Lahoris hold firm despite terror threats

[LahoreEstate]

Students mill around the quiet, hilltop grounds of Government College University in the shadow of 19th century spires. —AFP Photo


LAHORE: Residents of Lahore like to think their metropolis is a cut above the rest of Pakistan – a hallowed centre of education, intellectual thought and a cultural bellwether.

Students mill around the quiet, hilltop grounds of Government College University in the shadow of 19th century spires, while risqué art and a booming theatre scene provoke debate in bohemian galleries and cafes.

At the gates of the university, however, a police officer barricaded behind sandbags trains his assault rifle on the entrance. Students say they fear their journey to school in the mornings.

‘I am scared going to any area where security is concentrated. If I pass a police or army vehicle, I go fast,’ said 20-year-old history student Mateeullah Tareen. ‘But you can’t just sit at home.’

The traits Lahoris value in this eastern city of nearly eight million put it in the crosshairs of the Taliban and other insurgent groups: five militant strikes this year have killed more than 70 people.

‘They (the militants) want to destabilise Pakistan,’ said Tahir Kamran, who heads the university’s history department

‘Lahore is very, very important. In many ways it’s more important than Islamabad and Karachi because of culture, because now it has become the knowledge centre – opinion is formed mostly from Lahore.’

In March, masked gunmen opened fire on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in central Lahore, killing eight people, wounding six players and destroying Pakistan’s hopes of hosting international cricket.

Similar commando-style assaults hit three police centres on October 15.

Twenty-eight people died after gunmen attacked with suicide vests and grenades.

Police roadblocks have sprung up across the city, but on the surface Lahore gives no impression of being cowed by fear, unlike northwest Peshawar, where devastating suicide blasts have emptied public markets.

Schoolgirls sit cross-legged and giggling on the floor of Lahore’s museum filling sketchbooks with drawings of relics, while in the evenings crowds flock to see bawdy comedies at the theatre.

But Lahore is also blighted by the poverty that engulfs much of Pakistan, the sixth most populous country in the world but also one of the poorest.

Blinkered donkeys battle through indignities of the city’s choking traffic, their drivers in dust-caked clothing perched perilously on carts.

Beggars haul themselves between vehicles at traffic lights, hopefully tapping on car windows.

History professor Kamran says that for all Lahore’s pretensions and intellectual elitism, most of the residents struggle with daily hardships, while there is a strong undercurrent of religious conservatism.

‘Lahore can offer (the militants) far more assistance because right-wing politics has been very, very strong throughout the history,’ he said.

Although most Taliban attacks hit the northwest and are plotted in the tribal belt bordering Afghanistan, he says Islamist extremism has taken root in Punjab, the most populous province in Pakistan, of which Lahore is the capital.

In the university’s politics department, lecturer Ahmad Raza Khan says rising unemployment and Punjab’s spluttering industry create an army of disenfranchised men and potential militant recruits.

‘In Lahore, you can find many people who will be ready to kill somebody or die if they are given an amount of money,’ he said.

‘If anybody has his pockets filled with money on one side, and grenades and ammunition in the other side, it becomes easy. I’m not saying they are doing it, but logically it becomes easy.’

Lahore’s police chief Muhammad Pervez Rathor, however, puts on a brave face. He says reports of rising extremism in Punjab ‘is not a correct assessment’ and says the city is functioning normally.

‘Something goes wrong, a bomb explodes, people are upset for a day or two,’he told AFP at his office just 50 metres (160 feet) from the site of a bombing on May 27 that flattened a police building and killed 24 people.

Asked what measures police are taking to protect Lahore citizens, he looks weary and jokes: ‘We are praying for the long life of the suicide bombers

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