Eviction Kara 2002

By Fatima Bhutto
Tuesday, January 24, 2006 Daily Times

VIEW: Evictions in Karachi —Fatima Bhutto

The issue here is not the Expressway, but the rights of the people. Not simply their unalienable right to shelter, but also their right to choose where they make their homes and their right to defend their communities and resist forced resettlement. These forced evictions affect all of us

It’s too early in the day to feel so disheartened; after all it’s only one in the afternoon. I have just returned home, home being the imperative word, after visiting three townships that will be demolished to make way for the behemoth they call the Lyari Expressway. To build this Expressway, they have already demolished 11,000 houses, all bearing legal titles. Several thousand tax-paying commercial enterprises will also be destroyed. These, however, are just figures. Behind them, there is a human tragedy.

Earlier in the day we had passed a graveyard that dates back to the early 19th century. It will be there no longer. An old man made his way through the crowd of those gathered and said simply “I have just buried my son here, and now they are going to take him away”. Even death is not sacred.

Why should it be, argues the government, when we can have a highway that takes us faster from point A to point B and allows a neat profit in the process (don’t ask them about the Northern Bypass, a road that does exactly the same thing, without dispossessing entire communities). Further away from the graveyard there is a mosque that has been home to worshippers as far back as 1840. It is now in danger of being razed to the ground.

The Lyari Expressway is meant to run over the embankments of the Lyari River, encroaching up to 100 feet on each side of the Lyari naddi. For this, the area given to the Baloch of Karachi by the Khan of Kalat in 1780 must be vacated. This is not just land we are wiping off the map, but also a part of the city’s heritage and history. Like preserving Mohatta Palace and the Quaid’s mausoleum, it is necessary to preserve these age-old communities that make up a legacy we owe to posterity. We can’t just leave KFC and McDonalds for the future generations of Pakistanis. Somehow I feel it wouldn’t be as meaningful.

The city of Karachi is home to more than 4.5 million people living in slums or katchi abadis. Not all the slums are in the area that is to be transformed into the Expressway. In fact, there are approximately 1,200 katchi abadis.

More than 16,740 houses have already been razed to the ground in what the city government likes to euphemistically call the ‘clean up’ project. The terms ‘anti- encroachment drive’ and ‘beautification scheme’ have also been used in an effort to sanitise what ultimately amounts to acts of violence by the men and women elected to serve and protect the citizens of Karachi

Last week I visited a Hindu minority township, Prem Colony, not too far from Gulshan-e-Iqbal, that has been bulldozed by government agencies. Stepping out of my car, I had an out-of-body experience. I thought I was in Muzaffarabad. Or Balakot. But I wasn’t. I was in the heart of Karachi, and this catastrophe was of the man-made variety.

The residents of Prem Colony were lathi-charged by the police when they tried to protest the brutality of their dispossession and the nazim, Mustafa Kamal, continually refuses to meet them and hear their concerns.

I was among the people of the destroyed colony as they clamoured outside the nazim’s office to seek an audience with his eminence. I was with them as they sat on the pavement and patiently waited for an elected official to address the hundreds of people rendered homeless by bulldozers in the middle of one of Karachi’s coldest winters. I was there for a long time.

I was with the men, women, and children of Prem Colony and Rahmatia Colony when they were robbed of their right to the most basic of human necessities - shelter. And I fear that I will be waiting with them this week, and the next, and the next, and the week after that.

One invariably brings up the issue of compensation, as if to justify the horrific lack of human concern brought on by the government agencies behind these forced evictions. What little compensation has been given to the people being displaced by the Lyari Expressway is far from adequate. Only 8,000 families affected by the Expressway have been given alternate plots of land to live on, and those plots are miles away from their original communities, from their schools, and from their places of work. And they are the lucky ones.

Many evacuees do not even have the offer of compensation or resettlement. While the government can play hide and seek with its poor, shifting them out of eyesight and constructing meagre shacks for them to live in once their homes have been claimed, the one thing it cannot do is compensate the dispossessed for their memories, their schools, their graveyards, and their anger. Deliberately creating a refugee population flies in the face of the development and progress the government claims to be pursuing.

On the drive back home I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed as I passed Karachi Zoo where even the animals have better homes than most of the katchi abadi residents. I felt ashamed as I crossed the Teen Talwar roundabout that was so spacious and so oblivious to the rest of the city. And as the gates to my house opened I didn’t want to go inside. It just seemed so wrong.

The issue here is not the Expressway, but the rights of the people. Not simply their unalienable right to shelter, but also their right to choose where they make their homes and their right to defend their communities and resist forced resettlement. These forced evictions affect all of us. In the basest terms, if it’s not your house and your family today, it could be tomorrow.

We must take a stand now, before it’s too late for our society and its people. We must, as Gandhi said, be the change we wish to see in the world. Our city government’s casual approach to human life will not and cannot stand any longer than it already has, we simply mustn’t allow it.

Those interested in more information should contact the Action Committee for Civic Problems at 0214643592 or 03332159831. *