SHOW OF FORCE
Pakistan's Embattled Leader
Embraces Maverick Partner

KARACHI, Pakistan -- President Pervez Musharraf's struggle to stay in power has an unlikely ally: a maverick group once hunted down by Pakistan's army that now controls this metropolis of 18 million people.

Like many of the political forces swirling through Pakistan, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement is full of contradictions. Born from a student revolt, MQM, which maintains a well-armed militia, was for decades synonymous with Mafia-like thuggery and violence. But in recent years it has also emerged as one of Pakistan's most secular parties, praised by a Western diplomat here as "fairly progressive" for its opposition to radical Islam. Led by a former Chicago cab driver, MQM has also garnered plaudits from the business community as Karachi's economy flourished in relative peace.

With its 20-year record of winning elections in Karachi, MQM enjoys a formidable stranglehold over Pakistan's biggest city, home to more than a tenth of the nation's 160 million citizens. And what happens in Karachi, which accounts for as much as 68% of Pakistan's economy and is its financial and industrial hub, often sets the tone for the rest of the country.

That gives MQM a prominent role in the unfolding political drama, as President Musharraf tries to hang onto authority after suspending the constitution, stepping down as army chief and calling parliamentary elections for Jan. 8. The main opposition leaders, former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, turned up pressure on him on Monday as they threatened a joint boycott of the vote unless President Musharraf restores the constitution and reinstates an independent judiciary.

Whether President Musharraf survives this crisis, and what political forces rise to shape government politics in coming months, will determine the extent of Pakistan's cooperation with the U.S. in its fight against terrorism, as al Qaeda and Taliban-style insurgents increasingly destabilize this nuclear-armed nation.

MQM'S RISE

 

1978 -- Altaf Hussain forms the All-Pakistan Muhajir Student Organization.

1984 -- APMSO activists create the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, a political party representing Pakistan's Muhajirs.

1986 -- Ethnic riots erupt in Karachi.

1987 -- MQM enters the electoral process and wins the mayor's office in Karachi and Hyderabad.

1988 -- Farooq Sattar, a then-28-year-old party member, is elected Karachi's youngest mayor. The party also wins 14 National Assembly seats and 25 Sindh Provincial Assembly seats.

1990 -- The party wins 15 National Assembly seats and 29 Sindh Provincial Assembly seats.

1992 -- Mr. Hussain flees to London as the Pakistani army is deployed against the party in Karachi.

Government troops flooded Karachi in 1995.

1993 -- MQM boycotts National Assembly elections and wins 28 seats in the Sindh Provincial Assembly.

1995 -- Benazir Bhutto's government launches a massive crackdown on MQM as Karachi descends into undeclared civil war.

1997 -- MQM changes name from Muhajir to Muttahida (United) Qaumi Movement as it tries to broaden its appeal. In elections, the party wins 12 National Assembly seats and 27 Sindh Provincial Assembly seats.

An MQM boycott left precincts empty in 2001.

2001 -- The party boycotts local elections as its most senior official in Pakistan is incarcerated.

2002 -- MQM wins 19 National Assembly seats and 42 Sindh Provincial Assembly seats, becomes part of the ruling coalition in Sindh and federal governments.

2005 -- MQM wins the mayor's office in Karachi and Hyderabad.

MQM supporters rallied in the spring of 2007.

May 2007 -- Amid a national wave of pro-democracy protests, Mr. Sattar and President Musharraf arrange for a flood of MQM supporters to jam the streets of Karachi to forestall a scheduled rally there.

Sources: MQM, WSJ research, AP (photos)

MQM has behaved throughout this turbulent period as a trusted ally. Its lawmakers' participation in the October presidential election, boycotted by the opposition, helped legitimize President Musharraf's re-election to a second five-year term. The group has also rejected opposition calls for boycotting the coming parliamentary elections, a move that helped prod most other parties to field candidates, too.

Most importantly, MQM -- which displayed its capacity for deadly violence in May -- remains a reserve of street power for the embattled president, a force that could maintain Karachi on his side should the political crisis escalate into street confrontations between the government and the opposition.

"We have a critical mass here" in Karachi, says Farooq Sattar, the party's most senior official in Pakistan.

MQM's backing may not ultimately be enough to save President Musharraf's political hide, given widespread outrage over his imposition of emergency measures against Pakistan's media and the judiciary last month. Unlike the two main opposition movements, MQM hardly exists outside Karachi and a handful of other southern cities; it captures only about 4% of the national vote.

