‘Father of Mangroves’ fights for Pakistan’s forests

by Hasan Mansoor
It was a brutal kidnap that turned him into an eco-warrior, and 27 years later Pakistan’s “Father of the Mangroves” still lets nothing get in the way of fighting against timber “mafia” and deforestation.
“This is my life. I am very happy with it. The cause is worth living such a life,” Tahir Qureshi told AFP, walking around the sanctuary that he set up in his spare time when he still worked full-time with the forestry commission.
He was captured by a kidnap-for-ransom gang in 1984 while working in the southern district of Dadu, now devastated by floods for two consecutive years.
“They kept me for a couple of days in captivity. But when they knew I was a forest officer they released me without further argument. That inspired me to dedicate my whole life for the rehabilitation of our ecosystem,” he said.
“The robbers released me as they respect those who respect forests. Trees provide them best hideouts.
“Besides, they are among many people who consider chopping trees as a sin because trees provide us livelihood and help better the environment.”
For years, it was a lonely if mighty cause, for apart from Afghanistan, in the grip of a 10-year war between Taliban insurgents and American troops, no other country in Asia suffers from a faster rate of deforestation than Pakistan.
In 2010, it was declared a forest-deficient country because just 2.2 percent or about 1.7 million hectares (4.2 million acres) of its land mass is forested.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Pakistan lost an average of 42,000 hectares of forest a year between 1990 and 2010.
At the current rate, Pakistan could lose half its remaining forest cover over the next decade or so, says the FAO. The trend has been exacerbated by recent floods, the worst in the country’s history in 2010 and a repeated bout this monsoon season.
Qureshi has helped rehabilitate 30,000 hectares of mangrove along the southern coast on the Arabian Sea, including in Baluchistan, one of Pakistan’s most violent and inhospitable areas, home to Taliban militants and a separatist uprising.
Today he is a senior advisor on coastal ecosystems with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
He starts almost every day with a visit to the mangroves, which he calls his kids, on Karachi’s Sandspit Beach. Wearing a khaki shirt and trousers, he wades into the swamp up to his waist to see how they’re getting on.
“We are historically a forestry-deficient country, but with the course of time the ratio has reduced alarmingly,” said the 65-year-old Qureshi.
So who is to blame? There are the timber “mafia” who hack away at mangroves and trees, trucking wood off to market by donkey and vehicle to sell as fuel, while the military and government officials are also accused of involvement.
“The current rate of deforestation is very alarming. We could lose our timber completely in two to three decades if not effectively checked,” an environment ministry official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Hussain Bux Bhagat, a conservationist associated with the Sindh provincial wildlife department, says wildlife in the riverine forest, including birds, reptiles and mammals, also suffered severely because of deforestation.
“Particularly high numbers of grey partridge, which nest on trees and don’t leave its habitat have died because of continuing deforestation and last year’s floods,” Bhagat told AFP.
In 1947, when Pakistan was created from the ashes of British colonialism, riverine forests lined the banks of the Indus River.
They were the first line of defence against floods that have deluged the plains annually for thousands of years, as well as against shoreline erosion. Instead, the deforested areas are prone to flooding and landslides.
But riverine and mangrove forest represent only 20 percent of the forest cover in Pakistan — the rest is concentrated in the mountains of the northern provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit and Baltistan and Kashmir.
There, officials, aid workers and residents accuse the authorities and the Taliban of being hand in glove with mafias cutting down trees.
The Swat valley was once the most popular tourist destination of the country before a Taliban insurgency began in 2007. After a major operation, the army declared the area back under control in July 2009.
But conservationists say tens of thousands of pine trees have been cut down, both during the Taliban years and under the military.
A former Forest Development Corporation (FDC) official, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity, said timber felling was one of the main causes of the devastation witnessed in Swat during the floods of 2010.
“Three kinds of actors participated in that: the FDC working for timber mafia, local people and the Taliban, who cut a lot to buy weapons,” he said.
“There are two kinds of timber mafias: the big ones, with a licence, and the local ones, people with no licence who bribe guards.
Numerous local residents said army trucks are seen transporting timber, but army spokesman Colonel Arif Mehmood in Swat told AFP he was “not aware” of the practice.
Others say the rate of deforestation has improved since the army restored control over the valley in July 2009. No department can provide statistics.
The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think tank, has also pointed to links between the timber mafia and Islamist militancy.
“Being shrewd investors, the timber mafia is believed to have spent part of its dividends to sponsor militancy. Huge sums are involved in the business, which has expanded to the hills bordering Afghanistan,” it said in a 2009 report.
“They invest money and energy in Talibanisation, that is how they protect their illegal businesses at the expense of the state’s writ.”

AFP November 2011

They dance in Sindh to capture Punjab!

