President Pervez Musharraf urged Pakistanis on Islam's holiest festival to help stamp out violence between rival Muslim sects, a scourge which has taken thousands of lives in the past two decades.
"I hope that the nation would not only keep its distance from the menace of sectarianism, but would also assist the government in its eradication," General Musharraf Wednesday said in a special message for Eid al-Fitr, the festival marking the end of the Muslim fasting month Ramadan.
Musharraf is in the throes of his second official anti-extremist drive since the US-led war on terrorism began in the wake of the September 11 2001 terror attacks.
He outlawed six radical Islamic organisations this month, just days after United States ambassador Nancy Powell complained that most of the groups he banned in his first high-profile crackdown had re-emerged under new names.
Among those banned in the past fortnight are radical Sunni Muslim outfit Millat-e-Islamia, the renamed Sipah-e-Sahaba organisation which is accused of killing hundreds of activists from the rival Shiite minority, and its Shiite counterpart Islami Tehreek -- formerly Tehreek-i-Jafria.
Authorities have closed their offices and demanded cash pledges from followers as guarantees they will not regroup, but have refrained from the mass arrests executed in last year's crackdown saying the courts would only demand their release.
Fanatics of the Shiite and Sunni sects have waged street battles and engaged in countless drive-by shootings since the 1980s, killing thousands.
Sectarian violence resurged this year after a lull in 2002, when the bloodiest attacks targetted Christian and Western targets.
Almost 80 people, mainly Shiites, have been killed this year. The murders include the shocking daylight assassination of iconic Sunni leader and MP Azam Tariq, as he drove into Islamabad for a parliament sitting.
Musharraf praised the absence of violence during the fasting month of Ramadan.
"It is a matter of great pleasure for all of us that we observed brotherhood and fraternity throughout the holy month of Ramadan," he said, in the message carried by the state newsagency Associated Press of Pakistan.