KARACHI, Pakistan - Stranded in a dingy hotel in the heart of the port city of Karachi, waiting for the smuggler’s call, Hussain felt at once trapped and poised for freedom.
Behind lay his hometown, Quetta, the city in western Pakistan that has become a killing ground for Sunni sectarian death squads that hunt Shiites. So far this year they have killed almost 200 people, and Hussain was nearly one of them. Lifting a pants leg, he displayed an 8-inch scar from a bomb blast in January.
Great danger also lay ahead, however. Hussain was headed for Australia, where thousands of his fellow ethnic Hazaras, Shiites who have borne the brunt of the recent violence, have sought refuge. The illegal journey - across Southeast Asia by air, ground and sea at the mercy of human traffickers - would be long and perilous.Several hundred Hazaras had died on that route in recent years, most when their rickety boats foundered at sea.
For Hussain, it was worth the risk.
“I’d rather die in the boat than in a bomb blast,” he said. “At least this way I get to choose.”
Hussain, 25, is part of a growing exodus of young Hazara men who are fleeing Pakistan as it has become apparent that their government and military cannot, or will not, protect them from violent extremists.
In Quetta, where most Pakistani Hazaras live, the attacks are led by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a fanatical group that views Shiites as heretics. With their distinctive Central Asian features and historical links to anti-Taliban forces, the Hazaras make an appealing target. After a decade of intermittent attacks, bloodshed is suddenly surging; two Lashkar suicide bombings this year killed almost 200 people, up from 125 in 2012.
That toll set off a security crackdown, but the attacks resumed Tuesday with a suicide attack on a Hazara politician that killed six people. To young men such as Hussain, whose family runs a clothes shop, the next bomb is only a matter of time.
“We can live without the basics of life - gas, electricity and so on,” said Hussain, who asked to be identified by just part of his name in the hope of avoiding arrest on his journey. “But we can’t live with the fear.”
Hussain’s older brother was shot and killed by militants in 2008. His own brush with death came on Jan. 10, when a powerful blast ripped through a snooker hall near his house. As Hussain rushed to help, he was caught in a second explosion that killed rescue workers, police officers and journalists. He blacked out.
He awoke in the hospital with 36 stitches in one leg and learned that three of his closest friends were among the 84 dead.
The final straw came on March 7, when the military summoned Hussain and other Hazara traders to a meeting in Haideri bazaar, a popular market. As soldiers stood guard outside, an army colonel offered the merchants some sobering advice: They needed to buy handguns, he said.
Some people reacted angrily and began berating the military officers, demanding better protection, Hussain recalled. But he went home to make a phone call. Two years earlier, his younger brother had left for Australia, where he had gotten a job in a fast-food restaurant.
“Just come,” the brother said.
Three days later, Hussain had agreed to pay $6,000 to a trafficker and was on a flight to Karachi, on the first leg of a journey across Asia.
As with many other Hazaras aiming for Australia - from Afghanistan as well as Pakistan - Hussain’s starting point was Karachi. From there, the journey is arduous and uncertain. Refugees first fly to Thailand or Malaysia, often via Sri Lanka, after their agents bribe immigration officers and Pakistani border officials. The trek continues by land and sea across Malaysia and Indonesia, in cars and trains, dodging police patrols, spending the night at flophouses.
Some migrants are arrested by police officers and border guards along the way and deported back to Pakistan; others are extorted or abandoned by the traffickers, or robbed on the roadside. In many cases, they end up paying thousands of dollars more - in bribes to border officers or supplemental fees to smugglers - so they can keep pressing toward Australia.
The last leg is the most treacherous. In Indonesia, migrants buy tickets aboard small, overcrowded boats bound for Christmas Island, a small Australian territory about 240 miles off the Indonesian coast, where they apply for political asylum.
Safe arrival is by no means guaranteed. Between late 2001 and last June, 964 asylum seekers and boat crew members from various countries are known to have lost their lives on this passage, said Sandi Logan, a spokesman for the Australian government’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
The Australian government has tried to deter the boat people. Last year, it began transferring asylum seekers to detention centers on two remote Pacific islands while their cases are heard.
Responding to the criticism, Australian officials say they have increased their humanitarian refugee quota to 20,000 this year, a 40 percent increase. At the same time, in countries such as Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, the Australian government has started an advertising campaign seeking to persuade potential refugees to stay at home.
Yet still they keep going. In the first weeks of April, the Australian Navy intercepted 10 boats carrying 760 people, most bound for Christmas Island.
This month, a boat carrying about 90 people, most of them Hazaras, sank en route to Australia. Hussain was depressed but undeterred.
“I’m looking forward,” he wrote. Then he added: “May God help me.”
Front Section, Pages 12 on 04/28/2013