Peace in Karachi: whose Responsibility?

The Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) during its rule from 2008 to 2013 repeatedly claimed credit for reinstating the judges, sacked by the then president, General (retd) Pervez Musharraf after imposing state of emergency on November 03, 2007.

But it is a well known fact that the PPP instead of implementing the court verdicts in their true spirit, started confrontation with the higher judiciary.

The Supreme Court had issued its verdict on a suo moto case in connection with Karachi Law and Order in the tenure of the same PPP but the result was the same: no Implementation.

The law and order situation in Karachi continued to remain volatile, as violent activities could not be curbed and 8 to 12 people regularly fell prey to the targeted and other kinds of killing. Even the elected representatives were targeted but the government did not pay its due attention towards the aggravating situation.

Karachi contributes nearly 70 percent of the total revenue towards the national exchequer, but due to law and order situation business activities almost came to standstill, adversely affecting the overall economy. Investors started shifting their businesses from the port city to other parts of the country while the capital flight out of Karachi to other parts of the world was also witnessed.

Not only common men, but elected representatives and now even judges are being targeted in Karachi. In the past week two major incidents occurred in Karachi which shows inability of the government to control the situation.

In the first incident, MQM MPA Sajid Qureshi and his son were shot dead and in the second major incident senior judge of Sindh High Court (SHC) Justice Maqbool Baqar suffered critical wounds and nine others including policemen and para-military force personnel were killed in a deadly attack on his convoy.

Following this incident, SHC Chief Justice Mushir Alam convened a high-profile meeting and ordered the Sindh government to improve the city’s order and provide foolproof security to judges.

Soon after this, Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Inam Memon questioned in the provincial assembly, why the government be held solely responsible for peace in the financial hub, when the judiciary itself fails to perform its job.

Memon said, “If the government catches terrorists and throws them in jail for the court to carry the cases forward and the courts don’t have the power to rule against them, what do we do?” He said judiciary is too afraid to rule against culprits.

It is a common saying that ‘law is blind’ and it only moves forward on the basis of evidence. If the courts acquit the accused for insufficient evidence, then it is not the court but the administration that is responsible for criminals going scot-free, because the responsibility squarely lies on the administration to provide solid evidence to prosecute the criminals.

In my opinion, if the government wants courts to rule against the criminals, then the government should formulate and enact laws to ensure proper prosecution. Even today, there is no law for protection of the witnesses.

We have a number of examples of cases where witnesses retracted from their earlier stance or failed to turn up at the courts due to threats to their life or their families. In some cases, the accused are so powerful that they can forcibly get statements of witnesses changed in their favor.

Even law abiding citizens dread going to a police station to report street crimes due to a number of complications and the kind of treatment meted out to them by the policemen. So, one can understand the situation of a witness who intends to testify in a court against an accused, specially, when he/she happens to be an influential one.

The above are the main factors responsible for the release of criminals. Therefore, instead of blaming the courts, the government should wake up to its responsibility to provide protection to the witnesses and enact laws to ensure proper prosecution.

Only through these actions the government can enable the courts to take the proceedings to their logical conclusion and bring the criminals to justice, which is imperative to restore order in any part of the country.

Power outages in Karachi after KESC line trips

KARACHI: Power outages are being experienced in several areas of the city after a KESC high tension line tripped.

The 220 KV transmission line of the Baldia Circuit tripped leading to power outages in Orangi town, Haroonabad, Mari Pur and Baldia Town.

A spokesman for KESC said that repair work on the line was underway and supply should be resumed within 30 minutes.

Karachi: 300 more CCTV cameras to be installed before Ramazan

KARACHI: At least three hundred more CCTV cameras would be installed before the holy month of Ramazan facilitating the city police for effective monitoring and surveillance, Geo News reported.

Sources said the provincial authorities have started taking measures for beefing up security arrangements during Ramazan, as 150 out-of-order CCTV cameras installed at different places in the city are being repaired, while three hundred more CCTV cameras would be installed before Ramazan for ensuring better security monitoring.

These CCTV cameras would be installed near mosques, small and big shopping centers, venues for ‘Taraveeh’ and Ramazan rallies for surveillance and pre-empting any untoward incident by locating the suspects beforehand, sources said.

