1 of 11. Pakistani journalists chant slogans during a protest against bomb blasts in Quetta and condemn killings of members of the media, outside the press club in Karachi January 11, 2013. The banner reads in Urdu ''we wholeheartedly salute our martyr brothers''.

QUETTA, Pakistan | Fri Jan 11, 2013 9:07am EST

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - In a rare challenge, a Shi'ite Muslim leader publicly criticized Pakistani military chief General Ashfaq Kayani over security in the country on Friday after bombings targeting the minority sect killed 118 people.

The criticism of Kayani, arguably the most powerful man in the South Asian state, highlighted Shi'ite frustrations with Pakistan's failure to contain Sunni Muslim militant groups who have vowed to wipe out Shi'ites.

"I ask the army chief: What have you done with these extra three years you got (in office)? What did you give us except more death?" Maulana Amin Shaheedi, who heads a national council of Shi'ite organizations, told a news conference.

Most of Thursday's deaths were caused by twin attacks aimed Shi'ites in the southwestern city of Quetta, near the Afghan border, where members of the minority have long accused the state of turning a blind eye to Sunni death squads.

Shi'ite leaders were so outraged at the latest bloodshed that they called for the military to take control of Quetta to shield them and said they would not allow the 85 victims of twin bomb attacks to be buried until their demands were met.

The burials had been scheduled to take place after Friday prayers but the bodies would remain in place until Shi'ites had received promises of protection.

Shaheedi said scores of bodies were still lying on a road. "They will not be buried until the army comes into Quetta."

Violence against Pakistani Shi'ite is rising and some communities are living in a state of siege, a human rights group said on Friday.

"Last year was the bloodiest year for Shias in living memory," said Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. "More than 400 were killed and if yesterday's attack is any indication, it's just going to get worse."

A suicide bomber first targeted a snooker club in Quetta. A car bomb blew up nearby 10 minutes later after police and rescuers had arrived.

In all, 85 people were killed and 121 wounded. Nine police and 20 rescue workers were among the dead.

"It was like doomsday. Bodies were lying everywhere," said police officer Mir Zubair Mehmood.

The banned Sunni group Lashkar-e-Jangvi (LeJ) claimed responsibility for the attack in what is a predominantly Shi'ite neighborhood where the residents are ethnic Hazaras, Shi'ites who first migrated from Afghanistan in the 19th century.

While U.S. intelligence agencies have focused on al Qaeda and the Taliban, Pakistani intelligence officials say LeJ is emerging as a graver threat to Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, strategic ally of the United States.

It has stepped up attacks against Shi'ites across the country but has zeroed in on members of the sect who live in resource-rich Baluchistan province, of which Quetta is capital.

The paramilitary Frontier Corps is largely responsible for security in Baluchistan province but Shi'ites say it is unable or unwilling to protect them from the LeJ.

"STATE OF SIEGE"

The LeJ wants to impose a Sunni theocracy by stoking Sunni-Shi'ite violence. It bombs religious processions and shoots civilians in the type of attacks that pushed countries like Iraq towards civil war.

The latest attacks prompted an outpouring of grief, rage and fear among Shi'ites, many of whom have concluded that the state has left them at the mercy of the LeJ and other extremist groups who believe they are non-Muslims.

"The LeJ operates under one front or the other, and its activists go around openly shouting 'infidel, infidel, Shi'ite infidel' and 'death to Shi'ites' in the streets of Quetta and outside our mosques," said Syed Dawwod Agha, a top official with the Baluchistan Shi'ite Conference.

"We have become a community of grave diggers. We are so used to death now that we always have shrouds ready."

The roughly 500,000-strong Hazara people in Quetta, who speak a Persian dialect, have distinct features and are an easy target, said Dayan of Human Rights Watch.

"They live in a state of siege. Stepping out of the ghetto means risking death," said Dayan. "Everyone has failed them - the security services, the government, the judiciary."

Earlier on Thursday, a separate bomb killed 11 people in Quetta's main market.

The United Baloch Army claimed responsibility for that blast. The group is one of several fighting for independence for Baluchistan, an arid, impoverished region with substantial gas, copper and gold reserves.

Baluchistan constitutes just less than half of Pakistan's territory and is home to about 8 million of the total population of 180 million.

In another attack on Thursday, in Mingora, the largest city in the Swat valley in the northwest, at least 22 people were killed when an explosion targeted a public gathering of residents who had come to listen to a religious leader.

No one claimed responsibility for that bombing. Swat has been under army rule since a military offensive ejected Pakistani Taliban militants in 2009.

