Red Interlude

A few months ago, the datelines read Teheran, Cairo, Bagdad. Last week the news was the same--riots, Reds, wreckings--but the place was new: Karachi (pop. 360,000), capital city of newborn Pakistan.

The story broke in the familiar fashion. First came the excitable students, angered this time by a large increase in already exorbitant tuition fees. Egged on by their leaders, some of them Communists, they milled off to protest personally to the Education Minister, were stopped by police, who clubbed and tear-gassed them.

That was the Reds' cue to take over. The next morning, they shoved aside the more cautious student leaders, whipped up a mob and broke into the shopping center, toting clubs and torches. Interior Minister Mushtaq Gurmani drove up to make a personal appeal to the rioters. They trapped him, set fire to his Cadillac, and forced him to flee in a police car. Steel-helmeted cops put aside their clubs, grabbed rifles, began shooting. By evening the Reds had seven martyrs.

At 6 a.m. on the third morning, the Red-led mob swarmed out of Karachi's slums and back alleys; there was now hardly a student in sight, not a word about student grievances. Up & down the streets the mob surged, bearing a gory bundle, the lifeless, shell-torn body of a teen-age boy. "Close down," rioters yelled. "Observe hartal [the strike]." Frantically, shopkeepers shuttered up. The mob went systematically to work: attacking the headquarters of the police inspector general, breaking into liquor shops, smashing and guzzling, crashing into three munition stores to grab 300 guns. When troops and police charged, the rioters would yield and scatter, as though by a pattern, and then reform a few minutes later.

On the fourth day, it was over; at least eleven were dead.

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