AL JAZEERA
People & Power goes behind the scenes with a famous super cop in Pakistan’s fastest-growing and most lawless city.
Karachi is Pakistan’s financial and commercial capital; a vast, sprawling metropolis of more than 20 million people, which generates almost a quarter of the country’s wealth.
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People & Power sent filmmakers Karim Shah and Shad Khan to find out why and to follow Karachi’s increasingly embattled police chief as he tries to restore law and order to the city’s streets.
Filmmaker’s view
by KARIM SHAH
Crime in Karachi is huge. Even for a city of an estimated 20 million people, the rate of violent crime is excessive. Over 40,848 serious offenses were reported in 2013 and over 2,700 murders. It was the city’s deadliest year on record.
We wanted to make a film to explore this rise in criminality and find out what is being done to combat it. So last year we got in touch with Pakistan’s most famous policeman, Superintendent Chaudry Aslam Khan. He was head of the Karachi police’s anti-extremist cell and his fight against the Taliban especially had made him a household name in Pakistan.
He agreed to let us film with him and document his work. But on January 9 this year, just as our project was about to get underway, an insurgent suicide bomber drove a car packed with explosives straight into the vehicle in which Aslam was travelling. He and two other police officers died instantly. He had survived nine previous attacks but this time the Taliban got their man.
When we eventually got to the city, a couple of weeks after the lethal blast, we discovered that Aslam’s death was not an isolated incident; 171 policemen had been killed the previous year – 79 since last September. During our two weeks of filming in Karachi that toll was to rise by another dozen more.
Such attacks often come in direct response to an episode of the police’s new and very aggressive law enforcement programme known as Operation Karachi. In September 2013, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ordered a clean-up of the city and a joint operation was launched between the Karachi Police, the Army Rangers and the country’s intelligence agencies. The police side is run by Karachi’s charismatic police chief, Additional Inspector General Shahid Hayat. Following Aslam’s death, he also now became the central character in our film. A remarkable man with an almost impossible task, when we met Hayat he was very frank about why the operation was necessary.
“We have to be very clear about it, it’s now or never. Things have got so bad that if we don’t arrest this trend it will really hit us hard. If we don’t tackle the Taliban and other criminals head on they are going to ruin this city forever,” he said.
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To get a better understanding of the scale of the problems he faces we joined Hayat in a helicopter trip over the Karachi’s far-flung suburbs. Below us we could see mile after mile of densely packed housing, a warren of ill-lit streets into which the armed gangs and the Taliban insurgents can easily slip away and hide from his men. The police chief gazed down and mused about the deep-rooted causes of the crisis that had cost the lives of so many of his officers. “It’s our society at stake,” he said. ” It’s not only the Taliban, it’s the religious militancy as a whole which is ruining our society and then there is political militancy … We can’t rid Karachi of crime until we get rid of political militancy as well because political militancy, religious militancy and the gangs they are all interlinked. If we don’t get rid of all of them it will be very difficult for us to clean this city.”
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