The unabated Shia Hazara genocide

The cold-blooded murder of 11 Shia Hazara coalminers in Machh Balochistan - they were kidnapped and transported to the massacre site at leisure, their hands tied behind their backs, and their throats slit by Sunni Islamist terrorists - is only the latest in the series of massacres and targeted sectarian killings in Pakistan. And it is unlikely to be the last because the ecosystem that allows these terrorists to operate with impunity is very much intact. So too are the reasons (of state, society and security) that lie behind this Sunni sectarian ecosystem.

As part of the slow but relentless genocide of the Shia Hazaras, the Machh massacre holds not just a message for the Pakistani Shias in general and Hazaras in particular, but is also a signal to countries like Iran & Afghanistan : Shias can never be safe and secure, nor expect equitable treatment in a Sunni dominated Islamic State like Pakistan.

There will be no dearth of hand-wringing after every massacre, paying lip-service to the cause of sectarian harmony, and egregious declarations of resolve to fight the scourge of sectarianism. But once enough time has passed, all this will be water under the bridge, until the next time.
According to one estimate, around 23,000 Shias have been killed in sectarian attacks since 1963. The South Asia Terrorism Portal has tabulated that over 2700 Shias have been killed by Sunni terrorists in Pakistan since 2001.

Over 1600 of these have been Hazaras. To understand the calamity that has befallen the tiny 7,00,000 strong Hazara community, a similar proportion of Pakistanis being killed in terror attacks would be around half a million. With under a tenth of that number being killed in the blowback of terrorism being faced by Pakistan since 2001, the Pakistani security establishment carried out both extensive military and intensive intelligence based operations against terror groups that had gone rogue. But as far as the Hazaras are concerned, it is a cynical cycle in which blood-letting in terror attacks is followed by pro-forma condemnations and meaningless assurances, which are soon forgotten, and only dusted out and repeated after the next attack.

The killings of Shias in general, Hazaras in particular, have been quite indiscriminate. Shia doctors, shopkeepers, civil servants, labourers, congregations and processions, Imambargahs, clerics and religious scholars, residential areas, are all in the crosshairs of the Sunni extremists and terrorists. In the case of the Hazaras, the targeting has been a lot easier. For one, they are easily identifiable because of their features. For another, because they are a tiny community, their targeting achieves all the nefarious political and propaganda, and sinister sectarian and security objectives with very little of the fallout.

Similar attacks on Shias would have led to retaliation, as has indeed happened in the past. Finally, because the Hazaras are overwhelmingly based in Balochistan, and not in the heartland of Punjab, or the metropolis Karachi or even the Capital Islamabad, their targeting seldom makes the news. Only when an attack is really outrageous does the Pakistani media starts to hyperventilate about it. Little wonder then that, sometimes in dribbles and other times in torrents, Hazara blood is being split in Pakistan.

It is not just the Pakistani state and society, but even international Human Rights organizations and institutions, like Genocide Watch and the UN, haven't gone beyond issuing a bland, if banal, statement condemning an incident. But the fact that the persecuted Hazaras are facing genocide is irrefutable.

The genocide convention of the UN defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such : (a) Killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The point a, b, and c above clearly apply to the Hazaras. Not only they have been ghettoized in Quetta, and are unable to move freely out of their ghettos because of the fear of being killed, they are also being targeted for belonging to an ethnic, racial and religious group. And yet, there has been deafening silence from the international community, including institutions who claim to be working to prevent genocide.If any of these Human Rights Organizations and international institutions bothered to hold even a perfunctory inquiry, it would reveal the deep involvement of the Pakistani state and its organs in the genocide of the Hazaras.

The Machh incident itself raises serious questions on how in an area saturated with security forces, terrorists could kidnap a dozen Hazara miners, take them to a different place, tie them up and then behead them and escape, and do all this at a leisurely pace, almost as if they had no fear of being obstructed, much less apprehended by the multiple checkpoints they crossed. Instead of explaining how such an incident could take place under the nose of the Pakistani security forces, Islamabad has conveniently blamed it on India. Apart from insinuation and innuendo, no shred of evidence to back the Pakistani accusations has been proffered.

The attempt to draw attention to an Indian hand is nothing more than a clumsy attempt to deflect attention from accusations of a false flag attack carried out in the pursuit of interests of not just the national security state but also its client regime led by Imran Khan. That the Imran Khan government is in deep trouble because of the crystallisation of opposition against it is a known fact. Imran Khan and his cronies have been accusing the opposition of working in the interests, if not the behest, of Pakistan's enemies (read India).

The Machh massacre only feeds into this fake narrative that the regime is trying to manufacture to put the opposition on the back foot. The military establishment also stands to gain from such a false flag attack. If shifts focus from the corruption and venality of the military officers in Balochistan and creates conditions where in the name of security the military can get away with murder and more.

Over the years, the military has nurtured enough dubious and despicable characters to carry out the grisly task. Sunni Deobandi and Wahabi terror groups like the Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Lahkar-e-Taiba have been given a free hand in Balochistan to crush the Baloch freedom movement. Islam is seen as an antidote to ethnic sub-nationalism by the Pakistani military establishment. Death squads led by proxies of the military like Shafiq Mengal, who also have links with the Islamist terror groups are also known to be active in such killings.

Interestingly, although the Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the Machh massacre, there are reports of how the IS in the AfPak region is either a smokescreen created by the ISI, or has been infiltrated, even controlled by the ISI agents who then carry out attacks that serve the interests of the state and give deniability to the ISI and military establishment by taking responsibility for these attacks.

The man that Imran Khan has appointed to promote inter-faith harmony and sectarian peace is himself an extremely dubious character. Maulana Tahir Ashrafi is known to have close links with Al Qaeda, Taliban, TTP, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, and Jaish-e-Mohammad. His close links with the now slain Chief of Lahkar-e-Jhangvi, Malik Ishaq, and fraternal ties with the Sunni extremist group and the mother lode of Deobandi terrorism Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (now reincarnated as Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat or ASWJ) are also not hidden. If such a person is going to be the points-man for social and sectarian harmony, is it any surprise that events like the Machh massacre happen so frequently?

Given the networks of terrorism spawned by the 'Deep State' of Pakistan to establish control and exercise influence in the region, the Hazara Shias are a convenient target for achieving security and strategic objectives and also satisfy the sectarian ideological blood-lust of the Sunni extremists who function as appendages and allies of the Pakistani state-within-a-state. Statements and gestures by the Pakistani state - reaching out to Iran, inviting the Afghan Hazara leaders like Ustad Mohammad Mohaqiq and Karim Khalili - are nothing but eyewash.

They should know how the Taliban, the Pakistani proxies, killed the Afghan Hazara leader Abdul Ali Mazari who had gone to negotiate a peace deal with them. The Taliban stripped him, mutilated him and dropped him to his death from a helicopter.Interestingly, Tehran reaction to the Machh massacre was subdued. It condemned the massacre by ISIS underlining that the situation underlines necessity for cooperation of all regional countries in the fight against Tafkiri and terrorist groups and avoided holding Islamabad responsible.

If Hazara leaders like Mohaqiq and Khalili as well as the Iranians think that Pakistan will react to mute criticism then they are being naïve. Hazaras will keep being picked singly and collectively to be butchered by the proxies of the Pakistani state. The situation calls for greater synergy between Iran and Afghanistan to hold Pakistan responsible for the killings in tandem with international organizations and strongly highlight the ongoing genocide of this minority community.


The writer is a freelancer and a columnist.