By Hasan Mansoor

(Written in November 2011)

Shah Mehmood Qureshi can conveniently be regarded as the greatest of all hypocrites and power-hungry individuals who are jumping on Imran Khan’s bandwagon.
   His hypocrisy is evident from the religious allegories he had associated in his speech in Ghotki, where he finally ended his role as the fence-sitter and joined Imran’s Tehrik-e-Insaaf.
   A show in Ghotki can never be applied on the whole Sindh. Ghotki is the smallest of Sindh’s border districts, taken hostage by the influential tribes, whose chiefs are as opportunist and corrupt as elsewhere. They boast on honour killing of women and harbour and nurture criminals to keep people in distress and manipulate election results to their own advantage.
   Local people confirm that majority of the participants of Qureshi’s rally were unknown to them. They had been transported in trucks and lorries from the bordering southern Punjab’s towns.
   “Some of the participants were provided by the influential Mahers of the district, while the rest might form the total supporters of Qureshi who revere him because of his being a gaddi-nasheen of a shrine,” a local political observer told me.
   This rally cannot be regarded as something, which reflects a change in the mood of Sindhis. Both Qureshi and Imran Khan stick to their guns against the government. They spoke of the so-called corrupt practices being committed by Zardari’s government, bragged about their being the clean entities and hit hard against the Sharifs.
   Actually, they discussed Punjab’s politics in Sindh. Both the PTI leaders have stakes in Punjab and they see little prospects in Sindh, the question remains why they chose a place elsewhere to fight for Punjab? Qureshi wanted to show his popularity on trans-provincial scale while Imran was keen to see his bag gets fully stuffed.
   But, none of them spoke about the worst miseries of Sindh caused by the floods the second year running. They talked about the ambiguous NRO controversy, war on terror, United States, Pakistan’s vague sovereignty and Afghanistan and Iraq but deemed it inappropriate to talk on the real problems of Sindh.
   Qureshi, on the occasion, went on to the religious allegories in his speech, which hardly impress Sindhis’ secular minds. Spectacular of all was when he put himself in the shoes of Central Asian warrior Mehmood Ghaznavi by saying he would attack on Somnaath’s temple. He said his rally’s day coincided with the advent of the holy Islamic month of Muharram which, according to him, was a good omen to the country’s secured fate.
   Qureshi received an immediate bashing from across the southern province’s intelligentsia who condemn him for his desire to attack a temple no matter that was a clichéd symbolic notion.
   “Sindhis have always respected the worship places of all faiths and cannot tolerate or appreciate such clichés, which have been created and safeguarded by the powerful establishment,” said one of several statements published in the Sindhi newspapers.
   Sindhis have the history not to support the religious bigots. They still keep their religion and routine life separate despite the deep state’s repeated attempts to corrupt it through the kidnapping and persecution of minority Hindus and their girls’ forced conversion by the mullahs whose sanctuaries are being expanded systematically.
   Imran might take time to keep his finger on the pulse of Sindh, but why Qureshi went so aggressive in his panegyric to his brand-new leader, though he is well accustomed to the Sindhi environs. He is in the process of changing his posture that suits his new party’s right-wing propensities. He wants the people to forget his popular images with Secretary Hillary Clinton showing him sharing broad smiles with his then counterpart whom now he strategically despises.

   One should admire Zardari for his prudent decision in 2008 not to select Qureshi as party’s nominee for the country’s next prime minister. Zardari must have foreseen Qureshi’s hypocoristic leanings that many critics did not.
   But, haven’t Imran started sipping hypocrisy when he gives a clean chit as the foreign minister to Qureshi in Ghotki, an individual whom he had criticised him in his book “Pakistan A Personal History”.
   He writes: “These loans, along with US and European aid money, are like bribes to the Pakistani political elite to keep fighting America’s war for them. This was painfully evident when in October 2010 Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told the European parliament: ‘If you want to help us fight extremism and terrorism, one way of doing that is making Pakistan economically stable.’ Pakistan’s ruling elite threatens the West with fears about Islamic militancy to extract more money out of them.”
   We should still admire Imran Khan, after all, he is the saviour we the poor souls have been waiting for the salvation!
Ends

