“The attack on the Hazara Shia community hall in Quetta has finally shocked the Pakistani state into taking action against the slaughter of that community in Balochistan. Haji Abdul Qayyum Changezi, a senior community leader, described it best on Sunday. “Our people are being massacred — 1,100 have been murdered in the last five years,” he said while speaking in a televised meeting with Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf. “That’s out of a total population of 500,000 — a rate unprecedented anywhere in Pakistan.” While women and children have been killed, the high risk age group remains young males. Increasingly, the Hazara youth prefer to choose the life of the illegal immigrant. Certain death awaits them at home. All Hazaras fear that they could be the next target of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. For Pakistan’s deadliest militant group’s Baloch incarnation — they are the ideal target on both ethnic and religious basis…………The LeJ’s story is well-known — created in form of the Sipah-e-Sahaba in the mid eighties by militants and extremist demagogues by harnessing rising anti-Shia feeling in the Punjab. While the province has remained home base, the LeJ has slowly but surely spread its tentacles across the country. Its sectarian poison also found a fertile ground in the soil that was prepared post 9/11.…………”

Pakistan’s sectarian war of genocide preceded September 11 and its aftermath. Its seeds were planted in the 1970s, when Wahhabi petro-money started flowing into impoverished Pakistan, mainly from Saudi Arabia. With the money came clerics, shaikhs committed to spreading the intolerant Wahhabi doctrine of hating and excommunicating “others”. The new madrassas did their assigned job over the past decades.
By the 1980s the Wahhabi inroad has deepened. Pakistan started seeing sectarian hatred in the open, and soon after sectarian killings spread, aimed at Shi’as. There are other minority faiths and sects in Pakistan that were also demonized by the Wahhbai ‘teachers’ and their disciples, but most of them are Shi’as (about one quarter of the population of Pakistan are Shi’as). And it is not confined to Baluchistan and not just against the Hazaras: it is widespread and suicide terror bombs often hit Shi’a mosques or funerals in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. There are occasional retaliations, but the terror and murder traffic is mostly one way.
It is a shame that such a beautiful Arabic word, Madrassa, has taken a sinister meaning outside the Arabic and Islamic world. It simply means a school, a place where lessons are taught and learned. It was not intended to mean a place where imported hatred is planted in young minds to spawn future terrorist monsters.
Cheers
mhg