QUETTA, Pakistan — Pakistan's minority Shiites have started using the word “genocide” to describe a violent spike in attacks against them by a militant Sunni group with suspected links to the country's security agencies and a mainstream political party that governs the largest province. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a group of radical Sunnis, who revile Shiites as heretics, has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks throughout Pakistan. Linked to Al-Qaeda, it has been declared a foreign terrorist organization by the US, yet it operates with relative ease in Pakistan's populous Punjab province, where Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and several other violent militant groups are based. The violence against Shiites has ignited a national debate — and political arguments — about a burgeoning militancy in Pakistan. The latest attack was a massive bombing earlier this month that ripped apart a Shiite neighborhood in Pakistan's largest city of Karachi, killing 48 people, many of them as they left a mosque after saying their evening prayers. So far this year nearly 300 Shiites have been killed in devastating bombings, target killings and executions. The unrelenting attacks also have focused the nation's attention on freedoms that Pakistani politicians give extremists groups, staggering corruption within the police and prison systems and the murky and protracted relationship between militant groups and Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies. “The government doesn't have the will to go after them and the security agencies are littered with sympathizers who give them space to operate,” Hazara Democratic Party chief Abdul Khaliq Hazara, told The Associated Press in a recent interview in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan where some of the most ferocious anti-Shiite attacks have occurred. He labeled the killings as the “genocide of Hazaras,” whom are mostly Shiites and easily identified by their Central Asian facial features. “I have a firm belief that our security agencies have not yet decided to end all extremists groups,” said Hazara. “They still want those (militants) that they think they can control and will need either in India or Afghanistan,” he said referring to allegations that Pakistan uses militants as proxies against hostile India to the east and Afghanistan to the west. The army has a history of supporting militants using them as proxies to fight in Kashmir, a region divided between Pakistan and India and claimed by both in its entirety. It is repeatedly criticized by the United States and Afghanistan for not doing enough to deny Afghan insurgents sanctuary in the tribal regions that border Afghanistan. Angry at the criticism, Pakistani army officials say they have lost more than 4,000 soldiers — more than NATO and the US combined — fighting militants. Yet, police officials in Baluchistan and the capital, Islamabad, told the AP that Pakistan's intelligence agency had ordered them to release militant leaders who had been arrested. The militants were not necessarily affiliated with Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because they feared losing their jobs. Even the judiciary has queried Pakistan's security agencies for information about their alleged ties to militants. The dramatic increase in sectarian violence also has spawned fierce political debate in Parliament with rivals firing volleys of accusations and counter accusations. The ruling, liberal-leaning Pakistan People's Party has accused its conservative rival, the Pakistan Muslim League, which governs Punjab province, of patronizing radical Sunni groups, including Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. In response, Punjab parliamentarians have shot back, charging the Pakistani federal government with inaction and ineptness for failing to establish a coordinated, nationwide anti-terrorist campaign during its five years at the helm. The militias, Hussain said, draw heavily from local religious schools or madrassas, which are heavily financed by donations from Gulf and Arab countries and are run by hard-line clerics with close ties to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. “That provides a deadly and unholy nexus (between) forces fighting the Baluch separatists and those waging war against the Shia community,” Hussain wrote in a recent column. It also implicates Pakistan's intelligence agencies, even if indirectly, in the carnage — an allegation they deny. In a column assailing the Punjab government's “dangerous liaisons” with militants in its province, Hussain said: “Pity the nation where the blood of innocents comes cheap and murderers live under state patronage.” — AP