Pakistan’s shunned HIV victims fight pariah status

by Hasan Mansoor
KARACHI, Dec 1, 2011 (AFP) – Shunned by their families and society, Rubina and Iqbal are a Pakistani couple who have struggled for years to win their lives back and spread a message of respect for fellow victims of HIV/AIDS.
Rubina Naz, 33, one of 12 children born to a labourer, was diagnosed with HIV four years ago, a year after her drug-addicted husband passed away.
“I didn’t know what it was until I was tested positive. I was afflicted with this horrible disease by my first husband, who was an AIDS victim,” said Rubina.
They married when she was 16 years old and had two daughters and two sons together, but Rubina was unaware of her husband’s illness until she read his medical tests after his death and friends advised her to take her own.
Finding out she was HIV positive ruined her life.
“My in-laws threw me out and took my kids. Even most of my own family treated me like a sinner and stayed away when I was desperate to be helped. Those days were horrible,” she said.
Pakistan, the second-largest country in South Asia, stands a few steps behind India and Nepal in terms of the extent of the HIV epidemic.
The National AIDS Control Programme says Pakistan is a “low prevalence, high risk” country, with low rates of the virus across the general population but a high concentration among risk groups such as injecting drug users.
UN figures from 2009 show that there are an estimated 97,400 cases of HIV/AIDS in Pakistan.
Rubina’s meals were always served separately to the rest of her family, who were fearful of contracting the disease, but with her mother’s support she says she has overcome prejudice.
She now works as a kitchen assistant at charity Pakistan Society, dedicated to helping HIV positive people, which is where she met her new husband Mohammad Iqbal, 35, who is HIV positive and recovering from drug addiction.
Iqbal was a tailor in his teens when he was introduced to heroin by friends. He contracted the virus 10 years ago by sharing needles to inject the drug.
“My addiction shocked my parents, who both died early, then my brothers threw me out of home and I was forced to live on the streets,” he said.
A charity gave him the tests that led to his diagnosis. But it was another three years before he decided to get well.
“Continuous hatred towards me wore me out. I decided to live a meaningful life or end it. I opted to live and agreed to get rehabilitated,” he said.
Rubina and Iqbal found each other in the kitchen, which serves food to patients and visitors at the charity’s medical centre.
The charity also goes into communities to help drug addicts across the southern city of Karachi and the wider Sindh province, where it spreads the message that HIV victims can live a normal life and should not be cast out.
“Now I don’t hesitate to see myself in the mirror. I am regaining my lost respect in the world,” Iqbal said.
Rubina’s in-laws have agreed to allow her children to see her regularly and Iqbal’s brothers have permitted him to rejoin the family.
Anti-retroviral drugs that treat the illness are provided free of charge at state-run hospitals, clinics and health centres across Pakistan, meaning that those diagnosed have the chance of a relatively normal life.
So long as Rubina and Iqbal continue to take their daily medication and maintain a healthy lifestyle, Pakistan Society head Saleem Azam said their prognosis is good and their life expectancy should not be affected.
Azam said that women are the least documented victims.
The 2009 survey revealed that 15 percent of wives of injecting drug users in just one district, Larkana, where Pakistan’s political dynasty the Bhuttos have their ancestral seat, are HIV sufferers.
But Azam said the actual incidence may be much higher as many cases go undetected and there could be many women “who die of the disease without even knowing what happened to them.”
“In our male dominant society women have fewer choices to save themselves from their HIV positive husbands. The majority have not heard of the disease and if they do they cannot stop their husbands from afflicting them.”
Rubina and Iqbal have taught their families to respect HIV-positive people but say they will continue their quest to educate the rest.
“It is not over yet as the rest of society is still there to be educated,” said Rubina.

