in Quetta originally came from Afghanistan and Iran to seek work in Pakistan, with many ending up in the mines of Balochistan.

For 15 years, Chaman Ali, another of the Mach victims, would travel from Afghanistan to Quetta every winter to work in the coalmines.

“I would be worried for his life when he was here and when he went to Afghanistan. I would think ‘what if he gets into the hands of the Taliban?’ I thought he was safe here, but this is where he got killed,” his sister Zara says.

Chaman Ali is survived by his wife and eight children, the youngest just three months old. Aziz and Nasim, from the Daykundi province of Afghanistan, came with Chaman Ali to work in the mines for the first time. They were also murdered.

Nasim, 22, started work to fund his education and had arrived in Pakistan just a week before he was killed. “Afghanistan is in a very bad situation and we think that something is better than nothing, which is why we come to Pakistan just to make a living,” says Abdul Rahim, Nasim’s father. Along with other members of his family, he could not get to his son’s funeral from Afghanistan, when the security forces closed routes out of the villages across Pakistan’s porous border.

Victims of the Mach massacre were all eventually buried in a mass grave at Hazara Town, on the outskirts of Quetta. The Hazara community is running out of space to bury their dead. The graveyard is full of photographs of Hazara Shia men, women and children, many of them murdered.

Having Mongolian ancestors, many Hazara are identifiable by their distinctive appearance, and it is along the single road that leads to Mari Abad and Hazara Town that thousands have been attacked by extremist groups.

“Our generation has grown up in a cage. We make houses on the mountain and are afraid of going out to see other parts of Quetta,” says Arif Hussain Nasry, 21, founder of the Future is Young campaign. “We are even afraid to gather with Hazara from other nations and communities. We have to live to survive in these two ghettoes.”

But for Naseem Javed, an author and political activist, the attacks on the Hazara are not just about sectarianism. “I don’t think Hazara are being targeted just because of their faith,” he says. “They also are being targeted to divert the attention from the Baloch separatist movement.”

Balochistan, the most impoverished province of Pakistan and wedged between Iran and Afghanistan, has a separatist movement that has been active in the province for the past 20 years. “The region also has become a hub for international proxies, including the Taliban,” Javed adds.

Javed shows the pistol he keeps close to him in his shop, where he sells prayer mats and prayer beads. “We live under shadows of weapons and fear. None of us has a normal life. We are being slaughtered. If the security establishment has no role in this genocide, why have they not arrested any attacker?”

For many Hazara people the solution is simply to leave. Amjad Ali*, 21, has made three attempts to leave Balochistan for a new life in Europe. He was first deported from Turkey and handed over to Iran, from where he was sent back to Pakistan. The second time he was deported from Iran.

During his third attempt to reach Europe, with 25 other Hazara Shia, Ali was caught a few miles from the border by Jaish ul-Adl, another Sunni militant group that operates mainly in south-eastern Iran. Pretending to be Iranian security forces, the jihadist group took Ali and others to a mountain camp in Pakistan, close to the Iranian border.

“They were very well updated and informed. As soon as we reached their camp they shot four Hazaras with Kalashnikovs. Two of them used to work in the Pakistan army. Two, as Jaish ul-Adl claimed, were going to be part of the Zainebiyoun brigade, an Iranian-backed militant force [fighting in Syria],” Ali told the Guardian.

The rest were held and their families sent ransom demands. Ali spent 55 days in the camp before his family members managed to raise thousands of dollars in ransom money for his release.

“If I get a chance now to go to Europe, I will try again,” says Ali. “There is no life for Hazara Shia in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

* Amjad Ali’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/apr/05/mass-graves-pakistan-shia-minority-hazara-slaughter-imran-khan 

A delegation of Sindh intellectuals, human rights representatives, journalists, writers, social leaders, and academics meets Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

A delegation of Sindh intellectuals, human rights representatives, journalists, writers, social leaders, and academics called on the Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party Bilawal Bhutto Zardari and briefed him on the growing extremism in Sindh.

Expressing concern over the intolerance and incitement being spread against writer and columnist Amar Jalil, the delegation drew attention to the unnecessary reaction to an old allegorical fiction of the well-known writer and expressed concern over the threats to him and other issues being faced by progressive writers, poets and intellectuals in Sindh.
The delegation included Noorul Huda Shah, Jami Chandio, Amar Sindhu, Dr. Ayub Sheikh, Dr. Irfana Mallah. Rafiq Chandio, Nazir Leghari, Fazil Jamili, Dr. Jaffar Ahmed, Anees Haroon, Ahmed Shah, Zakia Ijaz and Imdad Chandio.
Talking to the delegation, the PPP Chairman said that rise in extremist attitudes in the country and especially in Sindh will not be tolerated and no individual or group will be allowed to take the law into their own hands.
The meeting was also attended by Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah and Culture Minister Sardar Shah.
The delegation of social activists and intellectuals requested the PPP Chairman that the Cyber Crime Cell under the Federal government be contacted for containing and curbing of extremist statements on social media and the PPP should play its positive role in this regard.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that the process of dialogue with the administrative bodies of different sects will be promoted and in this regard the Ministry of Religious Affairs of Sindh will play an active role in promoting the process of healthy dialogue between the Ulema and other intellectuals.
He said that Sindh is a land of religious tolerance and Sufi traditions as the message of peace from Sindh spread all over the world, adding that the real identity of Sindh is the tolerance of the society hence it should be maintained in all circumstances.
Vice President PPP Senator Sherry Rehman, Central Secretary Information and MNA Shazia Marri and Political Secretary to PPP Chairman Jamil Soomro were also present.

https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/24606/