By Charles Recknagel
Pakistan faces the prospect of new rounds of violence between majority Sunni and minority Shiite Muslims as the Shiia next week (6 April) hold one of their most important annual religious observances. Correspondent Charles Recknagel looks at a conflict which has taken more than 300 lives in recent years.
Lahore, Pakistan; 28 March 2001 (RFE/RL) -- It is not easy to find someone who will talk at the Lahore mosque where earlier this month three masked gunmen shot dead nine worshippers, including a 12-year-old boy.
The three policemen now stationed beside the mosque warn reporters away, saying interviewing local residents will stir up trouble. That is because the residents are still grieving for the victims, most of whom lived on the adjacent streets in this crowded, middle-class neighborhood.
But as people gather, one man says he will describe what happened:
"There were a couple of people with guns. They came and they started, indiscriminately started, shooting at the people praying. More than 10 people died on the spot and some died at the hospital and a lot of people are injured. [The victims] are all of this neighborhood, they usually came every day for prayer."
The crowd is tense because this is the latest incident in a continuing cycle of sectarian violence in Pakistan that has killed more than 300 people in recent years. The violence is carried out by extremists belonging to both the country's Sunni Muslim majority and its Shiite Muslim minority, which makes up about 20 percent of the population.
Police have not yet caught the gunmen who attacked the mosque and have named no suspects. But the assailants are popularly believed to be members of the armed wing of an extremist Shiite party, the Tehrik-e-Jafiriya-e-Pakistan, or TJP, the Movement for the Imposition of Shiite Law in Pakistan.
One reason to suspect the TJP is that the mosque victims included a local leader of an arch-rival Sunni party, whose members often have attacked Shiia. That is the Sipah-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan , or SSP, the Guardians of the Friends of the Prophet.
If the TJP is in fact responsible, that would make the mosque attack another of those vengeance rampages by sectarian gunmen which, in the past two months alone, have killed 45 people. The spark for the latest spiral of violence was Pakistan's execution in February of Sunni extremist and SSP member Haq Nawaz, convicted for the 1990 murder of Iranian diplomat Ardeshir Sadegh Ganji in Lahore.
Now as the Shiia prepare next week to hold one of their most important annual religious observances -- Ashura -- Pakistan is bracing for the possibility of more trouble.
The government has issued a string of strongly worded pronouncements that it plans to crack down on anyone who uses the occasion to provoke violence. It says it is considering setting up military courts to try people who instigate or carry out sectarian killings and has ordered police to step up security for religious processions in the cities and countryside.
At the same time, moderate religious leaders on both sides have vowed to make no provocative speeches and to work together to keep tempers cool.
But even if the tense days ahead pass without incident, Pakistanis know the sectarian violence is almost certain to resume later.
One sign of how much of a part of Pakistan's life sectarian violence has become is the portraits of suspected assailants which police regularly run in newspapers. A current public notice offers rewards of up to $100,000 for information leading to the capture of a dozen men.
Catching the killers has proved difficult. Many of the Sunni suspects are believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, where they take refuge with the ruling Taliban militia, itself a radical Sunni Muslim group adamantly opposed to Shiism. The Pakistan government has presented the Taliban with a list of 120 names of men suspected of killing Shiia whom it wants extradited, but Taliban officials say they don't know where the men are.
Political analysts and journalists in Pakistan say the sectarian killings are the work of a small numbers of extremists on both sides. They say that most Sunni and Shiia live peacefully together and socialize easily, apart from marrying largely within their own communities.
But the extremists have been able to use violence to fan long-standing tensions over Shiite demands for greater minority rights. Also, while moderate Sunni leaders in recent years have been willing to discuss Shiite grievances, radical Sunni groups like the SSP have demanded the Pakistani government declare the Shiia non-Muslims.
Haider Javed Syed, a journalist with the Urdu-language daily "Aaj (Today)" in Lahore, says radicals on both sides have been able to build up their followings partly thanks to an explosive growth in the number of Pakistan's religious schools, or madrassas, during the last two decades.
