AP : Chaotic Karachi: Pak’s city of business, bombings

Chaotic Karachi: Pak’s city of business, bombings

Associated Press | October 24, 2007

KARACHI, October 23: The suicide bombing that shattered former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s return from exile shocked Pakistanis. That it happened in this chaotic port city did not.

For over two decades, violence has routinely visited Karachi’s seething streets: from political and ethnic bloodletting that made it one of the world’s most dangerous cities in the mid-1990s, to its emergence as a hub of Islamic militants and scene of repeated terror bombings after the September 11, 2001, attacks in America.

Yet the boisterous metropolis of 15 million remains the nation’s hub, a centre of commerce, media and fashion, that sits uneasily with its reputation as a home for underworld figures and religious extremists.

“We can complain but no matter how hard we try we cannot cut relations with the city — it’s ours and we know nothing else,” said Khalid Yusuf, a 30-year-old property developer. “It’s dangerous, it’s disappointing but this is our Karachi.”

Karachi was Pakistan’s capital until 1960, when the seat of Government was shifted to the prosaic and purpose-built boulevards of Islamabad, far to the north. But Karachi is in many senses more important, the source of 60 percent of tax revenues and also a lynchpin in the country’s turbulent politics. Violence and unrest in the city helped unravel several national governments.

“People want to destroy Karachi to make a point,” Deputy Mayor Nasreen Jalil, 60, told The Associated Press. “They know the world’s attention is here and nobody would take notice if they attacked a smaller city.”

Two-time Prime Minister Bhutto chose the southern city on the Arabian Sea coast to stage her return to Pakistan’s political limelight after an eight-year exile, holding a rally of more than 1,50,000 people despite her own admission that she had information that Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives might try to kill her.

Thursday’s night of carnage, that left at least 136 dead, was among Karachi’s bloodiest days. But the city moves on. “The people living in Karachi want peace,” said Jalil. “The dynamic of Karachi is such that life goes on, we can’t stop.”

Yet a few kilometers away, Raiz Babar, 43, picked at his betel-leaf stained teeth as he idled away the day at a busy junction near the city’s central prison. He said driving his taxi in the febrile post-bomb atmosphere was still too dangerous.

“For the last three days I’ve had no wages,” he said above the din of car horns. “If I had a passenger I would not take them because for a fare of 50 or 60 rupees I could be killed, or my taxi damaged.”

“Militant groups target Karachi because it’s a big city and security has been quite lax here for some time, while the city’s biggest (religious school) had close links to the Taliban,” said Zahid Hussain, author of Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam” and a native of Karachi.

Mohammed Hussain Mehnti, a leader of Pakistan’s most popular Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said that with so much at stake, the bombing against Bhutto is probably not the end of the violence in Karachi. “We are afraid there will be more bloodshed,” he said.