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Dispatch From KarachiDid Pakistan's president provoke an ethnic war last weekend?

By Nicholas SchmidlePosted Thursday, May 17, 2007, at 4:04 PM ET

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As expected, the worst of Saturday's violence didn't break out until after Chaudhry touched down in Karachi. With the MQM in command of every intersection, roundabout, and flyover, any attempt by the opposition parties to greet the chief justice was destined for confrontation. Syed, the Pashtun politician, was trapped, along with a caravan of his party's supporters, beneath a flyover on the main road leading to and from the airport. As gunfire broke out between ANP and MQM activists around 1 p.m., a well-aimed shot, taken from the overpass, smashed the windshield of a red Toyota Land Cruiser Prado with ANP plates, immediately killing a man sitting in the back seat. "They thought I was there," Syed told me two days later. He showed me the bullet recovered from the back seat of the Prado, the same kind of bullet used in the Heckler Koch G3 assault rifle. While Kalashnikovs are common in Pakistani homes, the G3 is not. Shahi said the only people with access to such weapons are the army and intelligence agencies.

Curiously, however, the army, the Rangers, and the police completely ignored their commitment to maintaining law and order on Saturday. I spent most of that afternoon driving to different parts of the city and saw only 10 Rangers: five guarding a Kentucky Fried Chicken and five guarding a girls' Montessori school. In both instances, rival groups were clashing down the street. It took police more than six hours to reach a private TV channel that came under fire. The channel, AAJ TV, continued broadcasting while technicians in the newsroom crouched under their desks to avoid being shot. When I returned to my hotel at dusk, I watched a white Kia SUV roll slowly down an otherwise-empty eight-lane road that cuts through the center of the city. A man in the back seat pointed a rifle barrel out the window and opened fire on a handful of innocent people walking a few hundred yards away. On Sunday, I asked a police officer if he had received an official order not to intervene in Saturday's street battles. His face bore a shameful expression, and he replied, "No comment."

By late Saturday night, with the chief justice on a flight heading back to Islamabad and with no chance of him speaking at the Sindh High Court (he never left the airport lounge), the Rangers patrolled the streets, and the containers and tankers were cleared from the intersections. But while a forklift can clear a road within minutes, ethnic tensions are not so easily soothed. In Quetta, a mostly Baluchi and Pashtun city near the Afghan border, 415 miles from Karachi, unknown arsonists torched the MQM office. And on Sunday, Pashtun-dominated areas of Karachi turned into battlegrounds between mobs and the police. Syed claimed that Pashtuns suffered more casualties than anyone else on Saturday. Now they wanted revenge. "If the MQM accepts their mistakes and apologizes, then there is no problem for my culture. We have big hearts," Syed said. "But if they don't accept their mistakes, then we will take our revenge."

On Monday, May 14, the opposition parties called for a nationwide strike. It marked the third straight day in which businesses remained closed; shopkeepers didn't dare lift the metal shutters protecting their stores from vandalism. The three days of strikes and violence amounted to roughly $400 million in lost national income, not to mention an incalculable loss of confidence by foreign investors. On Tuesday morning, I returned once again to the roundabout where rioters had clashed with the police all day on Sunday. There, I spoke with a pudgy, middle-aged journalist named Rafiq. He told me, "On May 12, the nexus between Musharraf and the MQM was fully exposed. On the other side are the lawyers, journalists, students, traders, Pashtuns, Baluchis, Punjabis, Sindhis, secular parties, religious parties, and nationalist parties. The battle lines are drawn. Who knows where it will end."