حزب مردم بلوچستان Balochistan People’s Party بلوچستانءِ اُستمانءِ گــَل
Pakistan - Quetta - 01.3.2006
From our correspondent
Enrico Piovesana
Balucistan, a Forgotten Conflict
Stories from western Pakistan, where the war between the
Balucistan people supporting independence and the government has reignited
The glass of the windows of the small house
where we staying rattles due to the ear-splitting din that resounds
every morning in the Quetta skies. The rumble is so loud that it even covers
the chanting of the muezzin at the nearby mosque. “They are the Mirages of
the PAF, the Pakistani Air Force, taking off from the air base to go bomb
the guerrillas’ positions in the mountains of Dera Bugti and Kholu,” said
Zeeshan as he served us a breakfast of black tea with milk and scrambled
eggs.
Since December a new war that nobody seems to have noticed is being fought
in Pakistan, a war that sets the powerful army of Islamabad against the
picturesque tribal guerrillas of Balucistan. They wear turbans, sport long
beards, have make-up on their eyes and sling Kalashnikovs over their
shoulders. They prey to Allah, but are neither Talibans nor Islamic
fundamentalists. Maybe that is why the world’s media has not taken an
interest in them. They write in Arabic characters, but speak a language
similar to that of the Kurds, a people with whom they share not only remote
origins, but also the fate of a ‘stateless nation’ divided by borders mapped
out by British colonialists. The people of Balucistan, shepherds and
farmers, live in western Iran, in the far south of Afghanistan and above all
here in the desert regions of western Pakistan, the historic centre of their
tribal kingdom that basically remained independent until the birth of
Pakistan in 1947.
The
history of a conflict that has lasted sixty years. “It was then that the
Punjabs who ruled the newborn Islamic state decided to annex our region with
the force of weapons. The region is very rich in natural resources (gas, oil
and precious minerals) and strategic owing to its long coastline on the
Arabian Sea, right in front of the seaways of Middle Eastern oil,” explained
Surat Khan Marri, an elderly intellectual and writer who lives in Quetta and
who has always fought for Balucistan’s independence. “We tried to make a
stand, but it was of no use. Our land was subjected to a regime of military
occupation and a colonial type of indiscriminate exploitation. In the 1950s
the gas of the Sui deposit started flowing toward the rich Punjab, without
giving us anything in exchange. Balucistan was plundered of its riches,
remaining a poor, backward region without infrastructures or any sort of
social services. The local population was not even given jobs at the new
plants. All of the qualified jobs were given to Punjabi ‘colonists’. All
that was left for us were the jobs of drivers, caretakers and mechanics.
This situation created a nationalist and independence feeling amongst the
people of Balucistan, and the first revolts organised by the chiefs of the
Marri and Bugti tribes, those of the regions surrounding Sui, started,
explained Marri as he sipped his tea with milk.
In the 1950s and ‘60s the powerful
Pakistani army had no difficulty in stamping out the rising Balucistan
nationalist guerrilla warfare. But things changed in the 1970s. The Soviet
Union was interested in the birth of a friendly Balucistan state that would
give Moscow access to the ‘warm waters’. Not to mention India, which is
always ready to weaken its historical enemy. With their help, our movement
gained strength. But Pakistan and the United States did not sit back and
watch. They unleashed total war against us. They bombed our villages with
napalm, killing thousands of civilians. Nobody remembers that war because it
was shamelessly censured by the western mass media. In those days Henry
Kissinger reached the point of saying, ‘I would not recognise the existence
of the Balucistan issue even if it hit me straight in the face.’ Since then
the situation here in Balucistan has only worsened. The government has
started up new exploitation projects, has built barracks and militarized the
territory. It has started persecuting Balucistan activists, thousands of
whom have simply vanished in thin air. In the 1980s and ‘90s our movement
was too weak to continue the armed struggle, so we chose the path of
political and trade union combat. We have tried the route of non-violent
protest. We have tried to negotiate with Musharraf’s military regime, but
have not obtained anything, only repression and new provocations. Until the
word returned to weapons.”
The
new break-out of armed conflict after thirty years of truce. In order to
understand how and why they went back to fighting after almost thirty years
of relative peace, we went to see Yar Jaan Badini, editor of the weekly
Balochistan Today, a publication that supports the cause of the Balucistan
people.
