Pakistan: Religious Violence

Lord Avebury Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd May 2013 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Avebury]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the Government of Pakistan on curbing religious violence in that country.

[Lord Avebury]

My Lords, there are good reasons why the international community needs to pay attention to the upsurge of religious violence and hatred in Pakistan over recent years, and indeed to the related political violence during the recent elections in which more than 100 people were killed. Pakistan is due to be the largest recipient of UK aid in the world when it gets £446 million in 2014-15. It also receives billions of dollars from the United States in both economic and military aid in the effort to shore up the country’s stability. However, since 2001, an estimated 30,000 civilians have been killed in religious and political assassinations and massacres—all that aid money has not reduced the level of violence in Pakistan. There was a temporary lull during Pervez Musharraf’s presidency between 1999 and 2007, but over the past few years there has been a further deterioration.

At the same time, the stability of Pakistan has become vital to the peace of the region, with the withdrawal of allied forces from Afghanistan. The new Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, has said that he will help the process by allowing NATO to use Pakistan’s roads for the transit of troops and equipment, but large convoys of US or UK forces on their way home will make a tempting target for the local Taliban and its associates. The presence of well organised and well armed groups of terrorists in Pakistan also poses a threat to neighbouring states, as we saw from the Mumbai atrocity in 2008.

Last Wednesday, my noble friend Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon perceptively suggested that Russia’s support for Assad was not a matter of looking after its only remaining supporter in the Middle East but a consequence of its experience in Dagestan and other Muslim republics where there was a war between Sunnis and Shias. My noble friend Lord King of Bridgwater also referred to the Shia-Sunni conflict, and he coupled this with the spread of jihadism and fundamentalism. In Syria and Iraq, there are interreligious civil wars.

The agenda of Sunni extremists such as al-Qaeda and its imitators across the Islamic world is to eliminate the Shia and other varieties of Islam, as well as the Kaffirs or unbelievers, from the face of the earth. Their ultimate goal is a universal caliphate based on what they imagine were the principles of governance under the four “rightly guided caliphs” who followed the Prophet in the seventh century. In Pakistan, one active and ruthless group of terrorists belonging to this loose coalition is the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. This outfit tried to kill Nawaz Sharif when he was Prime Minister in 1999, and the suicide bomber who killed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and 26 others in 2007 was probably a member of the organisation. It claimed responsibility for the murder of four American oil workers in 1997 and for the bombing of the Protestant International Church in Islamabad in March 2002. But its main target has always been the Shia, as it brazenly acknowledges when it takes credit for the atrocities that it commits. The group says that the Shia are infidels, that they should be labelled as non-Muslims under the law, and that they are “wajib-ul-qatl”, an Urdu expression meaning “worthy to be killed”.

A semi-legal organisation with the same ideology of hatred is the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, which took over from a banned organisation called Sipah-e-Sahaba. The ASWJ fielded 130 candidates in the recent Pakistani elections, generally under the banners of the PML-N and an alliance of five Sunni religious parties generally known as the MDN. Under one of these labels, a man who had spent five years in prison for murdering six people in 1998 was elected to a seat in Punjab, and other terrorists may well now also be MPs. The Election Commission of Pakistan directed that in 55 constituencies, listed sectarian terrorists should be disqualified from standing, but it turned out that this was not within the powers conferred on returning officers by the ECP itself.

I am not going to recite the whole appalling history of the crimes perpetrated by these terrorists because it would take all day, but a couple of examples illustrate their mode of operations. On 3 April 2012, six buses were stopped in Chilas in the northern territories en route to Gilgit, Baltistan. The male passengers were taken off the buses and their identity cards examined for Shia names. At least 25 were shot dead on the spot. No official report has been published on this massacre and, although I understand that four or five people were arrested, no trials have taken place.

In January, twin bomb blasts in the busy market area at Alamdar Road, Quetta, killed at least 108 people and injured 120. A LeJ spokesman telephoned the media to say that it had committed this outrage and threatened that no Shia would be allowed to leave Balochistan alive. In February, a bomb contained in a water tanker exploded in Hazara Town, Quetta, killing at least 92 people and injuring more than 200. The police arrested 170 suspects, but there has been no news of trials, let alone convictions. In March, a bomb in the Shia area of Abbas Town in Karachi killed 45 people and wounded 150. These atrocities and the targeted assassinations of Shia intellectuals are part of a concerted attempt to wipe out the entire Shia population of Pakistan. That is genocide, as defined in Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

I have been sent hundreds of eyewitness statements and other reports from Shia organisations throughout Pakistan on these events, and have forwarded them to the UN Special Rapporteurs on Religious Freedom and on Extrajudicial Executions. I know that the Government do not intervene in the choice of subjects the special procedures take up, but as this is obviously one that would demand resources well beyond those available to the special rapporteurs, I would be grateful if we might consider making a one-off contribution to the Human Rights Commission, if the matter is pursued.

The special procedures should also take action on the relentless persecution of the Ahmadi Muslims, in spite of the enormous contribution they have made to the development of Pakistan; for example, in the persons of Sir Zafarullah Khan, the first Foreign Minister of Pakistan, and Dr Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s only Nobel Prize-winner. The most heinous atrocity against this community was in May 2010, when simultaneous terrorist attacks on its two principal mosques in Lahore during Friday prayers killed 94 people and injured more than 120. The Ahmadis have been declared non-Muslims, are victims of relentless persecution under the blasphemy laws, are denied voting rights and are in practice denied access to the higher ranks of all the professions.

As with the Shia, the Ahmadis are victims of targeted assassinations, encouraged by another extremist organisation, the Khatme Nabuwwat, which is free to spread its messages of hatred and violence. In 2012, 20 Ahmadis were killed, and the leader of the community in Rabwah, the centre of the community, was tortured to death by the police. Ahmadi places of worship were demolished, mostly in Punjab, and the police themselves demolished graves in Faisalabad and Mangat Uncha. A dozen armed men vandalised 120 gravestones in Model Town, Lahore. Dozens of Ahmadis were arbitrarily arrested, and Ahmadi publications were summarily banned. The Friday Times said that the fetters imposed on the Ahmadi community were reminiscent of the restrictions imposed on the Jews by Nazi Germany in 1935.

I return to the ideology which threatens the survival of religious minorities and poses an even wider menace to the safety and stability of Pakistan itself, being promoted as it is in mosques and madrassahs financed by Saudi money to the tune of an estimated $100 million a year. It is intolerant and exclusivist, maintaining that all who do not subscribe to the Salafist version of Islam are infidels belonging to the Dar al-Harb, the realm of the unbeliever. In the extreme forms it takes in Pakistan, it promotes sectarian and religious hatred and teaches that killing unbelievers is approved by God. We need a worldwide strategy to combat this monstrous ideology. I believe that such is the magnitude of the danger it presents to world peace, only the United Nations Security Council has the authority and resources to grapple with it. I hope that the Government will consider how best to raise it at that level.