Brutality & impunity of Pakistan's military

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Brutality, impunity for Pakistan's paramilitary
Brutality, impunity for Pakistan's paramilitary

KARACHI, June 17, 2011 (AFP) -The killing of an unarmed youth in a public park by uniformed officers in Karachi highlights the reputation for brutality of Pakistani security forces in a violent city where murders are commonplace.

Answerable to the interior ministry, more than 10,000 paramilitary troops patrol the financial capital and its surroundings to combat ethnic, political and Islamist violence. But the violence has only got worse.

By any measure, the killing of 22-year-old Sarfaraz Shah, accused by a civilian of committing robbery, was horrific, all the more so for being captured live on camera and broadcast around the clock on national television.

In the footage, a clean-shaven man pleads for his life before being shot twice in the hand and thigh. As his blood poured out of his wounds, the soldiers appear to do nothing but watch as Shah falls unconscious.

"This is completely against humanity. What the Rangers did is unacceptable because by this way they can even kill small children in streets and say that they were dacoits," said cab driver Ameer Khan, using an Anglo-Indian colloquialism which refers to members of armed gangs.

In a rare move, Pakistan has since removed from their jobs the heads of the police and Rangers in Sindh province, of which Karachi is the capital. Prosecutors are now seeking murder charges against six Rangers and a civilian.

Authorities are also investigating the killings of five unarmed Chechens, one of them a pregnant woman, by security forces in the city of Quetta.

Accusations of several hundred extrajudicial killings dog the military in the northwestern district of Swat, where troops fought to put down a Taliban insurgency in towns and villages in 2009.

Human rights activists say units such as the Rangers, originally established for combat and border duty, are neither equipped nor trained for civilian areas.

"The paramilitaries consider themselves accountable only to the army and that civilians are inferior. Therein lies the problem," said Zohra Yusuf, chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP).

"As their stay in the city gets longer, the situation worsens," she added.

"Paramilitaries are appointed to cities having had just basic combat training. They should be sensitised with specialised human rights courses to help them adjust."

According to the HRCP, 748 people were killed in targeted shootings in Karachi last year, compared to 272 in 2009. A fresh bout of assassinations blamed on political tensions has left 30 people dead since Monday, according to officials.

Islamist militant violence is also on the rise in Karachi, a chaotic city of 16 million people whose port is a vital hub for NATO supplies bound for Afghanistan.

Shrines have been attacked, a police headquarters bombed. In the last two months, a Saudi diplomat was shot dead, the Saudi consulate targeted by grenades and the naval base held up.

It took the navy 17 hours to fight off a handful of militants who killed 10 security officials and destroyed two US-made aircraft.

Yet in the vast city, a magnet for economic migrants where the government says the population increases by 500,000 each year, 28,000 police are simply incapable of enforcing law and order.

Therefore officials say the Rangers are needed to help patrol the streets, safeguard government buildings and diplomatic missions, and to be on call in the event of riots, bombings or shootings.

"The paramilitary forces were meant to assist the civilian administration for a shorter and specific time, but here they have been engaged for two decades," said local government adviser Kaisar Bengali.

According to government figures, Pakistan has 350,000 policemen -- one for every 500 people -- with significant numbers diverted to secure government officials, politicians and top civil servants.

"Our province doesn't have enough money to spend on capacity-building the police and we have no such programme," said Bengali.

Sharfuddin Memon, an expert on policing in the provincial government, said there was a serious trust deficit between the law enforcement agencies and the people, and called for accountability through public safety commissions.

In the working-class, government loyalist stronghold of Lyari, Pakistan People's Party (PPP) workers have staged demonstrations accusing the Rangers of killing two locals in a shooting last month.

But government officials insist the park killing was an isolated incident by rogue officers that does not reflect an institutionalised brutality.

"We shouldn't blame the institution," Sharjeel Memon, Sindh's information minister, told AFP. "The Rangers have made a spectacular contribution to maintaining law and order," he said.
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