The LeJ has had historically close ties to elements in the security forces, who see the group as an ally in any potential war with neighboring India. Security forces deny such links.

In a measure of the outrage, several Pakistani social media users posted Facebook comments urging the U.S. to expand its covert programme of drone warfare beyond Taliban strongholds on the Afghan border to target LeJ leaders in Baluchistan.

Among the dead in Quetta was Khudi Ali, a young activist who often wore a T-shirt with fake bloodstains during protests against the rising violence against Shi'ites.

Ali's Twitter profile said: "I am born to fight for human rights and peace."

(Additional reporting by Mehreen Zahra-Malik and Katharine Houreld in Islamabad and Matthew Green in Lahore.; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

View the original article here

HAVANA | Wed Aug 1, 2012 6:28pm EDT

HAVANA (Reuters) - The Cuban government has closed a privately run cultural center, causing consternation among artists and intellectuals in what is shaping up to be the latest test of President Raul Castro's loosening of controls over everyday life.

A week ago government inspectors burst into the El Cabildo cultural center to the shock of patrons, artists and staff attending musical performed by its theater company, the "Opera in the Street."

The local authorities, citing a recent Reuters story on the center that mentioned a cover charge for customers, took away El Cabildo's license on the grounds of "illicit enrichment."

The vast majority of El Cabildo's clients were Cuban, paying a 50-peso cover charge, the equivalent of $2, while foreigners paid more.

The inspectors searched El Cabildo for hours and interrogated its young artists and restaurant staff, but found nothing more amiss than two cooks working on a trial basis without proper papers, employees said.

A protest letter circulating among members of Cuba's National Union of Artists and Writers, and written by owner Ulises Aquino, defends the cultural center against the enrichment charges and instead turns the tables on unnamed bureaucrats.

"The poet says: 'who questions the honorable, clearly signals that he is not,' and a proverb says, 'The thief thinks that everyone is the same as he,'" Aquino's letter said.

Officials at the Cuban government's press office did not immediately respond to a request seeking an official explanation for El Cabildo's closure.

STATE BUREAUCRATS UNDER ATTACK

For many within Cuba's cultural and intellectual circles, the cultural center's fate has become a litmus test of efforts by Castro to grow the state's small private sector while drastically reducing the state bureaucracy.

Since taking over for his ailing older brother Fidel in 2008, Raul Castro, 81, has liberalized regulations for small businesses and farming, and begun leasing small state retail outlets to employees.

Aquino, a 50-year-old opera singer, founded the theater company Opera in the Street in 2006, and taking advantage of loosened regulations on small business and government encouragement of local development projects, opened El Cabildo as a permanent venue for the youthful troupe.

A staunch advocate of socialism, Aquino charged in his letter that the forces behind the closing of his center were "jealous" of its success.

"Those who fear that the worker, the intellectual and the artist might find their own productive road are not revolutionaries, they are conservatives," he wrote.

"They enjoy the benefits of power that gives them the ability, as in this case, to decide the destiny of human works, not to help them flourish, but to destroy them," Aquino charged.

The Reuters story characterized El Cabildo as "perhaps the largest private business in Havana," with the Opera of the Street's 86 artists and support staff, plus 43 other employees in its bar and restaurant.

After the article appeared, the Communist Party's Ideology Department phoned Aquino to ask how El Cabildo worked.

Aquino told reporters that he provided a full explanation and believed all was well, only to be raided by a "commando" of inspectors later in the week.

BUILT FROM SCRATCH

Aquino, a stocky, barrel-chested man who has a powerful baritone voice onstage but speaks softly when he is off, built from scratch the eclectic theater company that mixes traditional opera with Cuban song and dance and popular music from abroad.

He also built the cultural center, investing his savings earned abroad as an opera singer, on the ruins of a collapsed building in Playa, one of Havana's relatively well off districts.

Reuters also had reported that El Cabildo's proceeds were shared after expenses, taxes, and investments, resulting in monthly wages four times greater than the country's 450 pesos average, or around $19.

"The earnings of the Opera of the Street are divided among everyone ... including me ... All the artists perform with a subsidy from the Culture Ministry, but as our president has said, salaries do not correspond with the cost of living," Aquino said in his letter.

A government insider said the Playa district's architect and perhaps other officials were opposed to the El Cabildo for various reasons and had apparently used the Reuters story as an excuse to shut it down.

A Cuban economist said El Cabildo's cover charge may have fallen into a gray area in Cuban law. Though private establishments were not prohibited from having cover charges, establishments associated with the Culture Ministry, such as such as El Cabildo, might be more restricted in what they can charge.

(Editing by David Adams)

View the original article here