Ends

Illegal lives: Karachi’s two million immigrants face a government crackdown

by Hasan Mansoor
My 2002 report for Himal South Asian Magazine
When Pakistan launched its National Alien Registration Authority (NARA) in January 2002 to address the perceived problem of illegal immigration, an estimated 3.3 million non-citizens were residing unlawfully in the country, close to two million in the southern city of Karachi alone. NARA received a mandate of three years to document illegal residents in Pakistan, specifically those in Karachi, and to issue work permits to non-citizens “who will get themselves registered”. But, perhaps not surprisingly, 18 months into its mission and halfway to its deadline of December 2004, NARA has registered only 35,000 people, just one percent of the estimated total.
The reasons for NARA’s poor performance to date are numerous, though many relate to difficulties inherent in differentiating ‘real’ Pakistanis from non-citizen ‘impostors’. Immigrants and their children have blended into Karachi’s bustling urban life, and many have secured government-issued National Identity Cards (NICs), often with the help of other non-citizens elected (illegally) to local administrative bodies. More broadly, they have created their own patronage networks and ensconced themselves into Karachi’s existing ones, gaining access to jobs, political connections and social services that make them as much residents of the city as any native-born citizen.
Owing to the scale and diversity of the immigrant population, estimates of its size and composition remain rough. In Karachi, the largest segment – about 1.3 million – hails from Bangladesh, while totals from Africa, Burma and India reach into the hundreds of thousands. Most Bangladeshi migrants travel overland to Pakistan via India, where they are sometimes able to make arrangements in advance for work in Karachi, where supposedly pays are higher than anywhere else in South Asia. Karachi is also home to 80,000 Afghans, who are counted as refugees rather than as aliens on the assumption that they will return to their native country once conditions improve.
In a sprawling city of 12 million-plus people, Karachi’s non-citizen residents represent about 15 percent of the total population, and because many of them have secured voting rights, they constitute a significant electoral block. A report prepared by NARA’s Karachi office states that at least 80 unnaturalised immigrants have been elected to a cluster of 20 union councils in the city, six of which are led by non-citizens, though local government officials put the number of elected immigrants at closer to 130. Another three dozen such candidates are believed to have gained office in
the interior of Sindh. And while about half of the non-citizen population in Karachi is concentrated in the city’s western district, it has spread effectively throughout the entire metropolis, often in small squatter settlements, making identification of ‘illegals’ all the more difficult.
On the whole, NARA officials’ efforts to register immigrants appear thwarted at nearly every turn, sometimes violently. Non-citizen residents in the Karachi localities of Machchar colony, Ibrahim Hyderi and Mauripur recently turned back visiting NARA officials with force, and NARA’s efforts outside of the metropolis enjoy no greater success. Attempts to register international migrants in the southern cities of Nooriabad and Thatta, in Sindh, and Hub, in Balochistan, have failed, casualties of patronage networks and organised resistance to the campaign. “The problem is that aliens have got powers to resist and help their other fellows to become Pakistanis”, an officer explains, noting that he and his colleagues are ill-equipped to overcome such tactics. NARA also suffers from more banal organisational woes, in particular cash shortage that prevents it from acquiring a fleet of vehicles or expanding its staff beyond its present four-dozen employees.
Patronage politics
Owing to its size and uncertain legal status, Karachi’s non-citizen community has enmeshed itself in the patronage networks of politicians and political parties, trading votes for political protection. The millions of non-citizen residents living in Karachi have proven to be a valuable vote bank for political parties, particularly for those with weak roots in the metropolis.
Mazhar Shaikh, an additional director general of NARA, expresses dismay at the nearly impossible task of registering non-citizen residents, the fault for which he says rests in large measure with their political connections. “A number of them have become elected nazims [mayors] and councillors, who stop their community members from getting registered”. He says that once elected, these officials push through NIC applications for other non-citizens to help them evade detection by NARA. Shaikh says that he has notified the National Database Registration Authority (NADRA), which issues NICs, about the difficulties NARA faces with identity card evasion tactics. A solution is yet to be found. “A joint line of action is under consideration”, says Shaikh, adding that the powers of some councillors to attest NIC applications may be suspended while discreet investigations are carried out. For its part, NADRA says that it is reviewing candidate filings in an attempt to root out politicians who lack citizenship.
Ejaz Shafi, a former MP who lost an election last year standing from Karachi as a candidate of the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), has championed the cause of Bangladeshi migrants for more than a decade. In return he has received support from the thousands of immigrants for whom he has helped secure NICs and space on voter rolls. Though he lost last year’s race to a candidate of the religious parties alliance, Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, Shafi received strong support from the estimated 20,000 Bangla-speakers in his constituency. As a strong supporter of the community, he refuses to use to the term ‘alien’ to designate persons of Bangladeshi origin living in Pakistan. “They are Pakistanis in all respects, by all conditions universally accepted for citizenship”, he says.
Other parties, such as cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf, Allama Tahir-ul-Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehrik, and former president Farooq Leghari’s Millat Party, have made concerted attempts to
cultivate Bangla speaking voters. Many political aspirants seek support from residents of Machchar colony, a squatter settlement inhabited by 50,000 Bangla-speakers on land owned by the Karachi Port Trust (KPT). The KPT has made several attempts to evict residents, but each time influential politicians come to the aid of the slum-dwellers. “When I was an MP from this area, I did not allow the KPT to evacuate them”, Shafi says, adding that he suggested instead that the port reclaim land from the upscale Clifton locality.
