حزب مردم بلوچستان Balochistan People’s Party بلوچستانءِ اُستمانءِ گــَل
July 29, 2007; http://www.nytimes.com
The Bush administration and Saudi Arabia’s
ruling family have a lot in common, including oil, shared rivals like Iran
and a penchant for denial that has allowed both to overlook the Saudis’
enabling role in the Sept. 11 attacks. But their recent wrangling over Iraq
cannot be denied or papered over with proposals for a big new arms sale. And
if these differences are not tackled, there is an increased likelihood that
the war’s chaos will spread far beyond Iraq’s borders.
While Washington hasn’t protested publicly, Riyadh is pouring money into
Sunni opposition groups and letting Saudis cross the border to join Sunni
insurgents fighting the American-backed, Shiite-led government. Washington
estimates that nearly half of the 60 to 80 foreign fighters entering Iraq
each month come from Saudi Arabia.
So far, neither Washington nor Riyadh is spending any time thinking about
containing the chaos that will follow the inevitable American withdrawal.
The only good news is that President Bush is sending Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Saudi Arabia for what
we hope will be a frank discussion.
A failed Iraqi state with Saudi Islamists holed up in Al Qaeda sanctuaries
in its western deserts is clearly not in the interests of the Saudi
monarchy. But for Ms. Rice and Mr. Gates to have any chance of changing
Saudi policies, they will have to go beyond the administration’s usual mix
of bullying and denial and address legitimate Saudi concerns.
One such concern is Iran, which is bankrolling and training Shiite militias,
building a power base in Shiite areas of Iraq and drawing the prime
minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, into its orbit. Iran’s expanding influence
poses a major threat to Saudi Arabia.
After years of mistaken American policy in Iraq, that threat cannot simply
be conjured or blustered away. Whether the Saudis like it or not, and
whether Mr. Bush likes it or not, Washington needs to face up to these
issues, sit down with Tehran and work out mutually acceptable solutions to
these issues that the Saudis can live with as well.
Another concern is the plight of Iraq’s Sunni minority under a sectarian
Shiite government in league with vindictive Shiite militias. Saudi Arabia
and Iraqi Sunnis have to get used to the idea of Shiite majority power. But
the Saudis cannot be expected to sit still while the Iraqi Sunnis are driven
from their homes, denied decent jobs and treated as second-class citizens by
the Iraqi government.
If Washington wants Saudi backing for the Maliki government, Mr. Maliki must
earn it by ending sectarianism in the security forces, reforming
discriminatory anti-Baathist restrictions and pushing through an equitable
oil revenue law.
It is past time for President Bush to acknowledge that the United States has
no realistic chance of winning a military victory in Iraq, and that it needs
to be urgently preparing to manage the consequences of an American
withdrawal. That will require working cooperatively with all of Iraq’s
neighbors, including Iran and Syria. Compared with those, Saudi Arabia
should be easy.
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Iranian Kurds Say Uprising is Possible
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Friday, Aug. 3, 2007
NewsMax.com
An Iranian Kurdish group whose fighters have clashed frequently with
government forces in Iran has sent its top leader to Washington, D.C., to
seek assistance from the United States government.
Rahman Haj Ahmadi, president of the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), told
NewsMax in an exclusive interview that he hoped to meet with senior
administration officials to discuss the situation inside Iran and how the
U.S. could help the opposition.
"PJAK has thousands of fighters in the mountains of Iran and deep inside
Iranian cities," he said. "With U.S. help, we will lead the Kurdish people
in an uprising that could spread to the whole of Iran."
PJAK fighters seized government buildings in Marivan briefly in the summer
of 2005, in armed clashes with regime security forces that spread to major
cities and towns through the Kurdish region. The clashes were sparked by the
brutal murder of a Kurdish human rights activist.
Ahmadi and his group have been accused by the Tehran regime of being lackeys
of the U.S. government. The July-August 2005 clashes occurred after PJAK
officials met with U.S. military leaders in northern Iraq, Tehran alleged.
Such accusations make Ahmadi smile. "Actually, this is the first time we
have had contacts here in Washington," he told NewsMax. "We would love to
have received U.S. help, but until now we have had no direct contacts with
the U.S. government."
