KARACHI: Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain turned his guns on Pakistan Peoples Party co-chairman Asif Ali Zardari and Sindh Chief Minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah on Saturday over their failure to communicate with him over the phone about the arrests of party workers.

“Rangers have turned the whole of Sindh into an occupied territory ... Sindh is burning and MQM workers are being treated like prisoners of war, but the irresponsible attitude of Qaim Ali Shah and Asif Zardari shows that they don’t care about Sindh, its inhabitants and their future,” said the MQM chief in a statement released from London on Saturday.

Mr Hussain said he wanted to draw the attention of CM Shah towards the arrests of MQM workers by Rangers for “merely collecting Zakat and Fitra” and he called the CM, but the voice was unclear and Mr Shah did not understand his words “clearly due to his old age”.

So he told the CM that he would call him from his direct line, said the MQM statement, adding: “But when I dialled twice instead of Qaim Ali Shah, his operator picked up the phone and asked me to hold for a minute as he was transferring the call to the CM.”

“As usual I had to listen to the recorded speeches of the late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and the late Benazir Bhutto for quite some time. Later, the operator told me that he will be dialling back in a couple of minutes. But he did not return the call after over half an hour.”

According to the statement, Mr Hussain tried to contact Mr Zardari in Dubai but to no avail.

He regretted the attitude of CM Shah and Mr Zardari at this juncture. It appeared that both leaders did not care for Sindh, its people and their future, he added.

Mr Shah responded to Mr Hussain’s statements and said he regretted the MQM chief’s statement and said he always had respectful relations with him.

He clarified that he was in the middle of a meeting when Mr Hussain phoned and he left the meeting halfway to talk to him. Mr Hussain was very emotional and disconnected the call while talking, Mr Shah added.

Meanwhile, president of the PPP’s Karachi chapter Najme Alam said that Altaf Hussain needed to prove his loyalty with Sindh and not Asif Ali Zardari. He also said that Rangers had liberated the occupied territories in Karachi.

MQM press conference

Senior MQM leader Dr Farooq Sattar has appealed to the prime minister, Sindh CM, Rangers director general and other authorities to stop the “illegal raids and arrests” of party workers and abolish the unannounced and unconstitutional ban on the Khidmat-i-Khalq Foundation forthwith.

“No MQM worker or KKF volunteer is forcibly collecting Zakat and Fitra from the people. The Protection of Pakistan Act was for anti-state elements but apparently it is being used only against the MQM,” he said at a press conference held at the Khurshid Begum Complex on Saturday. “This is injustice against the MQM, and the Sindh government and CM are equally responsible for it.”

Accompanied by Kanwar Naveed Jameel, Waseem Akhtar and others, the MQM leader said that thousands of charities were working in the metropolis but only the KKF was banned from collecting Zakat and Fitra. The organisational activities of the MQM were being restricted on the pretext of the Karachi operation, he added.

“People are being stopped from donating to the KKF. The government should tell us under which law collection of donations for a charity has become a crime?”

He said that 678 workers of the MQM had been arrested, out of which 25 activists had been detained for three months by Rangers. Some 134 workers and supporters were in illegal custody of police and Rangers and 20 were missing, while 40 workers had become victims of extrajudicial killings.

Dr Sattar said that the KKF’s Zakat and Fitra receipts were being presented to the world as prohibited weapons.

He warned that such steps would not bear fruit and if the people took matter in their hands then no one should hold MQM and Mr Hussain responsible.

Published in Dawn, July 5th, 2015

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