However, not all political parties cultivate the foreign-born vote – indeed, some doubt the calculations on immigrant electoral strength, and others have tapped into local resentment of the large Bengali community to mobilise support. A leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), an offshoot of a partition-era north Indian organisation of Urdu-speakers, argues that patronage networks have not worked to the advantage of immigrants, as despite being included on voter rolls, the government “cautiously sliced them out of Karachi’s population” when it came to distributing resources.
However, this has not stopped parties from pandering to non-citizens at election time, he says, and he accuses several of illegally registering non-citizens as voters. “Even rightwing Jamaat-i-Islami activists have put many Afghan voters on rolls in the city’s central district to harm the MQM”, he says. Another political mobiliser, this one from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), perhaps the most powerful political force in Sindh, says that his group does not register non-citizens, as doing so would harm the interests of Pakistanis.
Controversy surrounding immigrants extends to the job market, where local resentment is perhaps more acute than in the field of politics. For non-citizens who find work, it is typically as domestic servants, as low-wage employees in the garment or fishing industries, or in jobs such as sugarcane pressing. Because they are usually willing to work for less pay
than native-born Pakistanis, they attract the ire of locals as well as muffled praise from employers, who tend to be exploitative.
Many ethnic and nationalist political organisations, as well as labor groups, regularly carry out campaigns against immigrant employment on the ground that recent arrivals damage the economic prospects of the native-born. Along with the MQM, the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM) opposes the growing presence of non-citizen workers in Sindh’s economy. The parties’ election manifestoes accuse immigrants of depressing local wages, and promise improved job prospects for native-born (Urdu-speaking) Pakistanis once they are able to prevent migrants from participating in the economy. “These aliens are a burden on Sindh”, JSQM chairman Bashir Qureshi says, adding that it is the government’s responsibility to solve the problem.
Searching for ‘solutions’
The MQM’s Kunwar Khalid Younus argues that the government should settle the illegal immigration problem once and for all. “What we need is just the political will to do that”, he says. As far back as 1993, intelligence agencies considered competing proposals to ‘solve’ the problem, one being a massive repatriation scheme, primarily of Bangladeshis. This was deemed impractical, however, as for its part, Pakistan refuses to take in the ‘Biharis’ – the nearly 300,000 Urdu-speakers who have languished in 66 Bangladeshi urban refugee camps since the early 1970s. In any event, the ‘exporting’ countries are unlikely to cooperate with Islamabad’s repatriation schemes; in August 1996, Dhaka refused to accept 70 Bangladeshis deported from Karachi because they carried Pakistani NICs and passports.
What ‘solutions’, if any, can be found to the non-citizen resident question is a matter of pressing concern in Islamabad. In addition to launching NARA and debating the repatriation scheme, Islamabad has investigated other methods of regulating immigrants’ existence and bringing them within the scope of the law. There is a process by which non-citizens can secure legal residence and work status, but its costs are prohibitively expensive for most immigrants: until recently, PKR 10,000 (USD 180) and PKR 1000, respectively, for registration and work permit cards. Even after reductions to PKR 2500 and PKR 500, most non-citizens lack the finances to take advantage of these options, particularly when becoming ‘legal’ is not viewed as a pressing concern. “We often spend much less than this to get [forged] Pakistani documents”, a Bangladeshi migrant living in Federal B Area explains. For citizens of Bangladesh and Burma, there is also the option of formally applying for Pakistani citizenship under Rule 13/A of the Citizenship Act, though Islamabad has approved less than 1000 of such naturalisation applications till now.
Another idea is to provide migrants with transit back to their countries of origin on non-citizen Pakistani passports. A committee convened by the federal government, which included two Bangla speakers as ex-officio members, recommended the issuing of so-called ‘white passports’ to migrants from Bangladesh and Burma so that they may visit their countries of origin and migrate back, if so inclined. But to receive a white passport, migrants would first have to register with NARA and fill out Form E-I under the Citizenship Act, a step most non-citizen residents are hesitant to take. However, this plan possesses the advantage of offering an avenue for migrants to return to their birth countries, if they so desire, and some NGOs have expressed interest in facilitating such a process and providing financial support to
returnees.
While many Bangla speakers in Pakistan arrived relatively recently, there is also the challenge of adjudicating the citizenship claims of Bengalis whose residence dates to the 24 years between the 1947 partition and Bangladeshi
independence. The same federal committee that issued the recommendation about white passports also proposed granting Pakistani citizenship to Bengalis – not Bangladeshis – living in (West) Pakistan before the Bengali nationalist capture of Dhaka on 16 December 1971. After Bangladesh’s war of independence, fewer than 25,000 Bengalis opted to remain in Pakistan, according to NARA director general Shaikh, while most of the rest migrated to the former eastern wing. A 1978 amendment to the Citizenship Act nullified the Pakistani citizenship of those domiciled in erstwhile East
Pakistan. Bengalis remaining in Pakistan were required to submit a Form E-I to the home department of their province of residence and apply for citizenship, although according to the Sindh home department, no Bengalis submitted such forms in that province after the war. Many of these people have led a precarious legal existence for the past three decades.
The government committee also held meetings with Bengali community representatives and, in response to concerns that they lack documentary proof of residence, proposed that local police officials be empowered to recommend the granting of citizenship after verification. Critics, however, say that this proposal would only lead to massive corruption among police officers. Another widely shared concern among non-citizen residents is the suspicion that the entire government registration process is merely a plot to launch deportation proceedings once particulars are known to authorities. Interior ministry officials dismiss this claim, and note that none of the 35,000 migrants registered to date have been deported. “On the contrary, we are trying to resolve their civic and social problems, including extending
