Previous post continued:
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The shia-sunni conflict is as old as Islam itself in the Indian subcontinent, but it was effectively marginalised by a secular British raj which treated it as a law-and-order issue. After 1947, the policy was continued and the worst sectarian riots were defined by the state as no more than public disorder which the executive handled as violation of the CRPC, the legal code of criminal procedure. The clergy involved in the conflict gradually became tired as the citizens mixed and intermarried across the sect boundaries. The breakdown of the secular state under General Zia's martial law brought the shia-sunni differences to centre-stage. **
General Zia versus the Shias: General Zia took over the populist slogan of Nizam-e-Mustafa and imposed 'shariah' on Pakistan. It really meant the imposition of the Sunni Hanafi 'fiqh' or jurisprudence followed by the majority population from which the shias were excluded. The two early laws under 'shariah' that he enforced failed miserably: the first, abolition of 'riba', failed because of the inability of the Islamic scholars to reinterpret Islam for modern conditions; the second, 'zakat', failed because the shia jurisprudence, called 'Fiqha-e-Jaafaria', had a conflicting interpretation of zakat. In 1980, an unprecedented procession of shias, led by Mufti Jaafar Hussain, laid siege to Islamabad and forced General Zia to exempt the shia community from the deduction of zakat. The concept of sunni 'ushr' (poor-due on land) is also rejected by shia jurisprudence.
It appears that, when the anti-shia movement started in Jhang in the 1980s, General Zia not only ignored it but saw it as his balancing act against the rebellious shia community. This was worsened by Imam Khomeini's criticism of General Zia. The rise of Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi in the stronghold of big shia landlords in Punjab changed the sectarian scene in Pakistan. There is evidence that General Zia was warned of Jhangvi's anti-shia and anti-Iran movement, but he ignored the warning and allowed it to blossom into a full-fledged religious party called Anjuman-e-Sipah-e-Sahaba of Pakistan (ASSP). In small towns, the old shia-sunni debate restarted with the fury that had become dampened in the past. The tracts which carried this debate were scurrilous in the extreme and helped the clerics to whip up passions. Meanwhile, *in 1986, General Zia allowed a 'purge' of Turi shias in the divided city of Parachinar (capital of Kurram Agency on the border with Afghanistan) at the hands of the sunni Afghan mujahideen in conjunction with the local sunni population. *
Pakistan versus the Turis of Parachinar: Parachinar was the launching-pad of the Mujahideen attacks into Afghanistan and the Turis were not cooperative. Tehrike-e-Nifaz-e-Fiqha-e-Jaafaria had come into being during the dispute over zakat in 1980. When the Parachinar massacre occurred, it was led by a Turi leader, Allama Arif-ul-Hussaini. Allama Hussaini was murdered in Peshawar in August 1988, for which the Turis held General Zia responsible. That was also the year of General Zia's death (within a fortnight of Hussaini's murder) in an air-crash in Bahawalpur, and for a time there was rumour of shia involvement in his assassination although no solid evidence supporting this speculation was ever uncovered. The NWFP governor General Fazle Haq, whom the Turis accused of complicity in the murder of Allama Hussaini, was ambushed and killed in 1991. (Mehram Ali, the shia terrorist who blew up the Sipah leader Maulana Zia-ur-Rehman Farooqi at the sessions court in Lahore, was trained in Parachinar).
In 1989, the Afghan mujahideen government-in-exile came into being in Peshawar after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan. At the behest of Saudi Arabia, the exiled shia mujahideen of Iran were not included in this government. The Saudis, according to author Barnett R.Rubin in The Search for Peace in Afghanistan (page 103) paid over 23 million dollars a week during the 519-member session of the Mujahideen 'shura' as bribe for it. In 1990, Maulana Jhangvi was murdered at the climax of his anti-Iran and anti-shia campaign of extreme insult and denigration. The same year, as if in retaliation, an activist of Sipah-e-Sahaba shot the Iranian consul Sadiq Ganji dead in Lahore. The tit-for-tat killings were thus started. Maulana Isar-ul-Qasimi, chief of the Sipah, was gunned down in 1991.
Since then, the state of Pakistan has had to answer for the killing of more Iranians in Pakistan. Another consular officer was gunned down in Multan and a number of Iranian air force trainees were ambushed in Rawalpindi on inside information received by the killers, thus making the army not uninvolved in the sectarian mayhem. Most commentators in Pakistan are scared of telling the truth. Most inter-sectarian dialogue is fake since its great facade of speech-making is nothing but divine-sounding hogwash. Almost all Muslim clerics lie when it comes to sectarian deaths.
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Also, I suggest you read up on the 1988 cleansing of Shias from the Kurram agency as well as the infamous Zia sponsored SSP raid on Gilgit shias where hundreds were shot dead to teach "them a lesson."