"We, the 12 to 14 million Kurds in Iran, will be the dependable and loyal
allies of the USA and the democratic world," he added.
PJAK claims that its armed resistance fighters control the streets of major
towns and cities in northwestern Iran after the Revolutionary Guards troops
return to barracks in the late afternoons.
Forty percent of their fighters are women, Ahmadi claims. Women also make up
50 percent of the group's political leadership. "We are a decidedly modern
party," he said.
"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he is waiting for the badieh
zaman," the legendary 12th imam of Shia Islam whose return brings justice to
the world.
"We also believe in the badieh zaman," he chuckled. "For us, he is George W.
Bush."
Based in Europe, Ahmadi recently returned from a three-month tour of his
fighters' positions inside Iran.
He told NewsMax that his organization is seeking to join forces with other
opposition groups, from republicans to monarchists, to forge a common
program of action to topple the regime."
"In our mountains, we can train people from all the other groups. We can
train them politically, and militarily," he said. "They can then act in
their own name, under their own banner."
The immediate goal, he said, was to get rid of the system of absolute
clerical rule, known as velayat-e faghih. "We want Iran to become a secular
democratic republic," he said.
"In the longer term, we would like to see Iran become a confederation, where
the rights of all ethnic groups will be guaranteed within a single, united
Iran."
He specifically rejected charges that his group was "separatist," or that it
favored in any way the break-up of Iran.
But Ahmadi also warned that when Iran's ethnic minorities launch their
uprising, the temptation by some groups to establish ethnically-pure
autonomous areas would be great.
"We must avoid ethnic cleansing at all costs," he said.
Iran's 70 million population is ethnically diverse, and includes millions of
Azeris, Kurds, Balouch, Ahwazi Arabs, Turkomans, and others. Approximately
35 percent of the population is ethnically Persian.
But over the centuries, Iran's various populations have moved around,
intermarried and intermingled. Iran's Kurdish areas, for example, are home
to hundreds of thousands of ethnic Azeris. Roughly 1 million Kurds live in
Tehran.
This complex ethnic mosaic makes internal borders, or a Yugoslav-style
partition of the country into separate ethnic states both "unrealistic" and
"undesirable," Ahmadi said.
Instead, PJAC favors a loosely structured confederation along the lines of
Belgium or Switzerland. "But of course, all of that is long in the future.
It will take fifty years of negotiations!" he said.
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
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August 2007 | 137 » Web exclusive » Balochistan's rebels;
Is the US providing covert support to Baloch rebels in Iran? If so, what does this say about its support for Musharraf in Pakistan?
Willem Marx is a freelance journalist based in New York; http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?&id=9743
The Toyota pick-up truck roared through the green gates into the dusty
walled compound and juddered to a halt inches from a small well. Eight
figures, their faces swathed in cloth, stood up stiffly from their crouched
positions before clambering down. They lifted their weapons gingerly from
the floor where they had lain concealed. I counted five semi-automatics, a
light machine gun and a green rocket-propelled grenade launcher before the
vehicle’s driver slammed his door. Iran’s most wanted terrorist walked
towards me with his hand extended, a dazzlingly white smile beneath a
Pashtun hat.
But 24-year-old Abdulmalik Rigi is not Pashtun, he’s Baloch—an ethnic
minority that straddles an area across southeast Iran, southwest Pakistan
and south Afghanistan. In February, the Iranian city of Zahedan was hit by a
bomb—for which Rigi claimed responsibility—that killed 11 Revolutionary
Guards, and placed Rigi at the top of Tehran’s hitlist. A series of American
media reports had linked Rigi’s guerrilla attacks to a wider US-sponsored
covert war against Iran. Rigi had agreed to meet me, a western journalist,
to publicly refute these allegations, which he says have been levelled
against his group by the mullahs of Iran.
Balochistan is a vast expanse of territory separating the middle east from the Indian subcontinent (see below—the Baloch region is coloured pink). The Baloch people are ethnically heterogeneous but united by their language and culture, and their Sunni Islam faith. In the late 19th century, the highly tribal Baloch homeland was carved up by British India, Afghanistan and Persia, and the Baloch have thus never enjoyed a modern sovereign state. Nevertheless, the difficult terrain kept the Baloch relatively isolated, allowing them to preserve a centuries-old cultural heritage, and in both Iran and Pakistan they have offered armed resistance to central government control since the early 20th century.