“Over the past few years the government’s attitude has bcome increasingly
aggressive and provoking. The local work force employed at the Sui plants
and in the other so-called ‘development projects’ was sacked and replaced
with Punjabi workers brought in from Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Strikes
and protests followed, duly ignored or repressed by the authorities. And so
acts of sabotage against the government gas pipelines began. To protect
them, the government built three new large military bases. And above all,
work in collaboration with the Chinese has begun for the huge Gwadar trade
port on the Balucistan coast. Looking to the future, this enormous project
will create at least four million jobs, all set aside for manpower coming
from the Punjab. In 2004 the Balucistan parties asked the government to
dismantle the military bases and observe Pakistan’s federal constitution,
allowing our province to take part in the management and in the profits of
the local resource exploitation projects. But the government did not want
have anything to do with it. The straw that
broke the camel’s back was the sexual violence a local doctor, Shazia
Khalid, suffered at the hands of an army officer in January 2005. Based on
the Balucistan code of honour, the local tribes demanded that the man
responsible be punished, but Musharraf himself publicly defended the guilty
soldier. This event is perfectly emblematic of our situation: raped by the
Punjabis with impunity. During the weeks that followed attacks on the
barracks and gas pipelines increased. That was until March, when the army
responded by bombing Dera Bugti with a shower of grenades, killing 72
people… mostly women and children… and injuring another 200. This did
nothing other than inflame the situation, which in the end exploded in
December 2005 when – in response to the launch of several rockets during a
visit made by Musharraf – the government ordered a wide-scale military
attack in the regions where the most combative Balucistan tribes, the Bugti
and the Marri, operate. Since then it has been all-out ware in the districts
of Dera Bugti and Kholu. Already 300 deaths amongst the people of Balucistan
and dozens of soldiers have been recorded, and the situation seems to be
getting worse day by day.”
The
right-hand man of the guerrilla leader speaks out. Confirming the plight
is Agha Shahid Bugti, spokesman of Nawab Adbar Bugti, leader of the
independence movement and chief guerrilla fighter. “They are using the air
force, combat helicopters, tanks and heavy artillery against us. All of the
military technology the Americans gave Musharraf to fight al Qaeda is being
used against us, killing men, elderly people, women and children. We have
found bodies burned in such a way as to think they are using incendiary
bombs: napalm, phosphorous and who knows what. To make you grasp the
situation, I want to tell you a story that recently occurred. On January 11
a military lorry of the Frontier Corps blew up on a mine close to the tiny
village of Pattarnala. Three soldiers who were seriously injured died during
the night. Half an hour later their comrades decided to take revenge by
arresting all of the adult men they could find in Pattarnala, twelve in all.
The next morning the national television network announced that twelve
‘unbelievers’ had died in combat. The women of the village immediately went
to the Frontier Corps fort to ask for the bodies of their men. But they were
not even allowed to enter. They tried the next day, with the same result. So
on January 14 two elderly men of the village went to the fort, but they did
not return. The following day the soldiers returned the twelve bodies plus
those of the two elderly men, all killed with a close-range shot to the
head. Executed! This gives you an idea of what is happening.”
“The Balucistan issue can be solved only
with the end of the dictatorship in Pakistan.” Kachkol Ali is the
leader of the Balucistan nationalist opposition party at the Provincial
Parliament of Balucistan. “As long as Pakistan is governed by a military
dictator, as long as the army is in power, it will be impossible to
establish any dialogue with the authorities since as far as soldiers are
concerned, there is only one way to solve problems: by force. The demands of
the people of Balucistan could be solved simply by implementing Pakistan’s
federal constitution of 1973, which today is a dead letter in view of the
fact that federalism is absolutely incompatible with a military regime,
which by its nature conceives only a centralistic organisation of power. So
we always go back there: the real obstacle is the military dictatorship.
Only a civil and democratic government can solve the Balucistan issue. That
is why we are asking for the support of the West, of the European Union and
above all of the United States. Not in the name of ideal abstract terms. We
are not naïve, and we know that the Americans do not take action to promote
democracy or a people’s right to self-determination. We appeal to their own
interests, since Musharraf’s regime is not only doing nothing to fight
terrorism, but the Chinese Gwadar project – which will be not only a trade
port, but also a military port – will give Beijing’s regime the chance to
position its new war fleet in the ‘warm’ and oil-bearing waters of the
Arabian Sea. I don’t think this suits Washington.”