Ethnic Discord : Faith Not Enough to Cure Karachi’s Ills : As Prime Minister Bhutto finds she can’t wish the strife away, Pakistan’s chief city is hemorrhaging with violence and rage.

In this throbbing metropolis on the Arabian Sea, the grass used to grow lush and green on the cricket pitches in Jinnah Garden, and a mother didn’t worry particularly if her daughter stayed out past 2:30 a.m.

Those were the good times in Pakistan’s biggest city. But they are now fading memories in this seething tandoori oven of humanity whose high-rises and fetid squatter colonies have become the uneasy home to more people than New York and Chicago combined.

Reality now means: ethnic, sectarian and political strife, snipers, street crime and fear. When Rotary Club members met recently at the posh Marriott Hotel to discuss tolerance, law and order, police armed with assault rifles stood guard at the street-level entrance.

“Are you being given your right to life when you can’t get out of the house because you might be killed?” asked Nasir Aslam Zahid, a judge of the federal religious court.

The answer was evident, and Rotarians seated in the Ambassador Room glumly shook their heads.

What makes Karachi’s ordeal so poignant is that it cuts to the quick of the concept of Pakistan and to its founders’ conviction that the shared Islamic faith would be sufficient to weld disparate peoples together.

Those who sacrificed the most to make Pakistan a reality now feel as if they are its second-class citizens. And in this mega-city, which has rapidly taken shape not far from where the storied Indus River meets the sea, resentment has bubbled over into rage.

Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s failure to cope--indeed, what Karachiites see as a bizarre unwillingness to stanch the violent hemorrhage in Pakistan’s industrial and commercial heart--may have ominous consequences for the leader who came into the world in a Karachi hospital on June 21, 1953.

Bhutto braved Bosnian Serb guns to visit embattled Sarajevo earlier this year. But when she conducted a 10-day tour of Karachi and its surrounding Sind province last month, she attended a marriage and a charity function thrown by the Aga Khan here but spent the rest of her time in the hinterland.

“She’s been moving around the world and acting as if everything was peaceful at home,” one Karachi police superintendent said scornfully.

To administer the day-to-day affairs of her country’s most populous and richest city, in June she appointed an earnest 36-year-old who had no prior government experience but who had served as her helicopter pilot in the 1993 election campaign.

Now, however, Bhutto’s evident nonchalance about the most serious threat to law and order in today’s Pakistan seems to have come to an end.

“There is a mini-insurgency in Karachi, there is guerrilla warfare, and we should realize this,” she said Friday after returning to the capital, Islamabad, from the Islamic summit in Casablanca, Morocco. “We know the designs of terrorists roaming in Karachi. . . . They are against Pakistan’s unity, and we will fight them at all costs.”

She accused “foreign powers,” presumably India, of masterminding the turmoil and crime wave in which at least 700 people have died this year. She said her government would now beef up the civil administration and take other “political and economic measures,” and seek a political settlement with the local warring groups.

She will have her hands full.

On Nov. 30, the Pakistani army ended its 29-month “Operation Cleanup,” the attempted pacification of Sind and its capital of more than 10 million people, and returned to its bases. The violence, some of which is widely blamed on the army, escalated.

Already this month, at least 130 people have been slain, and Karachiites are now being killed at a rate of five to 15 a day.

The nadir came when Abdul Sattar Edhi, Pakistan’s most famous social worker, slipped out of town early this month, saying his life was in danger. Pakistanis were shocked: It was as if Mother Teresa had felt obliged to flee Calcutta.

“I do not want to do anything for Pakistan now,” Edhi said in London. “I will only pray for it.”

In Karachi’s dark and dusty alleys, members of two Islamic branches, Sunnis and Shiites, have been attacking each other. Meanwhile, native Pakistani ethnic groups including Sindis and Pathans are in a tense standoff with the Mohajirs, descendants of Urdu-speaking immigrants from India. A pair of Kalashnikov-packing groups claiming to represent the Mohajirs is locked in lethal rivalry and blamed for the bulk of the current blood-letting.

Along with this politically, religiously and ethnically motivated violence, there’s a surfeit of garden-variety felonies: homicide, armed robbery, carjacking, kidnaping for ransom. Government officials are often the targets.

“How do you define civil war?” a police official asked. “Is it when you burn government property? When you kill government employees? Then Karachi is in the midst of one.”

Municipal services have virtually collapsed under a population explosion that has turned Karachi into one of the world’s 20 largest cities. Home to 100,000 people when Pakistan came into being in 1947, Karachi has increased in population more than 100 times since.

Once reputedly the tidiest city in British India, it is now choked with jerry-built shantytowns where want and discontent fester along with the stinking garbage and canals fouled with human waste.