Successive Pakistani governments have encouraged or tolerated the opening of new madrassas to compensate for shortages of private schools in Pakistan, where education is not compulsory. The madrassas, supported by religious foundations at home and abroad, offer students free tuition and board, which private schools do not.
Today there are an estimated 40,000 madrassas in Pakistan, compared with only 900 in 1971. Their curricula are outside the state's educational system and center on religious studies, with many emphasizing narrow interpretations of faith and little tolerance for variations. The graduation certificates that the schools issue are not recognized as qualifications for state jobs or employment in much of the private sector.
Journalist Javed Syed says that because the madrassa students have few employment prospects, they become easy recruits for extremist groups.
"According to some surveys, in 1985 there were some 32,000 to 40,000 people studying in madrassas. Now there are more than 100,000 persons studying there. They cannot do any sort of professional work because they are not trained for it. So there is nothing left for them to do but become part of these religious and sectarian disputes, because they can't do any other job."
Javed Syed says he himself comes from a family where Sunni and Shiia live easily together. His mother and father are Sunni but among the sons, three are Shiia and four Sunni. As for his sisters, four are Sunni and one Shiia.
That mix of Sunni and Shiia also shows up in the lists of dead after individual sectarian attacks. In a recent attack targeting Shiia in the town of Sheikhapour, 30 km from Lahore, 16 people died, including five Sunni.
But the killers, be they from the SSP or TJP, show no remorse for killing their own community members in their rampages, which often take the form of wild drive-by shootings with automatic weapons.
Javed Syed says the extremists' attitudes were well summed-up by three suspects in the Sheikhapour shooting who appeared in court recently. The judge asked them if they felt any guilt for killing Shiia and they said 'no.' Then the judge asked if they felt any remorse for also killing members of their own Sunni sect. The three answered with one voice: 'no.'
Their reason: The Sunni, they said, should not have been sitting with the Shiia.
Conflicts between Islam's two main rival branches, the traditional Sunni and the reform Shiia, are almost as old as the religion itself and no stranger to South Asia.
But many Pakistanis say they are shocked by the level of violence that extremist groups of both sects are engaging in today.
The violence, in which 300 people have died in recent years, has seen rival sect members carry out assassinations in crowded bazaars, using automatic weapons and hand grenades that kill both their targets and bystanders. It has also seen masked gunmen walk into mosques and indiscriminately spray bullets at entire congregations, including children.
Mohammed Waseem, an expert on Pakistani society and politics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, says traditional conflicts between the communities began to escalate about 20 years ago, when Pakistanis watched two epic struggles take place in neighboring states.
One, the 1979 Islamic revolution in overwhelmingly Shiite Iran, inspired many Pakistani Shiia to demand more rights for their minority, which makes up some 20 percent of Pakistan's population.
The other, the Sunni Afghan Mujahedeen's 10-year war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, galvanized the Pakistani Sunni majority's own sense of identity. One result was less tolerance of those who do not share it. Mohammed Waseem says:
"The Iranian revolution and the Afghan resistance movement against the Soviet [forces] in Kabul, these two movements in a way inspired Shiia and Sunni sectarian movements in Pakistan. So, for the last 20 years, that source of inspiration from the neighborhood of Pakistan has been operating."
Immediately after the Islamic revolution in Iran, some 100,000 Pakistani Shiia surrounded the parliamentary complex in Islamabad to demand they be exempted from a state-collected religious tithe, called zakat. They said their sect does not recognize the tithe, which is used to fund Sunni-administered religious schools and charities.
The government of then military strongman President Zia ul Haq granted the exemption. But Sunni militant groups mobilized in response. In later years, the most radical began demonstrations to demand the Shiia be declared non-Muslims.
Today, the most extreme parties on either side, the Sunni SSP and the Shiite TJP, count their members in the thousands. They have become adept at fanning sectarian passions by using fax machines to instantly disseminate propaganda nationwide -- even as they are banned from the airwaves. In addition, the ready availability of arms in Pakistan -- in part due to the continuing Afghan conflict -- makes it easy for their armed wings to carry out the vengeance street assaults that keep tensions high.
