State of Pakistan and reasons to be cheerful

Despite Pakistan being in a state of chaos, fortunately, you could even say amazingly, Karachi is about as far from the epicentre of the main troubles as you can get, the least violent of all four provincial capitals, touch wood. This is despite stories such as that carried in yesterday’s papers of a shoot out between gangsters and police, real Hollywood stuff, with the police failing to catch the baddies in their hide-out. But it isn’t too difficult to avoid the gangsters’ hideouts. The main thing is that, unlike in the 1990s, the two biggest parties in Karachi have decided not to fall out with each other. They are the MQM, party of the mohajirs, the Urdu-speakers, often middle class, who migrated here after independence, mainly to take up government jobs, which they haven’t been successful in keeping in recent years, and the People’s Party, party of the Bhutto’s, with a strong base in the Sindhi population. Instead they try to divide the spoils; they have much to lose if they go back to settling their scores using guns of which there is a very large number in the city. It’s interesting that people talk of these parties with the same kind of contemptuous despair as they do in Britain. No one likes them but hardly anyone has any idea how they are to be replaced. With the exception of the MQM which operates differently, as a mafia constructing a state within a state, their corruption is beyond dispute, starting with the president, Zardari, Benazir’s husband and known as ‘Mr 10%’. It isn’t just him. Almost the entire elite have been listed as accused of one corrupt practice or another.

And then, of course, there is the Pakistan army committing unspeakable atrocities in its frontier provinces causing vast numbers of refugees and the Taliban matching these atrocities in Peshawar, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, wherever it sees the army and thinks it sees the CIA, not to mention the American drones which kill a hundred people for every targeted Taliban leader they manage to hit.
So it is important to be able to report that there is some good news. The best is probably the movement led by the lawyers earlier in the year which over two years of weekly demonstrations, often baton charged by the police, had protested, again and again, over the dismissal of the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry by President Musharraf. His ‘crime’ was to tell the army top brass he would have them arrested if they did not produce before him - habeas corpus - people whom the secret service had made ‘disappear’. He went on to insist the privatisation of the state steel company be reversed as it amounted to little more than theft given the ridiculously low price it was sold for. When the Chief Justice drove from Lahore to Islamabad, a million people, mobilised by no one but themselves, came out to greet him. And eventually the protesters won and the Chief Justice was reinstated. So disorganised as people are here, they can show their strength.

When they begin to organise, as with this wonderful class of students from the informal sector, textile and garment workers and workers from brick kilns, typically working for £1.50 a day without permanent contracts or any kind of welfare system, you can see the potential for change. We’ve spent the last two days with them discussing the problems, planning to deal with them, role playing recruiting new members of the organisation and talking to the media and more. They can do anything.