A banner in Skardu calls for a ban on extremist ulema
An irate Sunni mob stopped a convoy of 25 buses coming from Rawalpindi and segregated their Shia passengers from the rest. At 1:30 pm on April 3, 2012 they stoned 10 of them to death in broad daylight.
A similar attack was carried out on August 17 the same year when over a dozen or so Sunni militants stopped four buses travelling from Rawalpindi to Gilgit, separated 19 Shia passengers from around 100 others and shot them dead from point-blank range near Babusar mountain top in Mansehra district.
Those involved in these attacks have never been arrested and tried.
Khan Sangeen, who is around 70 now, regrets what he did in May 1988.
The relaxed setting of his hujra, shaded by tall, green trees and enveloped by a serene, calming quietness, is a whole world away from the deadly clamour of anti-Shia chants that reverberated in Tangir valley three decades ago. “Kafir kafir, Shia kafir. Jo na manay woh bhi kafir” (Shias are infidels and so is the one who has any doubt about it) — these chants rose above trees and echoed across mountains, stirring an unprecedented sectarian mobilisation in the area.
Sangeen recalls how a well-armed lashkar – or tribal army – built up after originating from Kohistan and passing through Diamer. The mobilisation was so intense that no one would dare oppose it. Not that anyone in Tangir wanted to do so.
Decades of anti-Shia sermons by local religious missionaries had already cultivated grounds for not just cheering on the lashkar but also joining it. Residents of Diamer willingly and generously contributed provisions, arms and men as the lashkar marched onward to attack Shia villages in Gilgit district.
Ahmed Hussain was 28 then.
He first heard about the lashkar when it was near Chhamugarh — a village 20 kilometres to the south of Gilgit city. People in his own village – Jalalabad, about the same distance from Gilgit city but in the east – knew the lashkar would soon be headed towards them as well.
Some of them had worked in security forces and knew how to build crude explosives. They hurriedly put together as many of those homemade bombs as they could. Others collected whatever weapons they could find in the village, mostly old rifles used for hunting, to resist the lashkar.
When the invaders came close to Jalalabad, the villagers threw bombs at them and pushed down boulders from a nearby hilltop to block their passage. “The blasts created the impression that we were equipped with heavy ammunition which checked the advance of the attackers for about three days,” recalls Hussain.
Unable to make a headway, the lashkar took a detour to an undefended village, Batkor, which overlooks Jalalabad from a hill in the northeast. When Hussain and his fellow villagers saw smoke billowing out of Batkor, they knew their village was going to face the same fate soon.
All this while, the villagers received no help or protection from law enforcement agencies. When some policemen did arrive in Jalalabad, they advised its residents to leave for some safe place. So they did and, except some elderly persons, moved to the nearby villages of Oshikhandass and Danyore which were relatively securer due to the presence of a police contingent headed by a deputy inspector general.
The invaders, meanwhile, entered an almost empty Jalalabad and burnt down each of its 800 or so houses.
Hussain returned to the village three days later to retrieve the body of his elder brother, Fida Hussain, who was shot dead near Batkor while resisting the lashkar. “His body was charred beyond recognition — save his hands that helped us identify him.”
Similar horror stories abound.
Ghulam Mustafa was working as a vehicle mechanic in Skardu city when he heard that the lashkar was moving towards his village, Shuto, in Haramosh valley. He rushed back home, fearing the worst for his family.
Around 30 years of age at the time, he saw the lashkar camped at Alam Bridge — that spans over the Indus river and connects Skardu with Gilgit. He also saw the residents of his village waging a losing battle with their old rifles. They soon realised that they had no option but to move to the safety of some other village. When they came back after a month, they saw all their homes destroyed, fruit trees chopped down and cattle killed.
Ahmed Mahmood* was a deputy superintendent of police in Gilgit district during the lashkar’s invasion. Accompanied by 20 or so other policemen, he blocked the lashkar’s path at an entrance to Gilgit city for a whole night only to find out in the morning that the invaders had entered the city by another route, burning down the whole village of Sakwar on their way.
Mahmood then went to the office of Gilgit’s commissioner and volunteered to go to Jalalabad to save it but he failed to get the go-ahead.
Now in his eighties but still retaining his tall erect posture, he believes law enforcement agencies were complicit with the attackers. “Diamer police were no less motivated [against Shias] than the men in the lashkar. They became a part of the lashkar and came to Gilgit as attackers in uniform.” The police in Gilgit, he says, were also hand in glove with the invaders. “A police officer in a Gilgit city neighbourhood slaughtered two cows to feed the lashkar.”
By the time the invasion came to an end, 222 people had lost their lives, according to Mahmood.
Sher Baz Barcha, a historian in Gilgit city, recalls a meeting convened by the chief secretary (then called administrator), the highest bureaucrat in Gilgit-Baltistan, in his office as the lashkar was running riot in surrounding villages. He remembers how Abdul Khaliq Taj, a Sunni revenue official, stunned the participants of the meeting by accusing the government of conniving with the lashkar.
Taj referred to the case of a Sunni resident of Gilgit city who was arrested by the police while he was trying to detonate a bomb at a Sunni mosque in order to instigate violence against Shias. The arrested man was kept in a police station overnight but was allowed to go home the next day. “It is the government that is creating rifts among Shias and Sunnis to advance its vested interests,” Barcha quotes Taj as saying at the meeting.
Members of Sunnis organisations in Gilgit-Baltistan may like to disagree. They say the anger that resulted in the lashkar’s invasion had been simmering for long — since 1972 when a Shia religious leader reportedly delivered an objectionable speech in Gilgit city.
Local Shias, on the other hand, blame the violence on General Ziaul Haq. They claim he visited Gilgit sometime in early 1988, along with then American ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Lewis Raphel, but faced strong anti-America protests during his stay in the city.
The problem with this claim is that no written records back it. The visit and the protests do not seem to have happened at all though Shias across Gilgit-Baltistan insist that they did take place and cite them as the reason why the lashkar attacked them — as a revenge for their anti-Zia protests.
What is more credible is that Shias in Gilgit-Baltistan, like elsewhere in Pakistan, observed Yaumul Quds (a day of protest against Israeli occupation of Baitul Maqdis in Jerusalem, one of the holiest of Muslim sites) on the last Friday of the fasting month of Ramzan that in 1988 fell in the second week of May. These protests usually take an anti-America turn and back then they might have assumed an anti-Zia tone as well because of a close alliance between Pakistan and the United States at the time.
There are also reports that a van carrying Shia protesters in Gilgit came under fire in a Sunni-majority neighbourhood as they were returning home from a Yaumul Quds rally. A police officer is said to have been injured in the incident.
Hamid Hussain*, a government official in Gilgit, cites a reason that sounds more solid than any other. May 17, 1988, he says, was the last day of Ramzan for the local Sunnis but local Shias were already celebrating Eidul Fitr on that day, marking the end of fasting. Some Shias were seen publicly eating in a Sunni area where fasting was still being observed, says Hussain. “Sunnis opened fire on Shias,” he says, claiming to have seen the whole incident unfold in front of his eyes.
As the news of an alleged violation of fasting code by Shias spread across the region, Sunnis became agitated. This might have led to the incursion by the lashkar.