[Dawn] NEARLY a hundred people have been killed in Bloody Karachi over the last two weeks. You've got an entire nation of people who're defined by who they hate and how much. That's known as "cause." Karachi is a synonym for "effect."
Is it this city`s fate to suffer in silence?
Silence punctuated by the occasional kaboom or bangety-bang. That sounds about right.
Is there no solution to the violence that has torn Bloody Karachi apart and which has now reached a level of chaos that is becoming increasingly difficult to decipher?
I'd suggest agnosticism. Any country with a Ministry of Religious Affairs has the potential to become Pakistain.
Earlier, it was relatively easy to identify foes and the perpetrators of specific incidents of murder.
The [cause] large, anonymous city leads to [effect] anonymous crime. Who knows who dunnit when you don't know your neighbors?
The finger of blame, not an easy thing to raise publicly in Bloody Karachi, could then be pointed in private with considerable surety at one political group or the other.
You can't do it in public or they'll kill you.
Now the situation is much murkier as `assassinations` are being carried out by a wide spectrum of operators, including hardened criminals of little or no ideological or political bent.
Because they can. If there was a significant possibility of them being caught and executed they wouldn't do it. They might even get jobs, though that'd be going to an extreme.
Ethnicity and sectarianism -- call it plain hatred for the other -- come into it of course, as do the yearnings of some to check a demographic shift that could undermine their position at the polls.
Respect accrues to the guy with the heaviest artillery. As long as he's got it, he's gonna use it, since there's no consequence to doing so.
Then there is the lust for power, a `this is our area` syndrome, that otherwise unempowered citizens find so heady that they can kill real or perceived opponents to achieve their objectives.
Dogs are territorial, too. They'll chase other dogs out of their yards.
And let`s not forget the land mafia. Bloody Karachi, despite its myriad problems, is still prime real estate and the fight over grabbing a piece of the pie is also claiming lives. The last week or so has seen a spike in liquidations that are not readily understood, for they could be attributed to a combination of all these factors.
Importing a bunch of Pashtuns along with their artillery and their macho ways didn't make things work a lot better.
How long will it be repeated, in print and on television, that Bloody Karachi burns again?
Probably past the date when Pakistain becomes a secular state. The violence is a cultural thing that's fanned into white heat by the religion.
Somehow sporadic carnage has become an accepted fact of life in the city. People keep score, without much inner reflection, of how many are killed on any given day, almost just as casually as they ask passers-by about the latest from the cricket World Cup. Such desensitisation does not bode well for the future. True, most people have no choice but to get on with it, to get to their workplaces every day and earn a livelihood come what may. But the psychological scars of this relentless exposure to, and tacit acceptance of, violence will only become more engraved over time.
It's part of the culture, part of the local variant of the religion.
It is time for all groups that claim ownership of Bloody Karachi to come together and end this madness.
It's not gonna end with everybody singing Kumbaya. More likely in either a mass shootout or with a solution imposed by grownups from outside.
What has become `normal` is unacceptable and the blame game that dominates life in Bloody Karachi cannot provide any solutions.
The rest of the world laughs at Pakistain. They can't admit it to themselves, in fact they hold themselves up as a model for the rest of the failed-state set.
Genuine grievances need to be aired around a table, not through guns or -- in a new twist to an already deadly situation -- hand grenades. Our elected representatives must restore the rule of law.
It won't happen when the law's for sale. Even if it wasn't for sale, the way it's built doesn't work. There's no State vs. Mahmoud. Criminal law's still based on a tort model, blood money can still be paid, and vendetta's still a way of life. Come back and talk to us when you've grown up.