But Waseem says one curious thing about the conflict is that, apart from religious doctrine, there are few differences between the two communities. In most areas of Pakistan, they share similar social and economic standings and in everyday life they socialize easily. Waseem says:
"The Shiia are somewhat more urbanized, somewhat more educated and better represented in [professional] services here and there, but overall the differences in class terms cannot be described in sharp terms. So one can say that the conflict is between households and between activists belonging to the same class."
One exception is Pakistan's Jhang district, in the eastern state of Punjab, where some of the worst violence has occurred. There, rural Shiia -- including both landowners and peasants -- are pitted against Sunni urbanites. The enmity is also partly ethnic: the Shiia are native Punjabi speakers, while the Sunni are largely Urdu-speaking newer arrivals.
As Pakistan now braces for possible new rounds of violence on the occasion of annual Shiite religious processions next week (6 April), moderate religious leaders on both sides have met and jointly said they will work to keep the peace. They have also said they will cooperate with security forces to keep order.
That is in line with efforts in recent years by successive Pakistani governments and by the moderate leaders themselves to get the two communities to work together to resolve the conflict.
Waseem says that, so far, the two sides have been able to make progress on some disputes. One is Shiite anger over the state-approved curriculum of religious classes in schools, which they say focuses only on Sunni Islam. Waseem:
"There have been some efforts at negotiations between the rival communities themselves. Sometimes the Shiia ulema (religious leaders) and the Sunni ulema have tried to thrash out differences between themselves, for example, on the issue of straightening out the curriculum, which is sectarian, predominantly speaking."
But both sides have resisted any effort by Islamabad to bring their privately run religious schools, or madrassas, under greater government control or to impose a tighter audit of their receipts of money from abroad. The government sees these steps as essential to curbing the teaching of religious intolerance and what many Pakistanis believe is substantial foreign funding for both sects' most extreme parties.
Pakistani newspapers regularly report that Iran provides funds to militant Shiite groups, while Arab states fund militant Sunni ones. Journalists say the outside support began in the 1980s as Tehran sought to export the Islamic revolution and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states sought to counter it. Both Tehran and Riyadh deny charges they support militant leaders and madrassas in Pakistan today.
In recent months, the government of military ruler General Pervez Musharraf has discussed passing a law to ban the most violent religious parties. But many in Pakistan feel that is unlikely.
Western diplomats say the reason is that many of the most extreme parties also field resistance fighters in Kashmir -- where Pakistan backs a separatist struggle against India. That makes the militant groups a key player in what Islamabad considers to be the most important contest in the region today, even as it condemns the militants' excesses at home.
Pakistan and Iran both say they want to maintain good neighborly ties. But there are two issues which regularly strain their efforts to do so.
The first is Afghanistan, where Islamabad supports the ruling Taliban militia. Tehran, along with Russia and several Central Asian states, backs the opposition Northern Alliance.
The second is sectarian violence in Pakistan, which regularly sees clashes between extremist Sunni and Shiite Islamic militants. The sectarian violence has killed more than 300 people in recent years and has occasionally spilled over into attacks by radical Sunni gunmen on Iranian citizens in Pakistan.
Both Tehran and Islamabad are still dealing with one of the most dramatic killings of Iranians in Pakistan, the 1990 shooting of Ardeshir Sadegh Ganji, director-general of an Iranian cultural center in Lahore. That murder, followed by the gunning down of six Iranian cadets, created diplomatic tensions that, more than 10 years later, remain high.
After Ganji's shooting, most of the suspects fled to Afghanistan, where they took refuge with the ruling Taliban militia. Ever since, Iran has accused Islamabad of using the militia as a cover for not trying the killers. But Pakistan, which has made public appeals to the Taliban to extradite the suspects, says its efforts have been rebuffed, leaving it powerless to do more.
The Ganji case returned violently to the headlines last month when Pakistan executed one of the killers who was unable to get to Afghanistan -- Sunni extremist Haq Nawaz. His hanging sparked several weeks of new sectarian violence in northwestern Pakistan and around Lahore, in which some 45 people died.
