MQM attacked JST relieve camp

[asif1986]

Blood spills over land
Blood spills over land – The Express Tribune

Fawad shah

KARACHI: At least two people were gunned down and around 14 including three policemen wounded in crossfire on Monday when law enforcers clashed with activists of a political party, accused of illegally occupying apartments near Sachal police station.

However, the Jeay Sindh Tehreek (JST), a Sindhi nationalist party, claims that the Chapel Sun City apartments are a relief camp occupied by flood survivors.

When the apartments’ occupants resisted the police move to vacate them, the Rangers were called for back-up.

According to police and Rangers sources, the scene turned ugly with an exchange of fire and two people, identified as Qamber Ali Soomro and Ayaz, were killed.

The injured included Abdul Rehman Jatoi, Sanaullah Jatoi, Syed Faryal Shah, Abdul Kareem, Raja Ramzan, Ghulam Jaffer, Sohrab Sarki, Abdul Wahab, Dhani Bux Soomro, Tariq Ali Jatoi, Manzur Wasi and Haji Bux.

Gulshan-e-Iqbal police station SHO Inspector Asif Munawar and two other policemen were also wounded in the clash. The three were taken to a private hospital while the deceased and other injured were shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre.

During the gun battle, the booking office of the apartments and two buses were also torched.

Police detained over 20 men including those who were injured.

Police officials say JST activists have occupied the apartments, posing as flood survivors, and attacked the police party that had arrived there to vacate them.

“I and two other policemen were injured by the land grabbers’ firing,” said Inspector Munawar. “We had received several complaints from the residents of the area as well as the project’s builder about JST activists occupying the apartments and therefore we took the action,” he said.

JST’s stance

JST chief Dr Safdar Sarki said his party had established a relief camp at the apartments and the operation was launched on the behest of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement and the Sindh governor.

“The camp was established in the area after taking different political parties into confidence,” he told The Express Tribune, adding, “It is a conspiracy by the governor and his party against the flood-affected people.”

Sarki said 7,000 affected people were living in the camp and all of them were needy. “It was not as if they were occupying the place.”

“The MQM leadership feels threatened by these camps and they cannot tolerate Sindhis in Karachi,” he said, adding that different strategies were being devised to oust survivors out of the city.
“Police and Rangers attacked the camp. They killed eight people including one child,” he claimed. “The law enforcement agencies also tortured women in the camps.”

“We have announced a shutter down strike in the city on Tuesday,” the JST chief said.

JST office-bearers said 11 flood survivors were injured in the attack and nine others were arrested.

MQM refutes

The MQM refuted the allegations leveled against it by the JST chief.

“The security agencies work under the supervision of Dr Zulfiqar Mirza,” MQM senior leader and Adviser to Sindh CM Ghulam Haider Rahu told The Express Tribune.

Rahu dispelled the impression that the MQM was working against flood survivors. “If people are accommodated in private properties, then authorities have the right to take action against this.”

He said the MQM activists sympathised with the flood survivors and had offered accommodation to their Sindhi brethrens even at their homes.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 24, 2010

An earlier version of this article stated the location of violence as Gulshan town. The exact location was near Sachal station within Gulshan.

Published in The Express Triune, August 24th, 2010

 

[rafay321]

I live in Block 7 of Jauhar. I heard extreme gun fires during iftar time. 7pm till 7 20pm. It was horrible. All this happened right at Maghrib time when people were breaking the fast.

Really ugly.

 

[IBRIS]

Pakistan Government should outlaw or confiscate all full automatic registered weapons at time of elections, disasters, internal unrest. There should be a mechanism in all police departments to issue a temporary hold of automatic civilian registered weapons. Whoever don't surrender their weapons, owners should be prosecuted and their gun licenses should be revoked.

 

[pak-marine]

as per the news paper report this exchange of fire took place btw police , rangers (comes under interior ministry headed by PPP) and ladmafia members posing as flood surivors newspaper headlined as blood spills over the land.

Police officials say JST activists have occupied the apartments, posing as flood survivors, and attacked the police party that had arrived there to vacate them.