Police, Rangers, CPLC and secret service personnel remain stationed at the Civic Centre Control Room from where they pass on any information to the respective police stations received through monitoring the CCTV cameras.

Karachi faces growing extortion menace

KARACHI: One afternoon a stranger called at Muhammad Faizanullah's stationery shop in Karachi, Pakistan's commercial capital, and wordlessly handed the man behind the counter two items: a piece of paper with a phone number scrawled on it, and a bullet.

"The letter contained a demand for 200,000 Pakistani rupees ($2,000)," Faizanullah, 20, said. "The man said 'Just call this number and pay the amount, otherwise the bullet is meant for you.'"

Businesses in Karachi are facing a surge in extortion demands from criminal gangs, forcing many owners to delay new investment or to relocate their families to escape the sense of insecurity gripping the urban heart of Pakistan's economy.

The worsening law and order situation in Karachi, which generates 25 percent of Pakistan's economic activity, presents one of the many challenges new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif must overcome to fulfill promises to set Pakistan on a path to faster growth.

An expanding middle class is fuelling consumer spending but extortion is hurting confidence among thousands of family-run firms that form the backbone of the economy.

With the Muslim Holy month of Ramadan due to start in July, a traditional time for extortionists to come calling, Karachi traders and shopkeepers are braced for what police say will be a record year of demands.

"The extortion racket has blown out of all proportion with the previous year," said Ahmed Chinoy, chief of the Citizen Police Liaison Committee (CPLC), a Karachi body set up to help police by providing crime statistics and technical support.

The growing demands reflect the shifting dynamics of a city of 18 million people where new challengers, including Pakistan's Taliban movement, are locked in an increasingly violent, neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood battle for control.

Figures collected by Chinoy's committee show there were more than 630 extortion complaints registered in Karachi from January to mid-June, compared to 589 in the whole of last year. Most cases were registered by people who have refused to pay.

Police say the actual number of incidents is many times higher since the vast majority of extortion demands go unreported and victims usually decide to pay. There is no way to know the sums involved, but police say payments run into tens of millions of dollars annually and that 2013 will be a record year.

Ten days after the extortionist paid his visit to Faizanullah's shop in the bustling Alam cloth market in December, two men on motorbikes stopped him, his father and uncle as they were driving home from work.

One of the men, a gun visible in his waistband, told Faizanullah: "You people don't seem to understand our polite attitude, we will have to shoot you." They demanded the men's cellphones and roared away.

"We live under constant stress," Faizanullah said. But he has insisted that his family refuse to hand over any cash.

Professionals, not just shopkeepers, are also targets.

When Javed Hanif, a doctor, answered his cellphone in June the caller reeled off a list of Hanif's personal details: his work in a government hospital, the registration number of his car, and preparations for his son's wedding. The man demanded 500,000 Pakistani rupees.

HAND GRENADES

Karachi traders say paying extortion has long been part of the cost of doing business in Karachi.

The number of killings in Karachi jumped to more than 2,300 in 2012 from 1,700 the previous year. More than 1,400 murders have already been recorded since the start of this year. The increasing death toll has made it easier for gangs to coerce people into paying money, although there have been few reports of extortion-related killings.

"The extortion racket in Karachi has become an industry," said senior police officer Niaz Ahmed Khosa. "There are around 50 no-go areas in Karachi, which police can not enter.

Most of the extortion rackets and other crime are being generated from these population pockets."

Police say Pakistan's Taliban movement, which originated on the northwestern frontier with Afghanistan, has also ramped up extortion operations in Karachi in the past year and has been blamed for attacks that have killed dozens of police.

But nobody is immune from an extortionist's call.

Byram D. Avari, the owner of a prominent hotel chain and a well-known figure in Karachi, refused to pay the demands of a caller who threatened to set off hand grenades at his hotels and home. But many others dare not say no. (Reuters)

Death rules life in Karachi

Side-effect...

