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Jadahmadine
19-11-05, 23:58
BBC-news


Differences between Pakistan's Sunni majority and Shia minority go back to the Islamic schism following the prophet's death.

But in the past two decades those differences have been manifest in repeated violence wrought by Sunni and Shia extremists.

The violence, which worsened after 11 September and the expulsion of the Taleban from Afghanistan, led President Pervez Musharraf to ban a number of militant groups.

However, the BBC's Zaffar Abbas in Islamabad says recent attacks show the extremists who were forced into hiding by the clampdown are now resurfacing.

Great schism

In early Islamic history the Shia were a political faction ("party of Ali") that supported the power of Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed and the fourth caliph (temporal and spiritual ruler) of the Muslim community.

Pakistan's sectarian divide
Shias revere Ali, son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed
Pakistan is 20 percent Shia, 70 percent Sunni
Violence between Sunni and Shia factions began from early 1980s
More than 150 people have been killed in the past year alone
Around 4,000 people have killed in total
Most violence takes place in Sindh, Baluchistan and Punjab

Ali was murdered in 661AD and his chief opponent, Muawiya, became caliph. It was Ali's death that led to the great schism between Sunnis and Shias.

Caliph Muawiya was later succeeded by his son Yazid, but Ali's son Hussein refused to accept his legitimacy and fighting between the two resulted.

Hussein and his followers were massacred in battle near Karbala in AD680.

Both Ali and Hussein's death gave rise to the Shia cult of martyrdom and sense of betrayal.

Shia has always been the rigid faith of the poor and oppressed waiting for deliverance. It is seen as a messianic faith which awaits the coming of the "hidden Imam", Allah's messenger who will reverse their fortunes and herald the reign of divine justice.

Today, they make up about 15% of the total worldwide Muslim population

Zia's legacy



Most sectarian violence in Pakistan takes place in the province of Punjab and the country's commercial capital, Karachi, in Sindh province.

There have also been outbreaks in Quetta, capital of Balochistan province.

It is estimated that around 4,000 people have been killed in Shia-Sunni violence since the 1980s across Pakistan.

President Musharraf is not the only Pakistani leader to have been beset with such problems, which most analysts agree began in 1979 when General Zia ul-Haq began Islamicising Pakistani politics to legitimise his military rule.

As a result, hardline religious groups were strengthened.

This coincided with a period when parts of Pakistan came to be awash with weaponry as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979.

US arms and Saudi funds allowed General Zia to mount a proxy war in Afghanistan with mujahideen, or holy warriors.

Drawn from Pakistani as well as Afghan and Arab youths mostly educated at religious schools, the mujahideen and their patrons were to become influential actors in Pakistan.

Because Sunnis form a large majority in Pakistan, most of the mujahideen were Sunni too.

Radical Sunni Islamists were able to establish armed groups like the Sipah-e-Sahaba.

Revolutionary zeal

Shia fighters too joined the jihad, or holy war, against the Soviets in Afghanistan, although their bands were smaller.



In Karachi, doctors have been targeted

They received help from Iran where the Islamic revolution earlier in 1979 had boosted Shia confidence.

The growth of Shia militancy led to the establishment of groups such as Tehrik-e-Jafria.

Once the Soviets left Afghanistan, Pakistani militants returned home and began looking for a new jihad.

Many were encouraged to take their combat skills to Indian-administered Kashmir.

Others stayed at home to begin a campaign against fellow-Muslims they considered heretics or against Westerners and Christians.


After dozens were killed in sectarian attacks, General Musharraf launched a campaign against extremism in January 2002, banning the worst-offending groups.

However, continuing attacks have shown the limitations of the government's policy.

And violence in Balochistan puts a further strain on Pakistan's security forces which are faced with challenges from the Taleban and remnants of al-Qaeda, and have to deal with confrontations with India over Kashmir .




Ik hoop dat deze mensen hun hoofden bijelkaar houden, want dit voorpelt niet veel goeds, als je alleen al kijkt naar de hoeveelheid doden die vandaag weer gevallen zijn in Irak op markten, in moskeeën en zelf bij begrafenissen van moslims die omgekomen zijn bij aanslagen.

Hier zijn anti-religieus beduivelde onmensen aan het werk.

Jadahmadine
20-11-05, 00:38
Much that has been written about the ‘division’ between the Sunni and Shia in Iraq is not only a total distortion of the demographics of the Iraqi population, it also feeds into the propaganda campaign of ‘divide and rule’ tactics that even opponents of the war and occupation can fall into the trap of accepting as true, including I might add, myself, when I used a ‘statistic’ gleaned from the Independent without first verifying it.
I was rapidly called to task over my (or should I say the Independent’s) numbers by a reader:

"Your reference to "the minority Sunni Muslims" and "16 million of Iraq's population of 25 million are Shias" is [a] fallacy."

