The current waves of lawlessness in the city calls for a comprehensive deweaponisation drive in order to clean the city from the menace of illegal weapons, the main factor behind the state of chaos.

The new provincial government is confronted with an extremely volatile situation as the so-called private armed military seems to be calling the shots and tends to blackmail the government by restoring to lawlessness at the behest of some invisible forces. Some observers, however, say that plans are underway to initiate such a campaign. However, the provincial government, taking immediate action, posted a senior police officer known for his past operational experiences and had played a key role in 1995-1996 operation in Karachi.

It may be recalled that during the 1995-1996 operation under the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government headed by General (retired) Naseerullah Babar, two senior police officers played an important role. Out of the two, one was the present Provincial Police Officer, Sindh, Shoaib Suddle, the then DIG Karachi, who cleaned the city from terrorists and recovered a huge quantity of illicit weapons. The other officer who arrested and illuminated terrorists groups such as the Kalia group and other networks and captured half the areas in Hyderabad including Resham Gali, Pakka Killa, Shahi Bazaar, New Cloth Market and district Hyderabad was cleaned by the then DIG Saleem Akhtar Siddiki. He arrested these terrorists groups and recovered more than 200 kalashnikovs. During his tenure, Siddiki made the atmosphere of Hyderabad so congenial that the late Chief Minister Sindh, Abdullah Shah, addressed a big public gathering inside Pakka Killa, Hyderabad, where thousands of participants raised slogans of ‘Jeay Bhutto’.

Although in the past, the government had launched a deweaponisation campaign, it still failed to achieve the desired objective. This was mainly because these campaigns were politically motivated and targeted a specific ethnic group, which resulted in an outbreak of ethnic violence leading to innumerable human and material losses.

It is pertinent to mention here that the first drive against the deweaponisation on a mass scale was launched in the mid-80s in Karachi, when a crackdown took place at Sohrab Goth (Kuchi Bazar) — a stronghold of the Pushtoons. It was also known to be the main supplier of illicit weapons to the city and this operation was called Operation Sohrab Goth. However, the operation failed to yield the desired results because several officials in the police department had tipped off the smugglers prior to the operation. Ironically when the police force entered Sohrab Goth, they found a few old weapons and rounds of ammunitions at this juncture. The police, in order to hide their failure, bulldozed the flourishing markets in the area, which caused severe resentment among the Pushtoons. This failed operation resulted in an eruption of sectarian hatred which resulted in disputes between the two rival political groups. Thus, this deweaponisation campaign sowed the seeds of ethnic violence in the city.

However, during the second government of the former prime minister (late) Benazir Bhutto in 1990, another clean-up operation was launched with the prime aim of undermining a political organisation, which had acquired huge arsenal and had challenged the writ of the State. Besides launching a crackdown on political activists in various parts of the city, the trouble shooter and frontman of Benazir Bhutto — Naseerullah Babar devised a new strategy of launching a crackdown on arms smuggling in tribal areas that were providing arms and ammunition to the political group. They arrested tribal smugglers, who revealed vital information about the network.

However, this campaign launched to clean the city from illegal weapons came to a grinding halt, when on one fateful day — November 5, 1996 – the government of Benazir Bhutto was dismissed by the then President, Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari. Interestingly enough, Mian Mohammed Nawaz Sharif, in his second term in the office, launched a deweaponisation campaign, which utterly failed and the government had to stage a retreat. In this backdrop, the former interior minister, Lieutenant General (retd) Moinuddin Haider in 2001, ordered the surrendering of illegal weapons, which also fizzled out.

The present circumstances demands that the incumbent government should thoroughly deliberate upon this issue and formulate a well-thought-out strategy for an effective deweaponisation campaign. In this regard, a senior officer, requesting anonymity, suggested that the government needs to evolve an effective intelligence network in order to take action against the potential trouble-makers and recover weapons from them. Moreover, the trouble areas need to be identified so that an effective campaign can be launched.

Furthermore, the provincial government along with the concerned intelligence agencies should launch a campaign against the potential weapon traffickers who tend to ship lethal weapons into the city from the NWFP and Balochistan. It should also bring about effective coordination with the Punjab and Balochistan governments, so that all the entry points to Sindh are properly checked in order to curb the inflow of illegal weapons into the province.