them educational, health and other facilities”, says one official. He also discloses that the government committee has been asked to review other countries’ immigration and citizenship policies in order to suggest improvements in Pakistan’s system.
13 kg of bad publicity
Debates about the role of ethnic-minority non-citizens in Pakistani society and politics, and the proposed methods of dealing with the concerns of and about them, are also coloured by anxieties about the supposedly dangerous and illegal practices of some elements of the immigrant population. Statements from Pakistan’s interior ministry indicate that there is increased official concern about non-citizen residents’ involvement with religious schools accused of fueling sectarian hatred, and with criminal activities ranging from burglaries and murder to international drug trafficking. A recent interior ministry socio-economic survey showed that non-citizens are concentrated in 22 localities of Karachi, many in ‘sensitive’ places near sea, oil and power installations and army cantonments, prompting the police to recommend mass evictions in these areas.
Concerns about links to religious violence are heightened given Karachi’s experience with sectarian violence. NARA research shows that the migrant community is making concentrated use of 29 government schools and nine hospitals, and operates 44 madrasas, about five percent of the city’s 869 Islamic schools. Regarding those schools, authorities say that, despite it being a small proportion of the city’s total, they are nevertheless worried about an influx of students into these largely unregulated institutions.
Today, most foreign students in the madrasas come from Afghan, Burmese or Bangladeshi backgrounds, although until two years ago there were also large numbers of African and Southeast Asian students. With the opening of the US military campaign in Afghanistan in October 2001, however, overseas enrolment in Karachi’s madrasas plummeted, and now foreign-born students represent only four percent of the 264,169 madrasa student total for Sindh, 85 percent of which is concentrated in Karachi, according to a recent police report.
The already precarious position of foreign-born residents in Karachi vis-à-vis the police is further complicated by military and law enforcement efforts associated with the US ‘war on terror’. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), with the help of Pakistani authorities, is closely monitoring mobile phone conversations in Pakistan, and has arrested hundreds of foreigners suspected of links to Al Qaeda and other militant outfits. The FBI conducts operations in the country with the blessings and assistance of Pakistani officials, who have toed the US line since September 2001. Among the several thousand people arrested to date in these operations, officials say that about 700 are non-Pakistanis, mostly Afghans and Arabs, but there are also some Africans, Bangladeshis and Burmese.
The police also highlight migrants’ participation in local crime, in particular their connections to robbery, kidnapping, narcotics smuggling, human trafficking and murder. “We have evidence of their involvement in serious offences, and we have recommended that the government take the issue seriously”, the inspector general of Sindh police, Syed Kamal Shah, alleges. According to a police report, non-citizens are implicated in a widespread network of trafficking girls from Bangladesh and Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates. Police also suspect that immigrants have worked as hired killers
in Karachi’s recent spate of high-profile murders.
These concerns came to the surface in late spring with the high-profile arrests of three Bengali drug smugglers. On 21 May, Bangladeshi airport authorities arrested three women traveling on Pakistani passports for possession of 13 kilograms of heroin valued at USD 2.25 million, one of the largest drug hauls ever in Dhaka. Pakistani authorities had tipped off their Bangladeshi counterparts, who discovered the contraband in paste tubes hidden in the women’s luggage. A preliminary investigation into the case by Pakistani officials uncovered that the traffickers were Karachi-based
Bengalis who had bribed officials to receive documents attesting Pakistani citizenship. According to Pakistani authorities, travel on forged or falsely issued Pakistani documents is quite common, though it is ‘real’ Pakistani citizens who receive a bad reputation for such practices. Several Afghans have also been caught committing similar crimes, though Bengalis are believed to be more frequent offenders.
The Dhaka drug bust, extensively covered in the Pakistani media, led to hand wringing and accusation-leveling in Karachi. An official of the PPP cites the heroin arrests as evidence of the negative consequences of migrants participating in the political process. Others point to the implications of the incident for the entire bureaucracy. A thorough investigation into the Dhaka case, if and when it occurs, could raise troubling questions about the efficiency and integrity of NARA, which issues NICs and prepares voting registers, as well as other departments in the internal affairs ministry, such as the passport-issuing authority. Precisely how long corrupt practices have been occurring, and the extent to which bribery permeates the system, are difficult to assess, although anecdotal evidence paints a worrying
picture.
The heroin arrests prompted great interest at least in part because they touched on another widely held concern about non-citizen residents – their alleged widespread drug use. According to a United Nations Development Programme report, drug abuse among immigrants in Pakistan is rampant, and because of needle-sharing authorities suspect that HIV is on the rise in the community. Even so, such drug use is both a cause of concern and a symptom of their perilous condition, as many take up the expensive indulgence to alleviate the psychological stress and general frustration of leading a quasi-legal existence.
Yet, whether it concerns illegal activities or dangerous habits, official and popular scrutiny of Bangla speakers is greater than that of native-born, Urdu-speaking Pakistanis, and there are concerns that allegations of criminal activity are being exaggerated to malign the community. An October 2001 report in the Dawn of Karachi on immigrants in Pakistan states, quoting police sources, that “the over-all involvement of Bengalis in crime is negligible”, and that “contrary to a general perception”, at most 200 Bengalis are involved in crime in Karachi. This appears to contradict some of NARA’s positions, such as the claim that non-citizen residents are “adding to the crime rate”. Given that persons who lack clear legal status will likely seek to avoid activities provoking the interest of law enforcement officials, there appear to be grounds for doubting some of NARA’ s more sweeping charges of mass criminality in the migrant community.

