40 people dead and 140 injured so far and I still don’t understand what’s happened. The Chief Justice of Pakistan was to address a lawyers’ convention in Karachi on Saturday, but the political party that runs the show there apparently didn’t approve of the welcome rally that groups interested in the ‘restoration’ of democracy were planning and so held a rally of their own protesting the ‘politicising’ of the CJ’s visit. Still with me? Ok, so then, given that two opposing groups wanted to hold rallies in essentially the same space, police were deployed, ostensibly to keep things under control. Only said police apparently vanished into thin air and the two groups started shooting at each other. So maybe my reaction to the fact that they were shooting is naive: this is Karachi after all–the big, bad, dangerous, violent city that us northerners look at with a mixture of dread and envy–but I can’t help seeing shooting another creature, human or otherwise, as a fundamentally, hideously cowardly act. Oh. Wait. I think it’s just begun to make sense.

Back to the plot. Apparently the sainted government had warned our naughty little CJ that things would get out of hand if he went to Karachi. I hope they’re enjoying their ‘I told you so’ moment. Now Dawn says that Reuters says that paramilitary forces have been issued orders/permission to shoot anybody involved in “serious violence”. As opposed to what? Funny violence? (Incidentally, how appalling is it that you can, at reuters.com, select world crises by region from a handy drop-down list?) That is supposed to be a response to the loss of “precious lives”?

Apparently (because nobody ever really  knows for sure, it seems–not even the people directly involved) this could be a reemergence of the ethnic violence that Karachi was famous for two decades ago, or it could be a clash between the government’s supporters and anti-government activists and have nothing to do with the earlier violence, it could be sponsored by the government itself, or it might be something else altogether.

 Venial Sin, who happens to be from Karachi–and who I wish I’d found under happier circumstances–records his reaction to the madness as well as more details in his blog. Given that the post includes pictures of dead people, do consider your tender sensibilities before you click. And really, looking at pictures of the violence and reading about it on as many news sources as possible is the only thing we can do at the moment. At least until it begins to make some kind of non-simplistic, non-propagandist, non-asinine sense.