Traders fearing violence kept businesses shut in the troubled Pakistani city of Karachi on Friday after a strike call by Islamists to protest the recent killing of a pro-Taliban cleric in a wave of militant violence.
The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, the six-party Islamic alliance that called the strike, poured cold water on a proposal for a united provincial government to contain the violence in the southern city, which claimed more than 50 lives in May.
"The government is not serious about its proposal regarding the formation of coalition government in Sindh," Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the acting head of the alliance told Reuters.
"No concrete proposal has been put forward."
The ruling Pakistan Muslim League, struggling to control a surge in violence in the city, Pakistan's commercial hub, invited the opposition to share power in Sindh province on Thursday. Karachi is the provincial capital.
But Sindh's largest opposition party, the Pakistan People's Party of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who is now in exile, rejected the idea.
"The military government has landed itself in a mess. The PPP will not lend its shoulder to bail them out," its spokesman, Farhatullah Babar, said.
Qazi Hussain Ahmad said if the ruling party had been serious it should have invited Bhutto's party, as the largest in Sindh, to form a provincial government of its own.
"But this has not been done, which is why we think the government is not serious," he said.
The MMA called for a nationwide strike after Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, a senior Sunni cleric, was killed last Sunday in Karachi during a wave of tit-for-tat sectarian violence.
His death was followed by a suicide bomb attack on a Shi'ite Muslim mosque on Monday blamed on an al Qaeda-linked group that killed 21 people, the second such attack on the minority Muslim sect in less than a month.
While the latest violence has smacked of decades-old sectarianism, analysts say Sunni militants have been using attacks on Shi'ites in a broader campaign to undermine President Pervez Musharraf and his support for the U.S.-led war on terror.
ETHNIC VIOLENCE
By making the coalition proposal, the ruling Pakistan Muslim League would have been hoping the MMA would use its influence with Sunni militants to curb their attacks on Shi'ites and Western targets.
It would also have been wanting to prevent ethnic violence between Sindhi-speaking PPP supporters and Urdu-speaking backers of the ruling parties after bloody by-election clashes in May.
Shops and businesses were shut in Karachi on Friday and many parts of the city were deserted amid fears of militant violence. But the strike call fizzled in other parts of the country, with only a few scattered protests.
Public buses stayed off the roads in Karachi after strike supporters burned tires in some neighborhoods and threw stones at vehicles to force people to stay off the streets.
Provincial police chief Syed Kamal Shah said police and para-military rangers had increased patrols in sensitive areas of the city, including around foreign consulates and government offices.
"But at the moment it's quite peaceful," he said.
Police have blamed the mosque attacks on banned Sunni militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
It is perhaps the most feared of Pakistan's underground militant groups and has been linked to attacks on Western targets, including the 2002 murder of U.S. reporter Daniel Pearl and dozens of deadly attacks on Shi'ites since the mid-1990s.