Ends

Bomb attack on Pakistan train kills two

Two people were killed and a further 10 injured when a bomb exploded on railway tracks in southern Pakistan early Wednesday, police officials said.
   The explosion, which caused two of the train's cars to derail, occurred in the town of Thul at around 2:00 am, police official Murtaza Mirani told AFP.
   Thul is some 500 kilometres (300 miles) north of Karachi, the region's main city, while the train was headed for the northwestern city of Peshawar.
   "Fortunately, the bogies did not overturn as the train was slow, thus averting a bigger catastrophe," Mirani said.
   Ashraf Soomro, a local railway official, said that the injured had been taken to a hospital, while the other passengers were being looked after.
   "We are busy repairing the damaged tracks and will send the passengers to Peshawar as soon as possible," he said.
   Mirani said so far no terrorist groups had claimed responsibility for the attack, adding: "We can't comment right now until our investigation is complete."
   Thul lies in the Jacobabad district of the southern Sindh province. Terrorist attacks blamed on Islamist militants are less frequent in the south than in the country's restive northwestern border area with Afghanistan.
Ends August, 2012

Pakistanis resist creeping media vigilantism

by Hasan Mansoor

Most Pakistanis dislike the police, blaming them for being corrupt and aggressive -- but now the media is earning a similar reputation for its frequent attacks on people's privacy.
   Pakistan's ever-growing freewheeling private television stations have given birth to "vigilante journalism" aimed at exposing people -- often ordinary members of the public -- they say are breaching social morals.
   Former military ruler Pervez Musharraf liberalised the media in 1999, opening the way for the first time to private news and entertainment channels. There are now more than 80, 40 of them broadcasting round-the-clock news in five languages.
   In January, TV anchor Maya Khan caused a storm of protest with her show "Raid in the Morning", in which she and a group of veiled women chased couples in a park accusing them of behaving immorally.
   Many fled, but Khan pounced on one couple and badgered them with questions, tricking them into answering by telling them the camera was not running.
   The show provoked furious criticism on social networking websites Facebook and Twitter, and eventually a 5,000-name petition forced bosses at Samaa TV station to sack her.
   Khan refused repeated requests to talk to AFP, but in an interview with Express TV she was unrepentant, saying what she did was in the public interest.
   "My heart is satisfied because whatever I did was done for the betterment of society. But, still if it hurt people, I apologise," she said, insisting that what she presented on her show was "not real but a re-enactment" of the perceived events.
   Pakistani liberals praised Samaa for getting rid of Khan, but their celebrations were short-lived as she was quickly hired by another station, ARY, to host their morning show.
   The Khan incident is typical of stunts carried out by television stations who say they are safeguarding social morals in what is a deeply conservative country.
   Morning shows, such as Khan's, are the most popular. Hosts are well paid and eager to hold onto their audience in a competitive market.
   "Which is why, highly-paid anchors go for ventures like Maya Khan to keep business going," one senior official at a private channel told AFP on condition of anonymity.
   But Mehnaz Rehman, a director of the Aurat Foundation, an organisation which fights for women's rights, said it was a dangerous trend that threatened social order.
   "This is not journalism, this is purely vigilantism, something that does not suit good people, especially those who claim to be fighting for the rights of masses," she said.
   "Media should be responsible and think beyond commercialisation, especially where it hits the society's very social fabric."
   In a country where young people already feel intimidated by intolerance, 25-year-old Mohsin Haleem, an executive, said media has harassed rather than empowered them.
   Pakistan has suffered since the 1970s from encroaching Islamisation that has made society, particularly in the cities and particularly for women, more conservative.
   While the Internet, and sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide some interaction, gender segregation is common and public entertainment is limited.
   "The events of vigilantism by our TV channels have discouraged many of our youth to go in public parks, even they preferred to stay elsewhere on Valentine's Day," he said.
   It is not only courting couples that have been on the receiving end of intrusive television exposes.
   Ghulam Haider works in a health diagnostics laboratory which has been gatecrashed twice by reporters from two different TV channels insisting on filming the premises to check the facilities -- an act only the government is authorised to take.
   "They are more assertive and ruthless in attacking us in the name of freedom of expression. They don't respect our freedom and individual liberty," said Haider, 69.
   "The reporters take booms in their hands and gatecrash anywhere without permission. They especially do this in the places which are inhabited or owned by those having little influence in the society," Haider said.
   Talat Hussain, who hosts a political show on Dawn TV, is an exception to the trend and has exposed media vigilantism.
   He was the only anchor to dedicate an entire show to the Khan story.
   But while he says that shows like Khan's break boundaries and intrude, he believes the media has the potential to correct itself.
   "We are a young and evolving media. The action by a TV management to fire the host for chasing people shows that potential of self-correction and self-accountability," he said.
   "Any reporter who intrudes into the privacy of people should realise, if they continue to do this the market will turn against us."
Ends