“I and two other policemen were injured by the land grabbers’ firing,” said Inspector Munawar. “We had received several complaints from the residents of the area as well as the project’s builder about JST activists occupying the apartments and therefore we took the action,”

How did JST concluded that this was done by MQM !!? also the thread is BS news cliping is headlined Blood spills over land however the thread starter being BS titles it MQM attacks relief camps !!:

Source :: http://http://tribune.com.pk/story/42273/blood-spills-over-land/

 

[azfar]

However, the Jeay Sindh Tehreek (JST), a Sindhi nationalist party, claims that the Chapel Sun City apartments are a relief camp occupied by flood survivors

who gave them right to established a relief camp in occupied apartment?

 

[pak-marine]

However, the Jeay Sindh Tehreek (JST), a Sindhi nationalist party, claims that the Chapel Sun City apartments are a relief camp occupied by flood survivors

who gave them right to established a relief camp in occupied apartment?

They dont need any ones permision , they think its their personal right too accupy public land and when law enforcement comes they are shot at and the height of lunacy is they try and twist this into a political issue and are blaming MQM , typical example of shi*y politics

 

[iioal malik]

Saw this on u tube today thought i should share ...MQM is unstoppable in trams of their crimes eating karachi from past 35 years must stop ....Only army can stop them

 

[SQ8]

Yea. yea..
We all know how pure the pathan community in Karachi is.
Dont bring it another pathan vs Mohajir debate up.

 

[Irfan Baloch]

Yea. yea..
We all know how pure the pathan community in Karachi is.
Dont bring it another pathan vs Mohajir debate up.

I will request mods to trim and remove inflamatory material
the last thing we can offord is relgious, secterian and ethnic fighting.

 

[banned]

Pakistan is rapidly becoming crooks and criminals haven

 

[PakSher]

The crimes of MQM do need to be exposed so people know the henious nature of the MQM Party Structure.

 

[Nahraf]

Everybody wants piece of goose that lays golden eggs. Karachi produces so much revenue that every party want to control some part to share the gravy train. The Jeay Sindh Tehreek of Gul Muhammad Khan Jakhrani has lost popular support of Sindhis as PPP has swept the interior Sindh seats both federally and provincially. They are using fake refugees to occupy apartment complex in Karachi to get more attention and press. The land grabbing is the most profitable business where innocent citizen have no recourse when his property is occupied by people with guns and political support.

 

[Nahraf]

Flood Refugees Swamp Karachi, Exacerbating Ethnic Strife - WSJ.com

Crush of Refugees Inflames Karachi
Local government says it can accommodate one million, but with some 30,000 in camps, ethnic tensions are rising
By TOM WRIGHT

KARACHI, Pakistan—Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Pakistan's devastating floods are seeking refugee in this city of 18 million, exacerbating ethnic strife that has already escalated this year and threatens to destabilize the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Most of the refugees are ethnic Sindhis from areas outside Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed in the flooding that began more than three weeks ago.

The United Nations says 800,000 people are stranded by the flooding, which has severed major roads in Sindh and nearby Baluchistan province. Some 1,500 people have been killed and six million made homeless by the deluge, which started in the north but swept south along the Indus River and continues to threaten towns and villages in Sindh and Baluchistan.

Sindh's provincial government has set up camps on the outskirts of Karachi, where 30,000 people are trying to keep their families together under tarpaulins in the searing heat.

The local administration says it can cope with up to one million of the refugees. But many who have made it to Karachi say they are being turned away from shelters on the outskirts and are pouring in to the city, deepening ethnic rivalries with Karachi's majority ethnic community that have simmered for years.

Police and paramilitary forces opened fire Monday on hundreds of mainly Sindhi refugees who, aided by a Sindh nationalist party, were squatting in 200 unoccupied, private apartments in a northern suburb of the city. Three people were killed, including a young boy, and 16 injured when police fired tear gas and live ammunition into the crowd after some refugees began to throw stones, eyewitnesses and local government officials said.

