Hazara Community (Pakistan)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:16 pm on 4 February 2013.

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Photo of John Denham John Denham Labour, Southampton, Itchen 7:16, 4 February 2013

One of the most serious problems is that there has been no acceptance of responsibility by the Pakistani authorities of the kind that we would expect in a serious situation such as this. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us what representations Her Majesty’s Government have been able to make to the Pakistani authorities on this matter.

The problem with the ill-informed, shallow or sweeping reporting that we have seen is that it tends to obscure the real causes of the violence and to obscure the responsibilities. It allows the incidents to be shrugged off as though that is “just the way things are”. Since 1990, the violence has included ride-by and drive-by shootings, personal attacks, suicide bombings, rocket attacks and car bombs, as well as the ambushing of buses and taxis and the subsequent selection of Hazara passengers for execution.

This is not the first time that my constituents have alerted me to what has happened to their relatives. Under the last Government, I took constituents who had family in the Swat valley in Pakistan to meet Lord Malloch-Brown, then a Foreign Office Minister, to alert him to the violence being carried out by the Pakistan Taliban. My constituents had come to me with stark examples of what had happened to members of their families in the recent past. I shall not give the House details of names, as family members might suffer as a result, but I have received clear documentation of constituents who had seen family members—male breadwinners—singled out for murder in three separate incidents over the past three years. The effects of that are devastating for the entire family. In a country with little in the way of a social security system, the loss of a male breadwinner has an impact on every member of the extended family.

There are wider consequences too. The Hazaras in Quetta have to live in isolation from other Pakistani citizens, not least because those other citizens fear being caught up in the violence. They suffer travel restrictions, and virtually all the Hazara students in Quetta have dropped out of university, following attacks on student transport. Hazara people have also faced difficulty in accessing civil service jobs. As has already been pointed out, however, not a single terrorist has yet been prosecuted. On the rare occasions when individuals have been arrested, they have been released. The provincial governor has been replaced, but little action seems to have been taken as yet.

The failure of the Pakistan authorities to safeguard the Hazara community is surely beyond doubt, but concerns remain about a much more sinister involvement. It is alleged that the intelligence services, the Inter-Services Intelligence, sections of which have a history of involvement with extremist forces, have links in some ways to the LEJ. I want to put it on record that I do not know whether such links are documented or what the strength of the evidence is, but the concerns about those potential connections are widely shared among those I have spoken to.

There are complicated provincial politics in Balochistan, involving not only the movements I have mentioned. The province is also tied up in the wider regional conflict, and there have been separatist movements and movements calling for autonomy. Many Hazaras believe that they have been caught up as innocent victims in the wider geo-politics.