Afghan scavengers in Karachi crosshairs

by Hasan Mansoor

Barkat Khan was shot dead as he slept, curled up in the muck in one of the roughest parts of Karachi. He was a dirt-poor 13-year-old Afghan who never went to school and never dared to dream of a better life.
   Friends say he was an innocent victim of an increasingly vicious cycle of ethnic violence in Pakistan's largest city, a battleground between economic migrants from the northwest and Afghanistan, and original settlers from India.
   Barkat was one of more than 20,000 children -- the vast majority of them Afghans -- who work for $2 a day, collecting rubbish dumped by the 18 million residents of Karachi.
   They toil from dawn to night, braving the punishing summer climate and health dangers posed by toxic waste. Without passports and legal status, they have little protection.
   And now they are caught up in one of Pakistan's most under-reported wars: the violence that tears neighbourhoods of the country's richest city to shreds, trampling underfoot the unknown and the defenceless.
   "Karachi has become too dangerous. People are being killed indiscriminately, among them, my friend," said a mournful 12-year-old Jamali, picking up a soggy piece of cardboard.
   He and Barkat came to Pakistan as babies when their parents fled the southern city of Kandahar when US-led troops invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.
   Like tens of thousands of Afghans, the family eventually moved to Karachi in search of work, abandoning their first port of call, the southwestern city of Quetta where Taliban and their families are said to have settled.
   "Barkat started collecting garbage right after arriving in Karachi, along with his father. Our families lived together for some time," said Jamali.
   Five years later, Barkat was dead, shot in May at point blank range as he slept outside a food stall that offers free dinners to Karachi's poorest. His parents are devastated by the loss of their only child.
   "Barkat was a lovable boy, very hardworking, who wanted to earn a lot of money to see his parents happy, especially his mother who is shattered after his death," said his cousin, Mohammad Mukhtar, 19, who also collects rubbish.
   "Relatives told me that she hasn't yet recovered from the shock."

                        -- Rising death toll --
                        -----------------------
   Police say Barkat was an unwitting victim of ethnic and political violence that has reached record levels in Karachi, Pakistan's economic powerhouse, which accounts for 42 percent of GDP.
   The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says more than 1,100 people have been killed so far this year -- the vast majority without any political affiliation whatsoever.
   If the killings continue at the same pace, 2012 will top the 1,715 who perished last year, itself the worst death toll in 16 years.
   The troubles are blamed on Mohajirs, Urdu speakers who migrated from India after partition and who dominate the city, and an influx of Pashtuns from Afghanistan and Pakistan's northwest.
   Migration and population growth have put enormous pressure on resources in the Arabian Sea port city, where the economy has been under serious pressure since 9/11.
   The Mohajirs are represented by the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), led by Altaf Hussain, who exiled himself to Britain in 1992 over threats to his life.
   It has 52 seats in the Sindh provincial assembly, while the secular Awami National Party (ANP), the leading Pashtun representation in Karachi, has two seats.
   According to official figures, there are 500,000 Afghans in the city, 80 percent registered as refugees and the rest undocumented or illegal economic migrants.
   The vast majority of them live in poverty, like Jamali who lives in Koochi, one of three ghettos reserved for Afghans in the city.
   His family live near the neighbourhood where a UN doctor from Ghana was shot while working on a polio vaccination programme that had been condemned by the Taliban.
   But the rag-pickers live at around 400 compounds dotted around the city, divided by bamboo into dozens of cubicles shaded from the sun by polythene sheets.
   Each cubicle is shared by two to three, who pile up plastic bags stuffed with waste to snatch a few hours' sleep, before rising at dawn to start again.
              -- "Nobody knows when a bullet will hit" --
              -------------------------------------------
   Karachi produces around 12,000 tons of waste a day and has no proper solid waste disposal system. Much of it goes into the drains or is dumped along roads or across the city.
   Part of it ends up at government designated landfill sites, which seldom handle waste disposal on any scientific basis.
   Contractors pay money to their parents every week, based on the weight of the rubbish they collect, and the children eat at restaurants and charities offering free meals, in order to save as much of their salaries as possible for their families.
   The refuse is sold onto middlemen, who sell it to recycling factories -- paper, cardboard, copper, iron, animal bones and other discarded articles are all in high demand.
   Officials say rag-pickers do a valuable job, but that there are risks involved.
   Rana Asif Habib, head of Initiator, a charity working for underprivileged children, says they handle hospital waste without the necessary protection kits, leading to contractions of diseases such as hepatitis and scabies.
   "They also get infected by eating food from the garbage. They can't afford to see a doctor. If they want to, no state-run hospitals treat them well."
   Afghans are particularly vulnerable, he added.
   "They are often antagonised by police and their employers, but they can't complain because they are not Pakistanis."
   Despite the dangers, Jamali still thinks Karachi is better than Afghanistan.
   "Karachi is very dangerous. Nobody knows when a bullet will hit, yet we have a lot more opportunities here. We are not going anywhere now."
Ends