Ask any Mehsud who fled the military operations and fighting in Fata to seek refuge in Karachi and they will probably tell you that instead of open arms, they were met with stereotyping and ethnic profiling, despite having given up their homes and lives.
The tragedy was the name Mehsud, which thanks to celebrities such as Baitullah and Hakimullah, meant that if you had that surname, people were sure to turn the other cheek. It had the opposite effect with the law-enforcement agencies—all they wanted to do is kill you, because, well, of course, all Mehsuds are Taliban.
Naqeeb's case has highlighted the discrimination the Mehsuds have faced in Karachi, especially since their mass displacement from South Waziristan where the Taliban reared their heads
This deep-set bias appears to have been the reason why a 27-year-old Naqeebullah Mehsud became the target of what is being investigated as an extra-judicial killing in Karachi. The young man was from Makeen in South Waziristan and when he wasn’t busy posing for spectacularly staged fashion photos that he posted to Facebook, he was busy trying to set himself up in the clothing business. On January 13, however, he was shot dead by a team under SSP Malir Rao Anwar who has claimed Naqeeb was a terrorist and Taliban commander.
Naqeeb’s case has highlighted the discrimination the Mehsuds have faced in Karachi, especially since their mass displacement from South Waziristan where the Taliban reared their heads. (Of course, this plight is not just unique to this tribe. The people from other parts of Fata have similar stories to tell.)
Old connections
The Mehsuds have done business in Karachi and in Lahore, since roughly the 1990s as these cities were lucrative business hubs compared to Fata’s. They tended to put their energies into timber, transport, construction materials and heavy machinery. It therefore made eminent sense for them to move their families to Karachi when it became impossible to stay in South Waziristan.
There were two main reasons for the waves of displacement, which began much before the military operations started. The Taliban were putting the squeeze on the people of this area whose businesses were bled for extortion. To make matters worse, the security forces wanted the Mehsuds to organise lashkars to fight the Taliban. For many families it was simply better to leave than get involved in the mess.
By the time 2009 rolled around and operation Rah-e-Nijat started, an estimated half a million people had fled. According to the Fata Disaster Management Authority annual report 2016, military operations in June 2009 caused a displacement of 71,124 families in South Waziristan Agency. Of these 51,620 families have returned and 19,504 families are still displaced.
When these families started living in Karachi they discovered that the Mehsud name carried a burden. Law-enforcement agencies treated every Mehsud as a TTP member and had a clear “arrest and kill” policy for them if they failed to pay bribes to be freed. The TTP, who were also present in Karachi, continued to bleed them and their businesses as well. So elders say that Naqeeb’s case was certainly not the first.
One of the problems is that if you are a Mehsud, by virtue of the rule of six degrees of separation, you can probably easily be ‘linked’ to a militant. This was an “azaab” or hellish as one Mehsud man put it. If even one person from your family had connections to militants, you were at risk of being under surveillance even in Karachi. In addition to this, a city-wide operation began in 2013 to crack down on crime. By 2015, the numbers of ‘encounters’ or ‘shoot-outs’ with the police spiked.
Nadra problems
The suspicion against the tribes extended to the registration offices of the National Database & Registration Authority (NADRA) and the passport offices in Karachi. In 2016, much to the embarrassment of the authority, it emerged that Taliban chief Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who was killed, had a Pakistani CNIC and passport. In its zeal to rectify matters, however, Nadra blocked hundreds of thousands of CNICs over fears that they had been given to non-Pakistanis or militants.
Ishaq Burki, a pharmacist who came to Karachi in 2012 from South Waziristan, suffered this first hand. He doesn’t have a Permanent Residential Certificate for his daughter who is an FSc pre-engineering student. He can’t even renew his CNIC because he is from South Waziristan. “I don’t go to the Nadra offices to renew my card because I’m afraid they will put me in the category of Bengalis, and will block my CNIC,” he said. “Our community has experienced hard times, prompting most of the South Waziristan businessmen to leave Karachi for other cities.”
A senior medical practitioner from Fata, who wished to go unnamed, said that he hasn’t been able to get CNICs and other documents for his children who were going to school in Karachi. “The officials asked my children to bring my CNIC and domicile certificate and we produced them,” he says. “But then they asked for my grandfather’s documents as a precondition for a CNIC for my children.” He stopped going to the NADRA offices because he didn’t have time and just figured he would clean up the mess when he went home later this year.
Another South Waziristan resident, Mustafa Burki, is now a property dealer who lives in Sohrab Goth. He said it was nearly impossible to renew your legal documents because local officials couldn’t tell the difference between a Pakistani, an Afghan and a Pakhtun.
For what it is worth, however, a facilitation desk was set up for the people of South Waziristan inside the Gulistan-e-Jauhar NADRA Center in Karachi after MNA Maulana Jamaluddin of the agency put in a word.
Life in Karachi
When the Mehsuds came to Karachi, they found no one wanted to employ them.
“People from Fata, especially from South Waziristan, are especially denied jobs in the textile factories in Landhi Industrial Area,” says Saeed Khan, a district president of the Awami National Party and a DMC Malir district labour council member. Private firms were especially cagey.
“I’m an electrical engineer but people would be shocked when I introduced myself as a Mehsud from South Waziristan,” says Fida Muhammad Mehsud, an employee with a private firm. He now lives in Sohrab Goth.
The years between 2010 and 2015 were tough for Pakhtun in general and Mehsud in particular in Karachi. “I observed that people from Waziristan and I, myself, had to hide our identities for fear of being linked to the Taliban,” he says. “But people have now realized we are ourselves a victim of terror.”
Mehmood Jan, a driver by profession who is in his early 30s, arrived in Karachi in September 2012 and tried to rent a flat for his family. “I was denied stay in a hotel because I had a Waziristan address on my CNIC,” he says. “I had to spend that night in a mosque.”
With time, some perceptions had changed. Ironically, when the Rangers started a city-wide operation against terrorists, their sympathisers and collaborators, in 2013 Karachi became a little safer. Muhammad Rehman, a rickshaw driver from Buner who now lives in Hijrat Colony, says the operation meant that previously no-go areas for Pakhtun such as Golimar and Lalukhet are no longer off limits. “Gone are the days when na-maloom afraad used to keep different localities and routes closed.”
Noor Shah, 48, also from South Waziristan, now lives in Lyari with his eight-member extended family who had to flee after security forces ordered them to vacate the area in 2009. “I had to travel on foot for eight hours to reach Gomal,” he says, referring to the plain near Dera Ismail Khan. Today he runs a roadside kiosk and two of his young sons work as daily wage labourers in Karachi. Four of his children go to school. “I don’t want anything except peace,” he says. “I neither want a big business nor a big house. I want to live with my children away from militancy and violence.”