KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain has called upon Sindhi intellectuals to resolve the issue of administrative units through dialogue.

“I believe in dialogue and peace. I request Sindhi intellectuals to come forward and resolve this issue peacefully as we don’t want war,” he said while speaking to a workers’ convention of his party from London via video link on Saturday.

“There are some miscreants and a few Sindhi nationalists who want to start a war,” he said, adding: “You have to keep in mind that after killing millions eventually people have to sit on the table to start a dialogue.”

The MQM chief made it clear that he did not want the division of Sindh, contending that the demand for new administrative units did not amount to calling for division of the province.

He suggested that four administrative units be set up in Sindh and named “north Sindh”, “south Sindh”, “east Sindh” and “central Sindh”. “Creation of administrative units never divide countries or regions.”

He criticised the octogenarian Sindh chief minister, Syed Qaim Ali Shah, and former president Asif Ali Zardari, alleging that the latter had selected the former because he “does not remember anything”.

He said the Pakistan Peoples Party had been ruling the province since long, but failed to develop roads and hospitals even in Ratodero and Naudero.

Mr Hussain said when everybody asked him not to support Mr Zardari, he decided to support him for five years. “But the PPP co-chairman did not fulfil his promise about betterment of Karachi despite my repeated requests.”

He also lashed out at the establishment for not accepting the ‘Muhajirs’ as Pakistanis and labelling the MQM as ‘anti-state, which grabbed votes at gunpoint”.

Mr Husain recalled the treatment meted out to his party by the Rangers and armed forces during the Karachi operation, posing a question to law enforcement agencies whether they would fire rubber bullets at MQM workers if they staged a sit-in in Islamabad.

Amid slogans of ‘Go Rangers Go’, he declared that those who were working on a ‘minus Altaf formula’ should realise that this would give his party’s workers the power to do whatever they wanted to do with them.

`INTRUDERS’: Turning to his party set-up, Altaf Husain said whenever he tried to purge his party of “intruders sent by the ‘agencies’, something goes wrong”.

He said that Gen Rizwan Akhtar, the former director general of Sindh Rangers, had told MQM leaders that certain Muttahida workers came to Karachi from South Africa and carried out targeted killing of Shias and Sunnis. “When I came to know about his allegations, I asked him to arrest at the airport whoever is involved and shoot them at sight.”

He recalled that once “someone told me” that some security personnel had alleged, while talking to officials of the US Consulate in Karachi, that the MQM was involved in the killing of the son-in-law of Mufti Naeem and the son of Allama Abbas Kumaili. “What else could I do except using foul language against them for their lies?”

Published in Dawn, September 28th , 2014