Ethnic Tensions Grip Hyderabad : Pakistanis Fear for Lives in ‘Kalashnikov Culture’

Mayor Aftab Sheikh has not left his house for nearly three months. Frankly, he said Tuesday, he is too frightened.

The last time he went out, he was shot nine times and left for dead in the driveway of his home.

So last Friday night, Mayor Sheikh was in hiding when roving bands of gunmen ranged through Hyderabad and massacred almost 200 people in a three-hour spree now known as “Black Friday.”

And the killing has not ended. On Tuesday, as the mayor talked with a reporter, 30 additional people were cut down by gunfire during a two-hour break in the curfew imposed after Friday’s outburst. A prominent city judge was dragged from his house and shot 10 times.

“One thing is sure,” the mayor said. “For the time being, the civil administration is not able to control this mass killing. The civil administration works through the police, and the police are not that effective. The army is. The army means business. And the army is here.”

Pakistani and Western political analysts said that the past several days of bloodshed have given President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and his military backers a difficult choice--ineffective civilian rule or prolonged martial law in the area.

In interviews Tuesday, senior government officials hinted broadly that a limited form of martial law will be declared within the next few days, not only in Hyderabad but in other violence-torn parts of Sind province.

In Islamabad, the national capital, Ishaq Khan announced after a Cabinet meeting that the army will be given broader powers of search and detention in the troubled province and in sections of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.

Vote Set Despite Violence

The president and the military leadership, which together set up an emergency council to run the nation last August after President Zia ul-Haq was killed in an air crash, insist that they are committed to democracy. Both have promised several times in recent days that general elections planned for Nov. 16 will be held on schedule, despite the violence.

But in Hyderabad, Pakistan’s fifth-largest city and the undisputed hotbed of the ethnic unrest that underlies the violence, the government’s dilemma is as starkly cast as the piles of bodies in the morgue.

“The situation now is such that everyone feels insecure,” Mayor Sheikh said. “Everyone is feeling so panicky. They are looking here and there and to all sides when they go out. It’s a question only of killing, killing and more killing.”

Sheikh himself is an example of Hyderabad’s ethnic problem. He is a Mohajir--the Urdu word for “refugee”--one of the millions of Muslim immigrants who fled Hindu-dominated India for Islamic Pakistan when the subcontinent was divided at the time of independence in 1947.

Mohajirs Now Dominate

Before independence, Hyderabad was peopled entirely by Sindhi-speaking natives. After the influx from India, the Urdu-speaking Mohajirs dominated, and they grew so fast in power and population that in last year’s local elections, which brought Sheikh to power, the Sindhi speakers won just three of the 69 seats in the City Council.

The Mohajir victory was based largely on the formation three years ago of a militant political party called the Mohajir National Movement. The group, which reportedly has a large number of heavily armed members, was formed to protect the refugees from increasing militancy on the part of the Sindhi speakers, who felt they were losing control to outsiders.

“The success of the Mohajir movement in Karachi and Hyderabad was never well digested by this other group,” Sheikh said.

Within months of his taking office in January, Sheikh said, the violence began in earnest. It started with a gun battle between the two groups over the naming of a new intersection, and it continued through last June with a bloody attack on the City Council building. With the assassination attempt on the mayor July 17, it appeared to culminate.

Quotas at Universities

Clearly, the discrimination and the violent attacks have cut both ways. Through a quota system imposed in the province more than a decade ago to curb the growing Mohajir influence, Sindhi speakers now occupy most of the powerful government jobs, and they are favored in admissions to government universities. The Mohajir, who now make up about 85% of the city’s population, dominate local politics.

As a result, local government has been paralyzed and totally ineffective against the violence.

And when it comes to firepower, both sides are well armed and brazen.

“What we have in Hyderabad today is a Kalashnikov culture,” a newspaper owner, Sheik Ali Mohammad, said, referring to the AK-47 assault rifle. The AK-47, a Soviet-designed weapon, has flooded into Pakistan in the years since 1982, when the United States began supplying it in quantity, via Pakistan, to guerrillas in neighboring Afghanistan.

Power From Gun Barrels

“Conservatively speaking, there are about 8,000 Kalashnikovs in Hyderabad now,” the mayor said, “and the people who have them rule supreme. They can kill anybody.”

Indeed, according to police and hospital sources, most of the people killed or wounded in the past few days were shot with AK-47s.

“The problem has gotten so bad that Kalashnikovs are being sold on the installment plan,” a government official in Hyderabad said. “The total price is 15,000 rupees (about $850). You put 5,000 rupees down, take the Kalashnikov, go rob someone at gunpoint and use the loot to pay off the rest of the purchase price.”

So great has the firearm problem become that a prominent local attorney, Sajad Zaidi, proposed after Friday’s massacre that anyone caught with an illegal automatic weapon be sentenced to death.

4 Gunmen Guard Mayor

“It is definitely out of hand,” the government official said. “If you go to the mayor’s house, you’ll find four men with Kalashnikovs outside.”

And with good reason, Mayor Sheikh said. He was almost killed with a Kalashnikov--seven of them, actually. The seven gunmen who tried to kill the mayor in July were all armed with AK-47s, and investigators later counted 90 bullet holes in the mayor’s jeep.

Three of the bullets are still in his body, the mayor said, and the forefinger of his right hand is paralyzed. This, he said, is why he has spent nearly three months in virtual seclusion.

“Would you leave the house?” he asked.

Ali Mohammad, the newspaper owner, has campaigned against the Mohajir-dominated government.

‘Some Sort of Madness’

“There is some sort of madness which has overtaken the people,” he said. “If the army takes over, for a few days the people will not be unhappy. But how long will that last?”

Meanwhile, the mayor said that to call out the army “in a country like Pakistan, that has faced martial law so often, is to open the cage again for the lion to come in.” But he conceded that there is probably no choice, at least for the short term.

“There is no question of my resigning,” he said. “I personally have no decision to make. I belong to a political group and a community. If I resign, I’ll incur the wrath of my community. And if I don’t, I will continue to be a target of the other community. I am, you see, between the devil and the deep sea.

“The type of violence that we are having right now is the worst kind. It is like an insect eating at the insides of a building. We are weakening the foundation of our own government, the foundation of our nation and, indeed, the fabric of our entire society. The only answer now is some drastic surgery, and one can only pray that it will succeed.”