He went on to say:

"To date there is not and has not been any Iraqi official record documenting the actual head count of the Sunnis and/or Shias in Iraq. The reason is that in all the Iraqi government censuses previously carried out till the fall of the last regime, there was no requirement in the census forms to specify the Muslim sect [to which a person belonged]. In fact there is no official document issued by the Iraqi governments to date that mentions the Muslim sect in it. Hence, the referenced term about the Sunni's being a minority and Shias a majority is unfounded and incorrect. Not that it matters anyway but it is worth mentioning there is a counter argument that considers the Sunnis are the majority. I recently received…research by an Iraqi scholar which proved this argument with fairly reliable figures. Needless to say, both arguments do not bear any significance whatsoever. This whole charade is also part of what you so rightly referred to in your article as [a] "massive disinformation campaign" waged by those who have ulterior political motives behind this campaign."

The writer by the way is an Iraqi citizen currently residing in the Arab Emirates. And to reinforce his point he draws attention to the role of divide and rule in the War in Lebanon and role of the so-called Christian/Moslem ‘divide’ in fomenting discord and civil war in the country that only benefitted the Israeli and US imperialists:

"[B]efore and during the Lebanese crisis (1975-1990) there was a widespread belief, [that] to a certain extent became…common knowledge, that the Christians were the majority in Lebanon. That also was a politically motivated fallacy which served its political purposes for years but was later discovered by the Lebanese themselves to be untrue as it became well known, as a matter of fact, that the Muslim population was and still is the majority."

You would think by now that the tactic of ‘divide and rule’ would have been ‘rumbled’ by most people, yet it continues to cut a swathe of death and destruction across the planet wherever the interests of Western imperialism are threatened, that ennumerating them all would fill several paragraphs.

But of course, ethnic, racial and religious differences that mean little during the ‘good times’ are easy to ignite when communities feel threatened, whether the threat is real or invented. And in any case, the ‘differences’ have been artificially maintained by the state utilising a variety of tactics and strategies.

We need only look at the current Labour government’s use of the ‘asylum seeker’ and ‘illegal immigrant’ to see the truth of the role of divide and rule, especially when significant sections of the mass media are complicit in the process, whether it’s the BBC in even talking about it as a ‘problem’ or the more rabid sections of the press intent on inflaming the passions of the most vulnerable communities in this, the 4th richest country on the planet!

And it’s the UK that is the ‘past master’ of the use of this tactic that stretches back centuries to its colonisation of Ireland, India, the slave plantations of the Caribbean, and its colonial possessions in Africa and Asia. And such tactics are varied and ingenious from the use of people from different ‘tribal’ backgrounds in the various sections of the colonial state in Nigeria (Hausa in the army and Yoruba in the civil service, or perhaps it was the other way around, or maybe it was the Ibo, it matters little) through to the importation of Asians either as indentured labour in countries as far apart as Trinidad and as merchants in Uganda or Kenya.

Look, I needn’t go on, it’s all there, in the history books, you don’t have to be rocket scientist to figure it out nor what effect it has on the development process and the autonomy of countries struggling to establish themselves after centuries of colonial domination. It’s the final fallback for imperialism in its struggle to maintain its hegemonic control of the planet and its resources.

We forget that it’s only a century or so ago that Europe too was a bunch of ‘statelets’ busy butchering each other in this or that name, whilst its rulers squandered the wealth of their empires and sacrificed the lives of their people in the name of one deity, faction or another.

It’s also fashionable these days, even for some so-called anti-colonialists to take up the cudgel of capitalism and blame the victim, when I read about ‘dependency’ and corrupt rule and ‘failed states’ etc, without looking to the crucial role of imperialism in the process. It’s the hypocrisy that pisses me off so, when I read the words of these smug, self-satisfied bastards telling me ‘I told you so, you can’t trust the natives. You need the civilised white man to sort it all out’. And this is from the ‘civilisation’ that gave us Adolf Hitler, My Lai, lynchings and Hiroshima. ‘Mississipi Goddamn!’ as Nina Simone told it.

De white man heeft de afgelopen 50 jaar heel erg naar zichzelf gekeken na die twee wereldoorlogen, en wil dat zulke fouten niet weer gebeuren, met al die nucleaire mogelijkheden van tegenwoordig.