Flood Refugees Swamp Karachi, Exacerbating Ethnic Strife - WSJ.com
Crush of Refugees Inflames Karachi
Local government says it can accommodate one million, but with some 30,000 in camps, ethnic tensions are rising
By TOM WRIGHT
KARACHI, PakistanHundreds of thousands of refugees from Pakistan's devastating floods are seeking refugee in this city of 18 million, exacerbating ethnic strife that has already escalated this year and threatens to destabilize the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.
Most of the refugees are ethnic Sindhis from areas outside Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed in the flooding that began more than three weeks ago.
The United Nations says 800,000 people are stranded by the flooding, which has severed major roads in Sindh and nearby Baluchistan province. Some 1,500 people have been killed and six million made homeless by the deluge, which started in the north but swept south along the Indus River and continues to threaten towns and villages in Sindh and Baluchistan.
Sindh's provincial government has set up camps on the outskirts of Karachi, where 30,000 people are trying to keep their families together under tarpaulins in the searing heat.
The local administration says it can cope with up to one million of the refugees. But many who have made it to Karachi say they are being turned away from shelters on the outskirts and are pouring in to the city, deepening ethnic rivalries with Karachi's majority ethnic community that have simmered for years.
Police and paramilitary forces opened fire Monday on hundreds of mainly Sindhi refugees who, aided by a Sindh nationalist party, were squatting in 200 unoccupied, private apartments in a northern suburb of the city. Three people were killed, including a young boy, and 16 injured when police fired tear gas and live ammunition into the crowd after some refugees began to throw stones, eyewitnesses and local government officials said.
On Wednesday, police raided the house of a Sindh nationalist politician, Safdar Sarki, who organized the refugees' settling in the apartments without permission from the builder. Mr. Sarki, in an interview, said he had sent the refugees there.
For Karachi's dominant group, the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, the influx of Sindhi refugees poses a threat to the established order.
"If they come in hundreds of thousands, how will they survive?" says Khawaja Izhar ul Hassan, a member of the provincial assembly from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, a largely Muhajir political party that forms part of Sindh province's coalition government.
The crisis adds a dimension to a running struggle for control of Karachi between the MQM and ethnic Pashtuns, a group with origins in northwest Pakistan. The number of Pashtuns in Karachi has swollen in recent years as many have fled fighting between the Pakistan Taliban and the military in their homelands bordering Afghanistan.
Almost 1,000 people have died in Karachi since the start of the year, many in violence largely between Muhajir and Pashtun armed groups. Mr. Zardari's administration has been unable to stem the violence. The MQM has cast its opposition to the wave of Pashtun migration as a necessary push-back against the Taliban's growing influence in Karachi.
The wave of Sindhi flood migrants may be harder to counter. Sindhis are Karachi's indigenous ethnic group. The Muhajirs, Muslims of various ethnicities from India, arrived here after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent.
Ethnic Sindhis number about four million, smaller than the Muhajir community, but dominate the province's rural areas.
The provincial government has set up 30 camps around Karachi. In the largest, in the northern suburb of Gulshan-e-Maymar, some 10,000 refugees are sheltering, 10 to a room on average, in government-owned apartments. Outside, local volunteers have started primary school classes for 450 children.
At another camp, in Bin Qasim Town to the east of the city, thousands of refugees shelter from the heat under makeshift tents. They receive water from large trucks and two meals a day. On the outskirts of the camp, newly arrived refugees carrying children with distended bellies shelter beneath plastic bags strung together over branches.
Deen Mohammad, a 30-year-old farmer from Jacobabad, a town in northern Sindh, lost his house and goats when the Indus River burst its banks. His sister is still missing, he says. "Nothing is left behind," said Mr. Mohammad, who made his way to Karachi with his wife and four children. "We'd prefer to stay here."
Others have found refuge where they can. Mr. Sarki, president of Jeay Sindh Tehrik, a Sindh nationalist party, sent his cadres to direct refugees to the unoccupied apartments in a Sindh area of the city.
They were meant to be there temporarily, he said. But the police action has shown the city government, which has been dominated by MQM for 25 years, is worried about an influx of Sindhis changing the balance of power in Karachi, Mr. Sarki said.
"If one million Sindhis came here, the demography would be changed," he said. "These people are trying to get rid of Sindhis and dominate Karachi to show that Karachi belongs to them. It's totally immoral."
At the site of the killings, bullet marks pocked the walls and blood was smeared over the ground. A makeshift medical clinic lay destroyed, hundreds of pills trampled into the ground. Even after the violence, a few refugees remained in the flats.
Mr. Hassan, the MQM politician, says the police should have acted with more restraint. The MQM, he said, welcomes refugees on a temporary basis and if they are settled in official camps or relatives' houses.
The Sindh nationalist parties aren't contributing to relief efforts and are using the refugees to further their political agenda, Mr. Hassan said. "They are looking for places to capture. We will not allow them to use private property in the name of refugees."
not surprised that u dont want to talk about ignorance .. and yeh i live in karachi too!