It was a day trip to Karachi to attend a memorial reference and a poetry reading in the honour of Parveen Rehman, the director of the Orangi Pilot Project, who was murdered on March 13 this year. For those less than 24 hours I spent in the city of my birth, I met many people but the only topic of discussion around me was death in its various forms – lethal torture, murder, sniping, sporadic firing, target killing, bomb blasts – inflicted upon the citizens.

The flight from Islamabad took off an hour later than scheduled after we had boarded on time. The passengers sweltered while waiting in the aircraft. The captain, with a nominal hint of sarcasm, told us that it was not PIA’s fault this time around; neither was it a technical fault or weather conditions. (The absence of proper air conditioning in the closed compartment of its airplane was PIA’s fault though.) The aircraft was held back because it was asked to wait for a VIP who arrived after the scheduled time of departure.

Nowhere in the world would this happen. Imagine 400-odd people waiting and the flight schedule of an international airliner being disturbed for one man in the government. His name was not announced by the captain but the person sitting next to me claimed that it was the federal minister for interior. Whether it was him or not, what is more important in the present circumstances, however, is that the minister actually succeeds in contributing towards bringing peace to the city he was supposedly travelling to. For the moment, the ruling party seems to have no policy on Karachi.

A car with small rounded dents on the backseat door, apparently caused by the brushing of pellets, picked me up. I was later told by the driver that he was caught in a minor crossfire some days ago in Baldia Town. On his way to the airport from Gulshan-e-Iqbal that day, perhaps less than 30 minutes ago before he met me, he had witnessed two men on a motorbike stop a car, fire upon the passengers and kill two of them. The bikers ran away in front of everyone – in broad daylight.

The driver of the car I was in was a middle-aged man with a peppered five o’ clock shadow. His parents came from Swat but he was a born Karachiite who had been driving in the city for thirty years. He lived in Banaras Colony – a predominantly Pakhtun neighbourhood – with his wife, brother and four children. He told me, “Two days ago, a rickshaw driver from my neighbourhood was shot in the head, hacked into six pieces and found in a gunny bag. He was 25 and had gotten married two months back. He was not associated with any group or party. We are used to this now. I have transported bodies from the Kati Pahari area that connects Orangi Town with North Nazimabad to morgues in hospitals and Edhi centres last year. There were women and children also who got shot or small children who died due to unavailability of milk or food. This was due to massive gunfire in the area that continued for days.”

On my way to the auditorium where the event for Parveen was organised, I stopped over briefly at my brother’s place to say hello to my sister-in-law. After the usual exchange of pleasantries she said, “Do you remember the woman who came to help us out with house work when you were here last?” Before I could answer she continued, “Her younger brother was a vegetable vendor. He was made to disembark from a bus and was then shot and killed along with six other men. When she and her husband, who is a construction labourer, were going to the hospital to receive his body in a rented Suzuki pickup, they were fired upon by unknown men. Her husband got multiple bullet wounds in his leg and has been bedridden for six months. But she says they are lucky that she was not hit and her husband survived.”

At the memorial meeting organised for Parveen Rehman, Parveen’s colleagues, architects, authors and intellectuals including Arif Hasan, Ajmal Kamal and Zahida Hina spoke. Then there were poems read by a small group of poets present on the occasion with Fahmida Riaz presiding over. Even those speakers who would end their remarks on a positive note lamented and cried about the state of affairs. They did not only speak about Parveen’s murder but talked at length about the rampant killing of innocent women, men and children in the city and the country. The poems were mostly requiems and elegies. Some that had a hint of optimism were also interwoven with expressions of fear, insecurity, death and existential crisis being experienced collectively. Later in the evening, Arif Hasan mentioned that six of his friends, associates or acquaintances had been wounded by gunfire or killed over the last one year.

When speaking of Karachi, we discuss its sociology, the political choices made by the state establishment over the past few decades, the issues of identity, ethnic tensions, sectarian target killing, ethnic or religious militancy and violence. We worry about the commercial and economic hub of the country. We are concerned about the price hike in the rest of Pakistan if things come to a halt in its primate city. But we speak little about the true human suffering in Karachi that political parties, mafias, criminal gangs, militant outfits, et al have brought upon innocent citizens.