Violence and unrest have plagued the city for years. But there is an increased feeling that the situation has spun out of control.

“My daughter, who is 18, is in England studying law and politics, and you know, it hurts to say it, but I feel quite happy that she’s there, safe in her hostel, and not here,” attorney Ismat Mehdi said.

The downtown business district is generally regarded as safe. But Mehdi’s experience shows nowhere is totally secure. She was the victim of a carjacking at noon in one of the city’s swankiest neighborhoods, not far from the Bhutto family mansion.

In November, the U.S. consul general advised the 2,000 American residents and arriving visitors from the United States to exercise “greater-than-usual caution” and to keep away from large crowds, meetings and the worst-affected neighborhoods.

So far this year, 75 Karachi police officers have been slain, and police stations have been turned into reinforced bunkers. “The first priority is now to defend yourself,” the Karachi police superintendent said.

Neighborhoods such as Shah Faisal Colony have become free-fire zones. One recent morning, Dawn, a Karachi-published newspaper, began its review of a typical 24-hour slice of Karachi life this way: “A leading coal mine owner of Sind was shot dead by bandits, three absconding kidnapers and a policeman were killed in a shootout, while an 8-year-old boy died in sniping in the city on Monday.”

This in the city that is the commercial brain and sinew of the world’s eighth-most-populous country. It boasts half of the registered cars and trucks in Pakistan, two-thirds of its industry and trade and almost all of its financial institutions.

Karachi--Pakistan’s only seaport--collects an estimated two-thirds of government revenue and contributes more than 50% to the gross domestic product. Until Bhutto tackles the unrest in earnest, business leaders believe, economic prosperity for Pakistan will be an unrealistic dream.

“We are sick and tired of hearing that things are getting better,” complained Said Ahmed Sattar, president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

The roots of the city’s agony lie in its past.

The agglomeration that grew up on the site of a former fishing village surrounded by mangrove swamps and waterlogged coastal flats was the magnet that drew hundreds of thousands of Muslims who had lived in India proper to the new nation created specifically for Muslims.

Known as the Mohajirs, or refugees, these immigrants were a precious source of human raw material for the fledgling republic. As a group, the transplants from India were the only Pakistanis with a high degree of literacy and administrative know-how.

Today, they and their descendants make up an estimated 60% of Karachi’s population.

The Mohajirs flourished under a merit-based civil service and educational system. They were aggrieved in the 1970s when new ethnic quotas shut off most government jobs and educational opportunities to them. To make things worse, the socialist policies of Bhutto’s father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, scion of a land-holding family from rural Sind, led to the nationalization of banks and other large businesses, most of which were then Mohajir-owned.

In 1978, a group of Mohajir students angered by quotas in higher education formed what was to become the Mohajir Qoumi (or National) Movement, or the MQM. Within half a decade, the movement was the most powerful political group in this angry city that has become increasingly ethnically stratified. Its founder, Altaf Hussain, son of an Indian-born railway clerk, became de facto lord of Karachi.

Sind is the electoral fiefdom of the Bhutto clan, and Pakistan’s powerful generals saw in the MQM a tool to sap the power base of the Bhuttos’ Pakistan People’s Party.

With the secret blessing of the armed forces, Hussain’s activists fought gun battles with People’s Party militants and resorted to terrorist tactics to pressure business leaders into forking over “contributions.”

Only too late did the Pakistani generals realize that they had created a monster with a will of its own. They backed a splinter group backed by Hussain’s lieutenants, and the two rival MQM factions are now warring for mastery of the Mohajir community.

More than 100 criminal charges, including murder and kidnaping, have been filed against Hussain, who has fled to London. The impression being given ordinary Mohajirs is that their leaders are being persecuted and their democratic right to be governed by people of their choice is being trampled underfoot.

“There’s basically no link between the government and the Urdu-speaking population these days. Who are they going to talk to?” one disapproving government official asked.

Sind’s vital importance to her national political fortunes is very likely the reason Bhutto has moved so gingerly. Making a deal with Mohajirs would be perceived by many natives of her home province as a betrayal of their interests.

But unless a way can be found to appease the exiled Hussain, continued trouble for Bhutto’s leadership and Pakistani tranquillity is likely. This year, the MQM movement began toying publicly with the idea of a separate, Mohajir-dominated province for Karachi.

That idea, if pressed with vigor, would spark separatist passions in other parts of Pakistan.

“We sacrificed 2 million people to achieve Pakistan, not to see our children killed and our elders humiliated by the law enforcement agencies,” Hussain told a meeting of Mohajirs by telephone hookup from his exile in London.

In Azizabad, a movement hotbed, a sculpture erected at a traffic circle shows how its supporters feel.

It is a crude and giant fist, raised in permanent defiance.