Still, the party's support underscores that the former army chief of staff, who seized power in a 1999 military coup, can still count on influential allies beyond fellow generals in Pakistan's army.

Once a bitter foe of the military, MQM came to embrace President Musharraf after years of conflict with past democratically elected regimes, headed by Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif. "The major political parties always want the transfer of power from a military dictator. But we've seen that, once they gain power, they start to behave in the same manner or even worse," says Mr. Sattar. Interviewed at the MQM Karachi headquarters complex that's manned by gunmen with MQM-embossed baseball caps, Mr. Sattar adds: "Any discontinuity, instability and chaos will only be to the advantage of the extremists."

By any measure, MQM is an unusual force. It is led via daily conference calls by its revered leader, Altaf Hussain, who fled Pakistan in 1992 and is now living in London as a British citizen. For a short time Mr. Hussain, who like Mr. Sattar trained as a doctor, drove a cab in Chicago, where he has family. Unlike Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif, who recently returned to Pakistan and re-entered politics after years in exile, Mr. Hussain has stayed away from his homeland. He didn't answer requests for an interview.

Born out of a radical student movement in the late 1970s, Mr. Hussain's party capitalized on the frustrations and aspirations of the so-called Muhajirs -- Muslims who chose to throw their lot with the new country of Pakistan, emigrating from what is now India following the subcontinent's bloody partition in 1947.

An ethnic community that includes Delhi-born President Musharraf himself, the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs settled predominantly in the cities of Sindh, the southern province that includes the city of Karachi. Their initial prominence in Pakistani bureaucracy and relative wealth aroused particular resentment from the ethnic Sindhis, the country's second-largest ethnic group, which felt marginalized in its own homeland.

After becoming prime minister in 1971, Sindhi landlord Ali Zulfikar Bhutto began implementing a policy of quotas that promoted the Sindhi language and favored rural Sindhis over Muhajirs in university admissions and public-sector jobs. Aggrieved young Muhajir students led by Mr. Hussain and Mr. Sattar responded by launching a semiclandestine, militialike movement that would become MQM.

As it spread outside university campuses amid rising ethnic tensions, this movement became a mighty political force. Mr. Sattar, then just 28 years old, became Karachi's youngest mayor in 1988. In parliamentary elections later that year, MQM won by a landslide in Sindh's urban centers. The same elections also brought Benazir Bhutto, Ali Zulfikar Bhutto's daughter, to national power as Pakistan's prime minister.

Ms. Bhutto's administration cracked down on MQM almost immediately, trying to break the party's stranglehold over this vital city. Ethnic killings and clashes between Muhajirs and police sent Pakistan's economic nerve center into a tailspin.

One of MQM's favorite methods of protest was a ban on any wheeled transport in the city, enforced by militia snipers who would shoot any drivers from rooftops. The party also began to fund itself by extorting protection money from businesses -- and, according to Ms. Bhutto's government, by running torture chambers where electric drills were applied to enemies' kneecaps. Mr. Sattar says that whatever violence was committed by his party's members at the time was in self defense.

Mr. Sharif, a conservative politician who followed Ms. Bhutto as Pakistani prime minister, proved just as reluctant to cooperate with MQM. In 1992, the year when the party's leader, Mr. Hussain, fled to London, Mr. Sharif deployed the army to Karachi for a massive anti-MQM operation. The city descended into an undeclared civil war, with dozens killed every day. In 1995, Ms. Bhutto, who had become prime minister once again, launched yet another crackdown. MQM says it lost 15,000 supporters to extrajudicial executions; thousands remain missing. Ms. Bhutto's government argued at the time that it had to show an iron will in its fight against "terrorists."

It is largely because of the escalating human-rights abuses in Karachi that Ms. Bhutto's government was dismissed in 1996, allowing Mr. Sharif to return to power. Violence in the city only subsided after Gen. Musharraf, then head of the army, ousted Mr. Sharif and established emergency rule in 1999.

Although a Muhajir himself, Gen. Musharraf -- who has always insisted his loyalties lie with the whole of Pakistan -- didn't initially embrace the controversial party. Shortly after the coup, Mr. Sattar, the former mayor, was jailed by a military-run tribunal on corruption charges. An angry MQM boycotted local elections and an Islamist politician became mayor of Karachi.

Then the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks transformed Pakistan. MQM rushed to condemn the tragedy and to endorse President Musharraf's decision to cooperate with the U.S. against al Qaeda and Afghanistan's Taliban rulers, who had been long supported by the Pakistani establishment. As President Musharraf cast around for allies, Mr. Sattar was released from prison.

