WASHINGTON, (UPI) -- Pakistani military operations against militants in the restive Balochistan province have continued to intensify since last December's failed assassination attempt against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf in the provincial capital Quetta. An estimated 40,000 troops are now deployed in counter-insurgency operations there.

Dawn newspaper reported on April 8 that the Balochistan Solidarity Front is demanding an immediate cessation of military operations in the province.

The BSF is a loose alliance of Baloch leftist political organizations, intellectuals and workers.

During a press conference at the Rawalpindi Press Club camp office on Friday BSF leaders told journalists, "The increasingly militant mood of the nationalist movement in the province is a direct outcome of the state's repression in the troubled province."

BSF People's Rights Movement representative Asim Sajjad said that the military's "enforcing the writ of the state" was increasingly alienating the Baloch people.

Sajjad said the Pakistani government had tried to suppress news of dissent and resistance in Balochistan by depicting the current unrest as being the work of a small number of tribal chiefs but, "in fact, the sentiment against the center is widespread and is increasing by the day, which suggests that a situation very similar to that of 1971 in east Pakistan is developing."

The National Workers Party representative Masudul Hasan added that the working people of the Punjab and the country's other two provinces were in complete solidarity with the Baloch, as centrist exclusive nationalist politics had long divided the country's various oppressed classes.

Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party member Zahoor Khan told journalists that the province's natural resources, including natural gas, should be used first for the benefit of the Baloch people instead of enriching a handful of the nation's elite.

Jammu Kashmir People's National Party representative Imran Shan added that the story of Pakistan was one of national oppression, commenting that the authorities in Islamabad, while paying lip service to the Muslim Kashmiri cause, had in fact always done so for its own interests in order to maintain a huge army and dominate state affairs.

Shan added that Islamabad in reality had never done anything for the Kashmiri people, citing as evidence the authorities' catastrophic response to last year's Oct. 8 earthquake, which killed an estimated 74,000 and left millions more homeless.