Sunni radicals in Pakistan have targeted Iranians because they say Tehran plays a direct role in the conflict. The Sunni extremist SSP accuses Tehran of arming and financing its arch-rival, the extremist Shiite TJP. The Shiite group, along with Tehran, rejects the charge and, in turn, accuses Saudi Arabia of bankrolling the SSP. That charge is denied by Riyadh.
For its part, the Iranian leadership regards both Sunni extremists in Pakistan and Islamabad's support for the Taliban as part of a dangerous resurgence of militant Sunni Islam on its borders. That has made Iran skeptical of Pakistan's attempts to ease the tensions by pursuing Ganji's killers -- even when Pakistan recently sent Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider to Kabul to ask the Taliban to extradite them.
Rifaat Hussein, a foreign policy specialist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, says Haider's trip last month included a personal appeal to Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Omar to send back the militants.
"[Pakistan officials] recently have made two or three appeals, including a personal appeal which was made by Mr. Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister, during a recent visit to the Taliban, asking for their extradition to Pakistan. And the Taliban have said they don't know where these people are and that therefore they are unable to help Pakistan."
Rifaat Hussein continues:
"And this has not gone down well with Islamabad and we have conveyed this to Iran, the difficulty of trying to catch these culprits."
Hussein says some of the suspects in Ganji's killing are members of the radical Sunni group Lashkar-e-Taiba, or Army of the Pure. Some 5,000 of the group's militants fight alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance.
The deadlock over extraditing Ganji's suspected killers comes as Pakistan's military ruler General Pervez Musharraf has sought to improve overall relations with Iran.
Shortly after taking power in an October 1999 coup d'etat, Musharraf made Tehran the destination of his first trip abroad as Pakistan's leader. Musharraf met with both President Mohammad Khatami and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
During the visit, Musharraf called for renewed regional efforts for peace in Afghanistan, where he has said he favors seeing the Taliban form a government that includes all the country's warring factions. He also discussed economic cooperation between Islamabad and Tehran, including possible construction of an Iran-to-India gas pipeline through Pakistan.
Since Musharraf's trip, Afghanistan's opposing factions have held meetings in Saudi Arabia with representatives of Pakistan, Iran, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the UN. But, as with previous talks, there were no results. And Pakistan has made no follow-up initiatives.
Western diplomats in Islamabad say Musharraf has now abandoned plans to take an active role in shaping an Afghan peace and has returned to Pakistan's policy of championing the Taliban. The diplomats say that frees him to concentrate on his priority, which is Pakistan's hard-hit economy. It also reduces the risk of angering Pakistan's religious right, which actively supports the Taliban and whose support the government wants in an anti-corruption drive.
Analyst Hussein says Islamabad has backed away from pressing the Taliban to form a more representative government because the militia refuses any suggestions to do so.
"Pakistan has not abandoned the idea of having some kind of united front government in Kabul but then this desire has to be squared against (that is, reconciled with) the reality of the Taliban controlling 95 percent of Afghan territory. The Taliban have said: 'why should we give [the opposition] something on a diplomatic plate that they have lost on the battlefield?'"
As Pakistani-Iranian relations continue to be strained by Afghanistan and by sectarian violence in Pakistan, there is little likelihood that prospects for greater economic cooperation will change the picture soon.
The two countries would like to see a pipeline built to connect Iran's gas fields with Indian markets through Pakistan. But the conflict between Islamabad and New Delhi over Kashmir makes investors wary.
Hussein says that for now the projected gas pipeline remains only an idea:
"There is a feasibility study -- there is a joint India-Pakistan-Iran ministerial committee and commission which looks at these issues. So these ideas are there and the thinking is there, the blueprints are there. But I think that unless and until the relationship between Pakistan and India is stabilized, the Iranians would be very reluctant to go ahead."
Hussein estimates it would cost some $10 billion to $15 billion to build a pipeline to bring Iranian gas across Pakistan to India's northern markets. At the same time, the pipeline would help Islamabad meet its own growing energy needs. Reserves in Pakistan's gas fields are reported to be running out and the country could face shortfalls in production by 2010.