Baloch
militants with their sophisticated weapons: Ready to fight Pakistan
Army
In Balochistan
an Army Rape, a Cover-Up and Rush to Kill
By
Najam Sethi
LAHORE,
January 14: The crisis in Balochistan is enveloped in a curtain
of official censorship, public ignorance, tribal honor and military
arrogance.
There
are two aspects to it. First, there is the local conflict in Dera
Bugti in which Sui gas installations continue to be rocketed by
Bugti tribesmen and officials of the Defense Security Group (DSG)
and Frontier Corps are being fatally targeted. Second,
there is the “nationalist resistance” to central rule
led by the shadowy Baloch Liberation Army in which military targets
in Balochistan are under attack.
Behind
the scenes, negotiations are being conducted between Islamabad
and representatives of the small Baloch nationalist parties and
groups over the terms and conditions of local employment and compensation
contracts by the gas companies as well as over the amount of royalties
and federal development outlays and handouts for Balochistan province
and their distribution between the provincial and local administrations.
In
the first case, Nawab Bugti has constantly complained that Pakistan
Petroleum Ltd has reneged on its financial commitments to local
Bugti tribesmen at Sui. Various federal governments have tried
to bribe or browbeat him but to no avail.
Meanwhile,
Islamabad has relentlessly propagated the notion that the tribal
sardars, including Nawab Bugti, are both greedy and opposed to
their area’s development. This has injected personal acrimony
into the conflict and stiffened the tribal resolve. In the latest
round at Sui, over two dozen troopers have been killed, gas supply
to major industrial units in the Punjab and Sindh has been halted,
thousands of regular army troops have been rushed to the area
and helicopter gun ships have been marshaled to put down the Bugtis
and Marris.
The
conflict is cloaked in a web of deception. It is being painted
as standard sardari ‘mischief’. But the facts are
quite different and alarming.
A
young lady doctor was gang-raped at Sui recently. At first, the
PPL and DSG tried to destroy the evidence and denied the incident.
Then the woman was spirited out to Karachi and told to shut up.
At
no stage was the local police allowed to meet and interrogate
her. But when the police turned up sperm and blood evidence of
rape at the scene of the crime, the PPL/DSG reluctantly allowed
an FIR against “unknown assailants” However, Nawab
Bugti insisted that one of the rapists was Captain Hammad of the
DSG.
But
the military flatly rejected the allegation. Indeed, the local
and national media was advised not to print Nawab Bugti’s
allegations. Outraged, the Bugtis joined ranks and vowed resistance.
The local military commanders now want to “sort them out”.
But that may be easier said than done. If the Bugtis are not calmed
down and military action is precipitated, the gas compression
and precipitation plants at Sui could be attacked and destroyed
with disastrous consequences.
The
second issue is even less amenable to the military’s ‘standard
operating procedures’. It is a throwback to the 1970s insurgency
that resulted from ZA Bhutto’s dismissal of Ataullah Mengal’s
nationalist government and the detention on conspiracy charges
of 55 nationalist politicians and student leaders.
That
revolt was crushed by a combination of military force, political
appeasement and economic largesse by Gen Zia ul Haq. In the 1990s,
the Baloch nationalists were quiescent because they were part
of the democratic process, sharing power at the center and in
the province with the ruling PPP and PML parties in turns.
But
that has changed under General Musharraf who has instead shared
power and privileges with the mullahs in Balochistan and forced
the nationalists to sulk and conspire in the wilderness.
A
second generation of Baloch students and tribal leaders has readily
fallen prey to the call to arms, targeting such multi-billion
rupee federal development projects as Gwadar which have largely
left the local Baloch middle classes out of the loop of beneficial
stake holders.
This
disgruntlement has been fed with financial donations from working
class Baloch communities in Oman and the Gulf and foreign powers
interested in fishing in troubled waters. Certainly, the nature
of sophisticated weaponry in the hands of the BLA suggests that
it will not be easily sorted out by military means alone.
General
Pervez Musharraf has warned the Baloch: “They shouldn’t
push us. It isn’t the 1970s when you can hit and run and
hide in the mountains. This time you won’t even know what
hit you”.
Wrong.
This is exactly what is happening in South Waziristan where a
couple of hundred motivated militants with local sympathies and
support continue to pose serious problems despite all the new
US supplied helicopter gun ships and wonderful new equipment with
the Pak army. In fact, General Musharraf should be thinking of
speedily extricating himself from Wana rather than jumping into
the Baloch quicksand.
To
be fair to him, though, General Musharraf has sincerely tried
to negotiate Baloch grievances through dedicated civilian interlocutors.
But army hardliners in Balochistan want to jump the gun.
The
situation in Sui is precipitous. It can be diffused by arresting
the DSG officer and ordering an inquiry. The longer term nationalist
problem can be tackled by co-opting the main tribes and nationalist
parties into the political process and isolating those who give
succor to the BLA.
The
writer is Editor of The Friday Times and the Daily Times of Lahore.
This editorial was written for The Friday Times.
