When General Pervez Musharraf took over Pakistan in a military coup in October 1999 by ousting Nawaz Sharif as the premier, I was barely two years old. My family, who had escaped the brutal regime of the Taliban in my homeland, Afghanistan, resettled in Balochistan’s Quetta capital a year earlier. But little did my father, who reckoned it was safe for us to reside in Quetta, know that the city would incrementally turn into a slaughterhouse for our community: the Hazaras.
As I grew up in Quetta’s Hazara Town enclave, little did I too, in my right, know who Musharaf was, and what his policies, at home and outside, meant for ethnoreligious minorities like the Hazaras.
The first time I saw Musharraf was on a small black-and-white TV my father had newly bought in the summer of 2005 and placed on a one-sided cupboard which, living its last days of life, looked like a blackhole inside. It was my father who pointed his finger on the screen and told me laughingly, “that witty tiny man with a hilarious Fauji peak cap is the four-star general who is ruling the country.” To me, that presented an unassuming setting.
The second time I heard of Musharraf was in August 2006 when he had imposed an indefinite curfew in Quetta following the death of Nawab Akbar Bugti, a veteran Baloch leader. Neither I knew who Bugti was, nor did I understand curfew; the only thing I can well recall is that my mother had warned me not to go outside until security forces had abandoned the streets for good.
The third time I learned about Musharraf was when I found myself staring at a Hazara mother who was constantly cursing him for the death of her 18-year-old son who was brutally murdered along with six other Hazaras on July 16, 2008, on Kirani Road. Every time she shrieked, it sent chills down my spine. By then, I had developed a different view of Musharraf – someone who had failed to protect my people from extremist militants who vowed to slaughter them anywhere they could lay their hands on.
Yesterday, I read on the news that the former military dictator, who effectively escaped a death sentence by the Supreme Court of Pakistan for high treason, died of amyloidosis, a rare internal disease, at the age of 79 in Dubai. As I look back, I recall what legacy he left behind for my community.
Turning a Blind Eye
For most of his life, Musharraf remained a controversial figure at home. Bolstered by the US for his assistance in the so-called global war on terror, in which Musharraf sprucely played a double-game strategy, his ill-founded policies and largely failed reform agenda contributed to the weakening of the foundations of democracy in the country. Moreover, he was accused of gross human rights violations and abuses. As he sought to tighten his grip on power through autocratic methods, he raged violent extremism, militancy, and insurgency across Pakistan in general, Balochistan in particular, a province that remains the least developed yet rich in minerals.
In Balochistan, he downplayed or undermined the long-standing grievances and demands of the Balochs in a bid to align the province with his political ambitions. For example, hundreds of political and rights activists, lawyers, students, and tribal-affiliated members, among others, were forcibly disappeared, or later killed, in the province during his rule. This, in retrospect, helped fuel unprecedented violence that plagued the entire province, more particularly Quetta, where 600,000 Hazaras are concentrated. The violence, which can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s in the Punjab and Sindh provinces, eventually entangled the Hazaras in the late 1990s in Balochistan. While sporadic cases of violence against the community can be trailed to at least a decade earlier, it is since 1999 in Quetta and a year earlier in Karachi that a particular pattern of attacks, many genocidal in nature, began to emerge and continues to date with ebbs and flows.
When Musharraf was preparing for his vicious coup in mid-October, two targeted attacks against Hazaras were carried out in Quetta. The first attack, which marked the beginning of a string of systematic attacks against the community, struck on Oct. 5 when a Hazara driver, named Najaf Ali, was shot dead behind the University of Balochistan on Sariab Road, a location that has ever since become a killing site for the Hazaras. The following day, the second attack targeted Sardar Nisar Ali Hazara, then provincial minister for education in Balochistan, near his office on Zarghun Road. While Mr. Hazara narrowly survived the assassination attempt, his driver and bodyguard did not.
In a forthcoming research study that is set to be published by the US-based Porsesh Policy Research Institute in late February, a friend and I, both Hazaras, have documented at least 276 systematic attacks against the Hazara community in Balochistan as well as in Karachi and Lahore that were carried out with complete impunity between 1998 and 2022. In the 261 attacks against the community in the province, most of which were carried out in Quetta, at least 1,046 people were killed and 1,262 injured. 37 of the total attacks occurred during the rule of Musharraf (1999—2008) when nearly 400 people were either killed or wounded by Sunni extremist militant groups, chief among them Lashkar-e Jhangvi (LeJ).