We have reduced people to body counts. What is happening to the thousands of families, friends and communities of those killed or maimed is seldom anyone’s business. Death in Karachi is truly egalitarian. It does not discriminate on the basis of faith, caste, colour, creed, sex or age. The absence of a response to this situation by the state of Pakistan is criminal when it comes to the insensitivity to the continued suffering of people. The absence of a coherent policy in this respect is also suicidal for the whole nation.

Tailpiece: My last week’s column gathered a lot of flak from Khan Sahib’s PTI and his supporters. It is their right to disagree and I particularly respect those who counter-argue by correcting me or by giving out a different interpretation of the same fact. However, I am also used to hate mail from some PTI enthusiasts. One PTI office-bearer even wrote an article quoting ‘facts’ about me because the gentleman only searched the internet to find false information about his subject.

This time around, there were three letters published in this newspaper about my last column. Most significant, of course, is a long letter from Dr Shireen Mazari, the central information secretary of the PTI. While reading it I was reminded of a press conference Dr Mazari held in September 2012 when she had decided to leave the party. Have the issues she had raised just a few months back been resolved? I don’t see that. I don’t want to burden her with any new questions about her leader. Or about the KP information minister’s or an MPA’s statements about terrorism and the Taliban after her letter was published. She already has a hard job to do. People are wondering who from the first-ever PTI CM’s family is left who is not in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly? After three women from his family got reserved seats in KP, his son-in-law has been awarded the PTI ticket for by-election in NA-5, Nowshera.

Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com

Sindh chief minister to open 'My-Karachi' exhibition today

The Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KCCI) has finalised arrangements for its 10th international three-day exhibition 'My-Karachi, Oasis of Harmony 2013', which will be held at Karachi Expo Centre from July 5. The chamber has invited Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah to inaugurate the event on July 4.

The purpose of holding this exhibition is to introduce and popularise 'Made in Pakistan' brand and promote positive image of the country in the world. The exhibition will act as a venue for building business-to-business linkages and strengthening business-to-consumer relationship. The international pavilion mainly designed for B2B will showcase the products of other countries as well as Pakistan. Leading Pakistani companies and foreign exhibitors will display their products at more than 250 stalls in five halls of the Expo Centre.

This year, besides large participation from domestic exhibitors, more than 100 foreign exhibitors and businesspersons from Thailand and Indonesia are visiting Pakistan to participate in the event. The chamber, which has been holding this mega event since last nine years, is expecting huge turnover of general pubic. President KCCI Haroon Agar in a statement said that the exhibition would be held from July 5 to 7 and would be open for both businesspersons and families.

He said that the KCCI started this mega exhibition in 2004 and it had received huge national and international acclamation. "In view of the event's significance, the Sindh government co-hosts the exhibition while the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (TDAP) extends its full co-operation every year," he added. He further said that main objective of the exhibition was to project and promote the real image of Pakistan in general and Karachi in particular.

He said that over 700,000 visitors including businesspersons and ordinary people were expected to visit the exhibition. The KCCI President said that this year the Chamber had taken special measures to organise the event in more organised manner, with dedicated pavilions for the international participants, significant brands 'Made in Pakistan' and women entrepreneurs. He said that the participants from Thailand and Indonesia would also organise cultural shows while kids play area and food court had also been established. The visitors will also avail special discount on their purchases at the exhibition.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2013

Woman among six gunned down in Karachi

KARACHI: At least six persons including a woman were killed in violent and firing incidents that took place across the metropolis Wednesday, Geo News reported.

According to sources, unknown gunmen opened fire in Agra Taj Colony area of Lyari, killing a woman on the spot. The identity of the victim could not be ascertained.

Unidentified culprits also opened fire near parking plaza in Saddar area that killed a man riding on motorbike. The deceased was identified as Asadullah.

A body was also found from Surjani Town while another was recovered from old city area bearing bullet wound. The victim’s age was between 23 and 27 and had a gunshot wound in his head.

Earlier, a man was also shot dead in Korangi 5 area by unknown gunmen who was identified as Rehan, 27. The body was shifted to Jinnah Hospital for medico-legal formalities.

A man was also injured in firing incident that took place in Quaidabad area while another was injured in Ranchor Line last night.