Today, Afghanistan’s chaos has spilled over
its southern borders into the contiguous Pakistani and Iranian Balochistan
provinces. Afghan refugees have been flooding the northern edges of
Pakistan’s Baloch territory, while arms and narcotics smuggling into Iran
prop up the local economy among the largely unemployed Baloch youth.
Smuggled Iranian oil products fuel swathes of Pakistani Balochistan, and
convoys of pick-up trucks—overloaded with diesel barrels—regularly arrive in
plain sight at any one of a dozen border towns inside Pakistani territory.
(A veteran Baloch guerrilla commander told me that a large part of
Abdulmalik Rigi’s revenue comes from tolls levied on illicit trade in the
area he controls. Rigi denied personal involvement in smuggling, but
acknowledged that some members of his organisation might not be so
scrupulous).
I witnessed Pakistani policemen accepting bribes from truck drivers carrying
several dozen such barrels, but the security forces here are disliked for
other reasons. According to Pakistan’s Commission for Human Rights, several
hundred ethnic Baloch are missing and unaccounted for in the province. Some
are human rights activists, political leaders and journalists, but many more
are simply ordinary workers picked up at police checkpoints and never heard
from again. I met countless families with stories of loved ones who had gone
missing, they said, for expressing Baloch nationalist sentiments.
Abdulmalik Rigi and I settled on a shaded mat, surrounded by dwarf palms, at
the outskirts of a small village on the mountainous Pakistan-Iran border
that had been chosen for our rendezvous. As his eight young fighters sat
around, fingering their weapons and laughing at their leader’s jokes about
“cowardly Iranian soldiers,” Rigi told me similar horror stories from
Iranian Balochistan, while denying that he was a Washington stooge. He
claimed to be fighting for Baloch minority rights, and says he hopes to
replace Iran’s current theocracy with a federal union, a “United States of
Iran.” Affable and impassioned, he willingly discussed his group’s weapons,
tactics and martyred members.
What had driven him to fight the Iranian government? I asked. He told me how
at the age of 13 he had come around a corner in Zahedan, his hometown, and
seen the corpses of several young men, strung up from an industrial crane.
It was a common punishment for “counter-revolutionary” behaviour, he
explained, and it compelled him to abandon his urban life and take up arms.
A day later, 800 miles away across inhospitable deserts and dark granite
mountains, a separate group of Baloch fighters shared their dinner with me.
These men formed part of the growing Baloch Liberation Army, and say they
are engaged in a struggle with Pakistan’s government for the independence of
that country’s Baloch minority. Five hours' hike up a narrow ravine, they
live with their donkeys and their ageing rifles, occasionally venturing out
of their craggy maze to attack military checkpoints. Their commander, a tall
man with a green and black cloth masking his face, sat on a rock and held
forth on the Balochi hatred of Pakistan’s military elite. His fighters had
survived overwhelming firepower, he said, including “the helicopter gunships
that are provided by America in order to co-operate against Taliban and
jihadi organisations.”
It was recently reported that Pakistan had suggested a barter deal with the
British government: Islamabad would extradite Pakistani citizens allegedly
involved in the July 2005 London bombings, and in return the British would
hand over a group of Baloch men that President Musharraf has accused of
supporting the BLA’s increasingly successful insurgency from afar. Until
now, the British have refused to co-operate, but meanwhile the US state
department has not wavered in its support for Musharraf, despite the
continued unrest and repression occurring across Pakistan. Is there an
inconsistency in American and British support for the government of
Pakistan—with its poor treatment of the Baloch minority—and simultaneous
criticism of Iran for similar transgressions? The US has been learning
valuable lessons from its earlier support of Islamic mujahedin during the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. One is that proxy groups may
one day turn around to bite the hand that feeds them. If the CIA really is
supporting Rigi’s guerrillas in Iran, while simultaneously helping
Musharraf’s army stifle the Baloch nationalist insurgency in Pakistan, there
may be trouble ahead.