On Wednesday, police raided the house of a Sindh nationalist politician, Safdar Sarki, who organized the refugees' settling in the apartments without permission from the builder. Mr. Sarki, in an interview, said he had sent the refugees there.

For Karachi's dominant group, the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, the influx of Sindhi refugees poses a threat to the established order.

"If they come in hundreds of thousands, how will they survive?" says Khawaja Izhar ul Hassan, a member of the provincial assembly from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, a largely Muhajir political party that forms part of Sindh province's coalition government.

The crisis adds a dimension to a running struggle for control of Karachi between the MQM and ethnic Pashtuns, a group with origins in northwest Pakistan. The number of Pashtuns in Karachi has swollen in recent years as many have fled fighting between the Pakistan Taliban and the military in their homelands bordering Afghanistan.

Almost 1,000 people have died in Karachi since the start of the year, many in violence largely between Muhajir and Pashtun armed groups. Mr. Zardari's administration has been unable to stem the violence. The MQM has cast its opposition to the wave of Pashtun migration as a necessary push-back against the Taliban's growing influence in Karachi.

The wave of Sindhi flood migrants may be harder to counter. Sindhis are Karachi's indigenous ethnic group. The Muhajirs, Muslims of various ethnicities from India, arrived here after the 1947 partition of the subcontinent.

Ethnic Sindhis number about four million, smaller than the Muhajir community, but dominate the province's rural areas.

The provincial government has set up 30 camps around Karachi. In the largest, in the northern suburb of Gulshan-e-Maymar, some 10,000 refugees are sheltering, 10 to a room on average, in government-owned apartments. Outside, local volunteers have started primary school classes for 450 children.

At another camp, in Bin Qasim Town to the east of the city, thousands of refugees shelter from the heat under makeshift tents. They receive water from large trucks and two meals a day. On the outskirts of the camp, newly arrived refugees carrying children with distended bellies shelter beneath plastic bags strung together over branches.

Deen Mohammad, a 30-year-old farmer from Jacobabad, a town in northern Sindh, lost his house and goats when the Indus River burst its banks. His sister is still missing, he says. "Nothing is left behind," said Mr. Mohammad, who made his way to Karachi with his wife and four children. "We'd prefer to stay here."

Others have found refuge where they can. Mr. Sarki, president of Jeay Sindh Tehrik, a Sindh nationalist party, sent his cadres to direct refugees to the unoccupied apartments in a Sindh area of the city.

They were meant to be there temporarily, he said. But the police action has shown the city government, which has been dominated by MQM for 25 years, is worried about an influx of Sindhis changing the balance of power in Karachi, Mr. Sarki said.

"If one million Sindhis came here, the demography would be changed," he said. "These people are trying to get rid of Sindhis and dominate Karachi to show that Karachi belongs to them. It's totally immoral."

At the site of the killings, bullet marks pocked the walls and blood was smeared over the ground. A makeshift medical clinic lay destroyed, hundreds of pills trampled into the ground. Even after the violence, a few refugees remained in the flats.

Mr. Hassan, the MQM politician, says the police should have acted with more restraint. The MQM, he said, welcomes refugees on a temporary basis and if they are settled in official camps or relatives' houses.

The Sindh nationalist parties aren't contributing to relief efforts and are using the refugees to further their political agenda, Mr. Hassan said. "They are looking for places to capture. We will not allow them to use private property in the name of refugees."

 

[pak-marine]

The crimes of MQM do need to be exposed so people know the henious nature of the MQM Party Structure.

dont worry about MQM it party structure is open to its millions of voters , who live in their jurisdiction and understand what kind of fundamental issues we are dealing with every day.

 

[Mughal-Prince]

YouTube - MQM Mahajirs raped Pathan women infront of her children

Saw this on u tube today thought i should share ...MQM is unstoppable in trams of their crimes eating karachi from past 35 years must stop ....Only army can stop them

Well Mr. Malik I think you are such a retard. If you may saw that video before posting instead of reading its title you may yourself didnt post it here. And following writing some inflamtory comments ... only an Idiot could do it ... where in that video mension this women is a pathan and she was raped by some MQM activists ... Go get yourself right ... and mods please delete this post