Pakistan’s Shia Under Attack, Human Rights
Watch
JULY 7, 2014
Phelim Kine
The group of around 300 Shia Hazara pilgrims who
had been visiting religious shrines in neighboring Iran never knew what hit
them. Within minutes after they arrived at the Pakistani border town of Taftan
on June 9, the heavily-armed gunmen
from the Sunni Islamist militant group Jaish –ul-Islam rampaged through
their hotel.
The attackers –
including suicide bombers – raked
the pilgrims with machine gun fire and tossed hand grenades. At
least 30 died, including at
least nine women and a child. After a prolonged firefight, Pakistani security
forces killed the
attackers.
For Pakistan’s
beleaguered Shia, who constitute 20 percent of the
country’s overwhelmingly Muslim population, the incident was gruesome déjà
vu. An attack on a Shia pilgrim bus convoy
travelling to Taftan, in southwestern Balochistan province, from Iran on
January 21 killed at least 22 pilgrims and injured dozens of others. The
government has not arrested any suspects in that incident.
That earlier attack
was claimed by the Sunni militant group Lakshar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ),
a Pakistani-Taliban -affiliated organization that views Shia Muslims
as heretics and their killing as religiously justified. Pakistani media reported that the
government had ignored intelligence warnings of an impending attack ahead of
the June 9 massacre. Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan responded
to the attack by banning Shia
pilgrims from traveling by road between Quetta and the Iranian border, saying
it was impossible to “fully secure” the route.
The Taftan attacks
– and the Pakistan government’s failure to adequately protect the Shia or to
apprehend their killers – are scandalously symptomatic of an epidemic of violence that
has claimed the lives of thousands of Pakistani Shia since 2008. Human Rights
Watch has recorded the killing of 850 Shia by Pakistani Sunni militants in
2012 and 2013 alone. As international attention focuses on the growing
threat of Sunni-Shia sectarian violence in
Iraq following the incursion of the militant group the Islamic State in Iraq
and Syria (ISIS), a Human Rights Watch report released
on June 30 documents an ongoing vicious campaign of violence against the Shia
in Pakistan.
There has been
sporadic sectarian violence between Pakistan’s
Sunni and Shia militant groups for decades. But in the past five years, that
violence has become overwhelmingly one-sided as groups including Jaish –ul-Islam and
the LeJ have waged an increasingly brutal campaign against
Pakistan’s Shia. Balochistan has become the epicenter for this slaughter due to
its 700-mile porous border with Afghanistan. That proximity to Afghanistan has
made the province a nexus of
Taliban militancy, fostering the emergence of domestic Sunni extremist groups
as the LeJ.
Following the US
invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Balochistan’s Hazara community has borne the
brunt of the Sunni militant violence due to their distinctive facial features, which easily
identify them as Shia and Hazara. More than 500 Hazara have been killed
in sectarian attacks in Balochistan since
2008.
Since 2009,
LeJ killings of Shia Hazara have morphed from the targeting of individuals
including Hazara police personnel, doctors, bureaucrats and business people, to
mass bombing attacks that have killed dozens. Two attacks in January and
February 2013 by LeJ militants against Hazara in Balochistan’s provincial
capital, Quetta, which is home a half-million Hazaras, resulted in the highest death tolls for
individual acts of sectarian violence in Pakistan since Pakistan’s wrenching partition
from India in 1947.
On January 30, a
LeJ suicide bombing of a Quetta snooker club frequented
by Hazaras killed 96 and injured at least 150. Many of the dead and injured
were victims of a car bomb that
detonated near the club 10 minutes after the initial blast, striking those who
had gone to assist the injured. On February 17, a bomb detonated in a vegetable market in
a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Quetta killed at least 84 Hazara and
injured more than 160. LeJ militants had rigged hundreds of kilograms of
explosives to a water tanker truck, which they detonated in the middle of the crowded
shopping district.
The Pakistani government’s response to this
violemce suggests incompetence, indifference or possible complicity by
security forces and other state personnel with the extremists. Authorities
have failed to apprehend or
prosecute members of militant groups, including the LeJ, that have claimed
responsibility for such attacks. While Pakistan and Balochistan
authorities claim to have arrested dozens
of suspects linked to attacks against Shia since 2008, only a handful have been
actually charged with any crimes.
The poster child of
Pakistani impunity for killings of Shia Hazara is Malik Ishaq, the operational chief of the LeJ
since 2002. In October 1997, Ishaq admitted to
an Urdu language newspaper his involvement in the killing of over 100 people.
He has faced prosecution for
alleged involvement in some 44 incidents of violence involving killings of 70
people, the majority Shia. However, the
courts have not convicted him for any of those killings and have acquitted him in 40 terrorism-related
cases. They include three acquittals by a Rawalpindi court on
May 29 on the basis that “evidence against Ishaq was not sufficient for further
proceedings.”
That culture of
impunity has traumatized Quetta’s Hazara community, and safety concerns have
effectively ghettoized them. Since 2012,
Quetta’s Hazara have been compelled to limit their activities to
the Hazara-dominated neighborhoods of Marriabad and Hazara Town. That has
imposed increasing economic hardship on
the community and limited their freedom of movement and safe access to
education. Hazara unwilling to endure such economic and social privation
have fled Pakistan to seek refuge in other
countries.
Until the Pakistan
government takes all necessary measures to stop that campaign of violence, the
slaughter of Shia in Balochistan will continue with a vengeance.
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