While these attacks, most of them were targeted shootings, primarily began with targeted killing and assassination attempts aimed at select individual members of the Hazara community, i.e., politicians, professors, doctors, police cadets, lawyers, religious figures, and more, they kept diversifying and intensifying in the subsequent years. By 2008, it had reached the highest spate since 1999. Moreover, these attacks spiraled into larger attacks, taking higher human tolls. For example, on Mar. 2, 2004, a suicide attack, later claimed by LeJ, killed at least 60 Hazara worshippers and critically wounded more than 100 others, when the community was commemorating the 10th of Muharram in Quetta’s Mezan Chowk area.
During this time, the deliberate and sustained attacks against the Hazara community had targeted almost all social spaces of the community and had gradually isolated them from the rest of the society. By 2014, the community was effectively ghettoized into two enclaves as put by the special Human Right Watch report (2014) that called the enclaves “virtual ghettoization” and added that there is “no travel route, no shopping trip, no school run, no work commute that is safe.”
Although the spate of violence against the community rang the alarm over and over again between 1999 and 2008, no effective and concrete actions were taken by the Musharraf government to stop it and bring its perpetrators to justice. Thus, Musharraf and his administration turned a blind eye to the plight of Hazaras in Quetta which reached far-reaching pinnacles under successive governments. As a result, the heightened attacks unfolded extremely grim dimensions aimed at ghettoizing the community further and making it difficult for its members to exist and collectively live as a community.
Could Attacks be Prevented?
Could targeted attacks be prevented against the Hazara community in Quetta during the tenure of Musharraf? Most probably, yes.
Firstly, during this time, anti-Hazara groups, like the LeJ, were not strong in Balochistan. Founded in 1996, LeJ also lacked the confidence and the alleged clandestine support by some elements in the security forces and judicial institutions. Moreover, the group did not have the local support and infrastructure that it had created and fostered in the later years. For these reasons, Musharraf could have closed down the operations of LeJ and their hideouts, dismantled the financial network of the group, and prosecuted its members. Moreover, the government could have taken concrete measures against Sunni extremist groups that propagated hate speech against the community in a bid to stem the religiopolitical platforms that provided motivation and legitimacy to such groups.
Secondly, Musharraf had both the capability and the leverage to foster hard and soft powers to eradicate terrorist groups like the LeJ. He had also a unique window of opportunity to make the best possible use of US engagement in doing so. But, instead, he not only pandered to the extremists but also, on occasions, relied on them to shield his military-dominated profile and ensure his survival. For example, he covertly supported extremist militant groups, or better put state-sponsored terrorist groups, to fight Indian forces in Kashmir and provided sanctuary for the Taliban despite promising the US to counter them. At his best, Musharraf’s realization to fight religious extremism and separatist insurgency only backfired and paved the way for the rise in added insurgency and terrorism. The latter of which could be well explained by the emergence of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan in December 2007. It was, therefore, less surprising that he survived two assassination attempts in 2003.
Moreover, Musharraf, like the rest of his military predecessors, suffused the delusion that he could enhance Pakistan’s internal order and stability by pursuing confrontational external goals vis-à-vis India and Afghanistan. Facing a delicate balancing act, his policies under the so-called “enlightened moderation”, to meet democratic aspirations, among others, also came at the expense of Pakistan’s internal stability and democratization efforts.
By the end of Musharraf’s rule in 2008, Pakistan’s economy was staggering, democratic institutions had weakened and democratic representation had stunted, corruption was soaring, ethnic tensions were simmering, religious extremism and militancy had engulfed the country, and, more importantly, a full-blown terrorist insurgency was in the rise that had already taken a huge toll on ethnoreligious minorities like the Hazaras, and whose cost the community continues to bear to this day. In short, Musharraf left a legacy for the country that was, and continues to be, neither at peace with itself nor with its neighbors.
While there may have been stirrings of change under Musharraf for some of his policies, i.e., contribution to the media landscape and women’s rights, his legacy, like most of his promises and actions, largely remains empty and insufficient. The military dictator may be viewed as a celebrity outside the country, particularly the US, but his image, like his nearly decade rule, will remain ruined and devastating for most of the Hazaras for not showing the political will and moral responsibility to protect the community, fight impunity, and bring the perpetrators of attacks against the Hazaras to justice. And Musharraf, for that, may be forgiven but never forgotten by the Hazaras.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
Maisam Iltaf is a researcher and human rights activist. He is the Co-founder of Rahila Foundation, a non-profit working for youth empowerment through education, advocacy and capacity-building programs. Iltaf has also published with Diplomat and Global Voices.
