What have the Baluchis ever done to us?
01 August 2006
Ground troops and helicopter gunships yesterday “dismantled” several “terrorist” bases. “The helicopters achieved their target by destroying the positions of miscreants,” a government official told AFP. “It was an early morning operation, we have no information about any casualties”, he added. Militants claimed to have shot down one of the eight helicopters used in the raid but this was vehemently denied…
Had it made the papers, this report could be from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan or any other frontline in the so-called “war on terror”. In fact, it comes from the mountains of Zain Koh in Baluchistan, where an almost entirely unreported war is waging.
You may have heard of it. Perhaps you recall the
Baluchistan Liberation Army (BLA) becoming the forty-first group to be proscribed by the UK as an “international terrorist organisation” last summer? Apart from that, we have heard precious little else about a people whose plight was recently described as “slow motion genocide”.
Baluchistan is split across western Pakistan, eastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. Like the Kurds, the Baluchis are victims of Empire whose resource rich territory has been conquered and divided by successive regional powers, from the Persians to the British. It was British colonial rule that determined the modern political geography of Baluchistan, in the 1947 agreement with India that created Pakistan.
The Baluchis resented and resisted their forced assimilation into Pakistan. By the time Bangladesh had gained independence from eastern Pakistan in 1971, they too were demanding greater autonomy from the political elite in Punjab. President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s refusal to grant any meaningful powers to Baluchistan’s first elected body in 1972 resulted in a bloody five year war for independence in which 3,000 Pakistani soldiers, 5,000 Baluchi fighters and many more civilians were killed.
The Pakistan air force carried out strikes throughout rural Baluchistan and napalm was used as part of a “scorched earth” policy. Iran, concerned about the future aspirations of its own Baluchi minority, also joined the military action. The war ended in 1978 when General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had ousted Bhutto in a military coup, offered an amnesty to Baluchi fighters.
Almost 30 years on and Baluchistan, despite producing more than one third of Pakistan’s natural gas and accounting for only six per cent of the population, remains the country’s most impoverished region. In recent years, acts of violence against the continued presence of Pakistan’s military forces increased. This included a number of attacks on power lines and military checkpoints claimed by the BLA.
Following the alleged rape of a Sihndi woman doctor by a soldier at a hospital in Sui, in January 2005, insurgents launched a crippling attack on the Sui natural gas production facility, Pakistan’s largest. President Pervez Musharraf’s retaliation was swift and merciless. Warning that “this is not the seventies” and promising that “they will not even know what’s hit them”, he duly dispatched Pakistan’s F-16s and helicopter gunships (newly supplied by the US) into the mountains and deserts of Baluchistan to deliver the kind of collective punishment now all too familiar to those in occupied lands.
In the past year, six Pakistani army brigades, plus paramilitary forces totaling some 25,000 men, have been deployed to the province. Local groups claim that 450 Baluchi politicians and activists have been “disappeared” and that more than 4,000 Baluchis are now in detention, many in secret locations without charge or trial.
In August 2006, 79-year-old Nawab Akbar Bugti, a tribal chief, former governor of Baluchistan and leader of Baluchistan’s largest political party (JLP), was assassinated in targeted Pakistani air-strikes. In December, two more prominent nationalist leaders were arrested. Baluchi tribes have now put aside their differences to unite behind<