In 2002, MQM won throughout urban Sindh in national and provincial elections, securing 19 out of 342 seats in Pakistan's parliament. It also recaptured the mayoralty of Karachi in 2005, and is widely expected to do well in the Jan. 8 elections. "MQM is a very popular party in Karachi, probably more popular at this stage than any other party," says Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at New York's Council on Foreign Relations who used to deal with Pakistan when he was at the U.S. State Department.

In part, this popularity stems from the technocratic, business-friendly administration that MQM appointed to run Karachi, a city that's rising from ashes. By most accounts, the party's once-common practice of extorting businesses stopped too. "We've tried to appear whiter than white, knowing that there is this perception of MQM," Mr. Sattar says frankly.

Seeking to broaden its appeal beyond Karachi, the party has also reached out to non-Muhajirs and to non-Muslim minorities, positioning itself as a defender of the secular values and of Pakistan's burgeoning middle classes. "In the past, if you didn't belong to MQM, you couldn't live in the area they control," says Fayez Hussein, an ethnic Sindhi office secretary who moved a year ago to the MQM stronghold of Kalaboard. "Now, there is no problem."

As Pakistan's -- and Karachi's -- economy boomed in recent years, British-educated MQM Mayor Mustafa Kamal launched massive infrastructure projects that brought drinking water to overcrowded slums, created verdant playgrounds and eased traffic congestion with new highways and overpass bridges. Glittering new restaurants and shopping malls mushroomed in Karachi's upscale neighborhoods. Across the city, photography shops, CD stores and barber salons with names like "Bollywood Style" remain open late into the night, in spite of hardline Islamic restrictions that have shuttered such businesses in many other parts of the country.

"Karachi has never been a fundamentalist city, and our party is the biggest hurdle in the fundamentalists' way," Mr. Kamal says.

The city's improvements, in part a result of MQM's newfound influence with the federal government, have encouraged Karachi's business community. "Karachi was not part of a political setup for 20 years, it was always in the opposition, and so it was left out of the development," says Shamim Ahmed Shamsi, president of the Karachi Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "Now, it has become part of the mainstream. We are being listened to in all the corridors of power." President Musharraf's rule has given Karachi "years of political freedom," MQM's Mr. Sattar adds gratefully.

Now MQM has an opportunity to repay those favors. Earlier this year, President Musharraf's move to oust Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry energized the pro-democracy opposition.

On May 12, as a wave of protests erupted in Lahore and Islamabad, pro-democracy campaigners hoped to tip the scales with a mass rally in Karachi that was to be attended by the popular judge. Instead, following an accord between Mr. Sattar and President Musharraf, the city's streets were flooded that day with flag-waving MQM supporters. Chanting "You Will Die if You Come Here," armed MQM militiamen, according to witnesses, took positions on Karachi's main roads, including the highway leading from the airport where Mr. Chaudhry was supposed to land. The police force was noticeably absent.

Soon MQM and opposition supporters, most of them ethnic Pashtuns or Sindhis, began to exchange gunfire. By midday, these clashes escalated into full-fledged fighting reminiscent of the bloodshed of the 1990s, leaving the city littered with burned cars and causing dozens of deaths.

"We were in the middle of the road, in the open, and suddenly MQM started firing at us," says Bashir Jan, a Pashtun politician whose right leg was hit by a bullet that day. "MQM claims that Karachi is their city, and they don't accept anyone else here."

MQM officials say they didn't want these gun battles, blaming the May incidents on provocateurs among the opposition.

In any case, Mr. Chaudhry never made it into central Karachi on May 12, and no mass rally against President Musharraf has been attempted here since then. Apart from a massive suicide bomb in October that marred the return of Ms. Bhutto to Pakistan, the giant city has remained relatively calm. "The only true, reliable support that Pervez Musharraf has is MQM," says Mr. Kamal, the Karachi mayor.

MQM's loyalty to President Musharraf has deepened the rift between it and the main opposition parties that are jostling for power. MQM is "a terrorist group that has a political wing, and then a military wing, which it uses to win elections," scoffs Taj Haider, a senior official in Karachi with Ms. Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and a former senator.

Such hardening attitudes mean that, should President Musharraf be ousted or significantly weakened in coming months, Karachi could find itself dealing with a hostile federal government once again. And this, many here worry, means that the ethnic violence of the past may return with a vengeance, shattering the city's recent recovery.

"Whenever MQM is in government, there is relative peace in Karachi," says Abdul Khalique Junejo, a prominent Sindhi columnist and lawyer. "Whenever they're out, there is no peace."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com