SMOKERS' CORNER WHAT MAKES A CIVIL WAR.

On March 15 this year, supporters of Imran Khan clashed with the police. The clashes went on for hours. Imran's party leaders and supporters warned that these clashes would turn into a civil war if Imran were arrested. Eruptions of this kind do not evolve into civil wars. Not even into a civil conflict. What Lahore experienced was civil unrest.

In the 1990s, when security forces were conducting an operation in Karachi against alleged militants belonging to the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), the party's leaders and activists often described the commotion as a civil war. They claimed that Karachi had turned into Beirut. By this they meant the capital of Lebanon, which was the epicentre of a brutal civil war in that country between 1975 and 1990.

As a reporter for an English weekly at the time, I closely covered the first half of the operation and, indeed, some areas of Karachi did start to look like Beirut. It is estimated that over 3,000 people were killed in the operation, which finally came to a close in 2001. MQM activists had used sophisticated weapons during pitched battles against security forces. The latter too lost many men. There were assassinations, counter-assassinations, street battles, kidnappings, extrajudicial killings, protests and disappearances.

But was it a civil war? Interestingly, not only did MQM call it that, but the military claimed that maps of a planned breakaway Mohajir-majority state, called 'Jinnahpur', were found in some MQM offices. Although later discredited, this claim suggested that the MQM was battling the state to turn Karachi and Hyderabad into a separate country through a civil war. But whereas MQM did describe the commotion as a civil war, the party vehemently denied it was planning to create a separate country.

While Imran Khan's loyalists warn that their clashes with law enforcement in Lahore could lead to a civil war, they are perhaps unaware of the history of and the semantic differences between civil unrest, civil conflict and civil war

In 2009, a senior military officer who was leading the operation confessed that the maps were actually fabricated by the security forces to justify a large-scale operation against the MQM. But if the MQM was not fighting to create a new state, what was it fighting for? According to the MQM, its activists were simply defending themselves and their families from brutal extrajudicial measures applied by the security forces.

It wasn't in any way a civil war. The MQM did...