Nine villagers near Jamshoro were executed on the night of June 5 by the “law enforcing agencies”. On June 7, prime minister Nawaz Sharif told the press in Sukkhar that they were “terrorists” in cahoots with India. Islamabad was hoping that the matter would be buried thus.
It wasn’t — fortunately, the press didn’t buy the cock-and-bull story. On June 11, however, chief minister Muzaffar Shah was quick to apportion blame: yes, he ‘admitted’ in the Sindh assembly, the “law enforcing agencies” (read ‘army’) had erred in killing the innocent villagers. He said he would compensate their families forthwith. There was, obviously, no merit in rolling any civilian heads!
On June 14, the army felt compelled to redress the situation. A Major-General, two Brigadiers and a Colonel were relieved of their duties while the Major directly responsible for the cold-blooded murder was hauled up before a court-martial. Is that the end of the matter?
No, it isn’t. Ghulam Mohiuddin, the chief accused in the Jamshoro massacre, has mysteriously died in custody. When will we know what happened to him and why? Mr Yusuf Jakhrani, the head of the NDP Sindh, also died in custody on June 12 as did another civilian, Mr Ali Haider Shah, on June 10. The full facts of both cases have yet to be revealed. The army admits that 33 dacoits have been killed and 88 arrested, including 39 ‘Patharidars’, since Operation Clean-Up began three weeks ago in the rural areas. How many of these are ‘innocent’ Sindhi villagers and how many are terrorists? How will the army react if, at some stage of rounding up MQM terrorists in Karachi or Hyderabad, there is an unforeseen incident in which ‘innocent’ people are killed in some mohalla or the other and Mr Shah is again quick to absolve himself of any responsibility? Is there any guarantee that the army operation will not be progressively perceived as a travesty of justice which irrevocably alienates large masses of the Sindhi people? How many more officers will GHQ transfer before it dawns on it that the army has been propelled into a no-win situation?
“We will take our time, ensure that Jamshoro doesn’t happen again, nudge Islamabad to provide a socio-economic package to alleviate the problems of Sindh”, say the Generals. Deep down, however, their fear is that President Ishaq’s perceptions about what should be done in Sindh differ from those of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and that the army could be eventually entrapped in a web of civilian intrigue and contradictions which do irreparable harm to its status as a national institution.
GHQ has been at pains to point out that its intervention in Sindh is at the request of the civilian government, that all its acts are in cooperation with and under the jurisdiction of civilian authorities led by Muzzafar Shah. That is the legal position. But the ground position is markedly different — GHQ insists that the army will be ruthlessly impartial in dealing with all lawbreakers, irrespective of political affiliation, and that, in fact, it is the Corps Commander Karachi who is actually “calling the shots”.
Between these two positions — that is, between appearance and reality — there is an ominous, in-built contradictory dialectic. The more evenhanded the army’s operation, the greater the likelihood that Mr Muzzafar Shah will resist it. What will the army do when the contradictions between civil and military authority become antagonistic, as they inevitably must in the near future? If it bows before civil authority and is less than fair, its name will be mud in the country, let alone in Sindh. It can hardly allow that to pass. If it doesn’t, it will compel the demise of the Sindh government and prove the bankruptcy of the President’s strategy for Sindh. If the President is then forced to ask the army to run Sindh directly, why shouldn’t the army be provoked to conclude that it is time instead to run the country directly from Islamabad?
The army is not politically or psychologically trained to deal with a situation in which long years of socio-economic injustice, political authoritarianism and criminal victimisation of society have contributed to lawlessness and terrorism in Sindh. From its point of view, nothing could have served the state’s interest better than for President Ishaq to have relented his vendetta against Benazir Bhutto and allowed Mr Jatoi to form a coalition government in Sindh with her support after the demise of Jam Sadiq Ali. A democratic, popular government, which reflected the ground situation in Sindh and compelled the PPP and the MQM to come to realistic terms with each other, might have served as a better platform from which to come to the aid of civil power. Instead, the President thought fit to lean on the COAS and thwart such an arrangement in Sindh. Now the dialectic of his errors has compounded the situation: he is asking the army to deliver Sindh when it is patently ill-equipped to do so.
Sooner or later, the army’s Catch-22 dilemma will dawn upon the Generals and their current frustrations will be transformed into angry resolve. When that happens, we should also expect the unmentionable to follow.