Gangsters have been part of life in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, for decades. And nowhere is their rule more notorious than in the slums of Lyari, a dusty warren of low-slung tenement houses in the south central part of Karachi.
And in Pakistan, they are a little different from the American variety. They are part Tony Soprano — with the attendant extortion schemes and kickbacks and armed enforcers — but they are also, in a sense, politicians closely aligned to the various political parties. So when the leading such figure in Lyari speaks, it is with both the vocabulary and the sensibility of a politician.
"The people here in Lyari support us," says Uzair Baloch, 32. "It is the people outside who are trying to give me a bad reputation. They call me a gangster, but they have this wrong. I'm a politician. I'm a social worker."
He says all this with a smile, but he's only being slightly ironic. Every party in Pakistan has an armed wing, and gangster-politicians run them.
"When he says he's a social worker, to an extent he's right," says Zohra Yusuf, the head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "These groups do provide for the community. If the electric supply is bothering them, or residents need help, they go to Uzair Baloch rather than anyone else. The government hasn't provided services for people in Lyari for years."
A Well-Guarded Home
Baloch is charismatic and quick to laugh. He lives off one of the dusty main drags in Lyari, and it is easy to know when one has arrived there: There are literally two-dozen guards with AK-47s outside his house. Some of them are so young they don't look like they have learned to shave yet. Others are 30-somethings who sit on couches in the front hall, armed to the teeth.
Once inside the house, the mood changes from noisy slum to moneyed tranquility. The doors open into an enormous game room with an indoor lap pool, and a six-foot flat-screen television and hand-painted murals of beach scenes on the walls. A fish tank is embedded in a step leading out to the garden. It is filled with Japanese koi.