[As election fever grips
Pakistan this week, Sunni extremist groups are making a bold venture into the
democratic process, offering a political face to a movement that, at its
militant end, has carried out attacks on minority Shiites that have resulted in
hundreds of deaths this year.]
By Declan Walsh
 |
Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
Maulana Abdul Khaliq Rehmani, whose group, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, is fielding
candidates across the nation, spoke in Khalid Walid in Khanewal, a district of lush
fields and poor farmers.
|
KHALID WALID, Pakistan — Dust swirled as the jeep, heralded by a convoy of motorcycle
riders and guarded by gunmen in paramilitary-style uniforms, pulled up outside
the towering tomb of an ancient Muslim saint.
Out stepped Maulana
Abdul Khaliq Rehmani, a burly cleric with a notorious, banned Sunni Muslim
group. Thanks to a deft name change by his group, he was now a candidate in
Pakistan’s general election, scheduled for Saturday.
Supporters mobbed Mr.
Rehmani as he pushed into a small mosque in a rural district of Punjab
Province, where a crowd had gathered in a courtyard. The warm-up speaker played
on some typical populist tropes. “Islamabad is a colony of America,” he
shouted. “Thousands of their agents are in the capital, and they are
destabilizing Pakistan.”
But Mr. Rehmani
preferred to paint his campaign as a rural class struggle. “Feudalism has
paralyzed Pakistan,” he said, his voice rising as the audience — farmers with
weather-beaten faces, many fresh from toiling in the fields — listened raptly.
“By the will of God, every poor person in this district will vote for us!”
As election fever grips
Pakistan this week, Sunni extremist groups are making a bold venture into the
democratic process, offering a political face to a movement that, at its
militant end, has carried out attacks on minority Shiites that have resulted in
hundreds of deaths this year.
Mr. Rehmani’s group,
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, is fielding 130 candidates across Pakistan in this
election. Few are expected to win seats in the Parliament, which is dominated
by more moderate parties. But experts say they are flexing their political
muscle at the very time when Pakistan urgently needs to push back against
extremism.
Relentless Taliban
attacks on secular parties in recent weeks have tilted the field in favor of
conservative parties, while the election authorities have been ambiguous. Some
candidates were disqualified for having forged their university degrees, or for
having an anti-Pakistani “ideology.” But candidates with nakedly sectarian groups
have been allowed to participate freely.
“These elections are
critical,” said Ayesha Siddiqa, a defense analyst and the author of several
reports on militancy in southern Punjab. “General Musharraf and his military
started accommodating these groups. Now we see them trying to enter the
political mainstream.”
Mr. Rehmani was speaking
at a rally in Khanewal, a district of lush fields and poor farmers between the
city of Multan and the Indus River. His group, once known as Sipah-e-Sahaba
Pakistan, is the country’s main anti-Shiite group and was banned as a terrorist
organization by Pervez Musharraf, then the president, in 2002.
Sipah is widely viewed
as the ideological center of sectarian thinking in Pakistan; its most notorious
offshoot is Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the militant group responsible for much of the
sectarian bloodshed this year: roadside executions, drive-by shootings and two
major suicide attacks in the western city of Quetta that killed almost 200
people earlier this year.
But relatively little
sectarian violence touches Sipah’s political heartland in southern Punjab,
where such groups drive deep roots in conservative rural communities by
exploiting religious sentiment, profound social inequality and — in some cases
— the support of mainstream politicians eager to capture their votes.
In Khanewal, for
instance, Mr. Rehmani is estimated to control 12,000 to 20,000 votes, not
enough to win a seat, but sufficient to swing the vote in the event of a tight
race. At the last election in 2008, his group supported Raza Hayat Hiraj, a
candidate for General Musharraf’s party who went on to win the seat in
Parliament. This time, however, the group has fielded its own candidate, Mr.
Rehmani.
Mr. Hiraj has been
rejected by that group, and finds himself under political attack locally. He
has also had a change of heart about Sipah. “They are very strong fanatics,” he
said in an interview, saying that the group had a “different mind-set” when he
supported them — under pressure from his own party.
“I was told to go into
an alliance with them,” he said. “These people don’t even consider Shiites to
be like human beings. Their first philosophy is to kill a Shiite.”
A similar dynamic exists
in other pockets of Punjab where extremists enjoy a foothold: politicians, even
those who profess not to share the extremists’ values, are happy to embrace
their votes. All parties, including the Pakistan Muslim League-N, which is
tipped to do well in this election, have been guilty.
The phenomenon helps
explain how sectarian groups can carve out the space to operate, said Ms.
Siddiqa, the analyst. “There is an argument that if you engage these groups
politically, they might turn into Pakistan’s version of Sinn Fein or
Hezbollah,” she said, referring to the political wings of militant movements in
Ireland and Lebanon. “That is a very dangerous proposition.”
Other factors play a
part, too. Although sectarianism has been a problem in Pakistan since the
country’s birth in 1947, it turned militant in the 1980s when the military
dictator, Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, promoted Sunni extremist groups to counter
Iranian influence after the 1979 revolution in that country, which created a
Shiite theocracy.
Sectarian recruiters
found rich terrain in the fields of Punjab, where poor Sunni farmers felt exploited
by wealthy Shiite landowners who lorded over their tenants in a modern-day
feudalism. Some of the same factors are still at play today.
“These people are slaves
to the feudal lords,” Mr. Rehmani said after the rally, sitting on a rope bed
in a field outside the mosque.
Indeed, one of his
opponents is a Shiite landlord: Fakhar Imam, a member of a large and
politically influential family. Mr. Imam is a former speaker of Parliament
while his wife, Abida Hussain, is a former ambassador to the United States. In
1991, his brother was shot and wounded in a sectarian attack.
In an interview after a
rally in Kabirwala, the main town of Khanewal District, Mr. Imam played down
the importance of sectarianism as a political factor. “People are more
concerned with gas, jobs and electricity,” he said, speaking by torchlight
after the city power went off.
Still, there is little
doubt that sectarian politics are the seedbed of more violent actions.
Militants from Kabirwala took part in a high-profile attack on the Sri Lankan
cricket team in Lahore in 2009 that killed eight people. And the founder of
Sipah-e-Sahaba, Maulana Haq Nawaz Jhangvi, was educated in a madrasa just a few
hundred yards from Mr. Imam’s rally.
The head of the madrasa,
Maulana Irshad Ahmed, bristled at any suggestion that the institution had a
connection with terrorism. Instead he offered juice and samosas to a visiting
Shiite journalist, and offered a tour of the complex, which belongs to the
conservative Deobandi sect and houses 2,000 students.
In the corridors of a
new, three-story building, filled with dormitory rooms that doubled as
classrooms, bearded teenagers crowded around teachers, listening to religious
instruction. A similar-size mosque was under construction next door; Mr. Ahmed
said he hoped the complex would soon have 4,000 students.
After the rally in
Khalid Walid village, Mr. Rehmani rose to leave, trailed by his armed guards.
He apologized: he was rushing to another campaign rally.
As his convoy
disappeared into the dusk, it passed under the village’s dominant feature: the
red-brick tomb of Hazrat Khalid Walid, a 13th century saint from the moderate
Sufi strain of Islam, who was famed for his sense of tolerance.