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Back to the
hills
By M. Ilyas Khan
Unknown to the rest of
the country, Baloch nationalists are up in arms again after 30 years
 Which
of the two should be more worrying: the fact that Balochistan, after a
troubled peace lasting some 30 years, is once again in the throes of a
full-fledged insurgency or the reality that the issue has so far failed
to find space in Pakistan’s mainstream political discourse? The sights
and sounds recently emerging from the country’s vast hinterland are
failing to register, despite having risen to a violent and bloody
crescendo over the last six months. The forgotten and at times mocked
Baloch nationalist has quietly emerged from the shadow of sectarian and
international terrorism to stake his own claim on the spoils of a system
that is threatening to fall gradually but inevitably apart.
There is serious turmoil in Balochistan, irrespective of whether the
rest of the country is willing to acknowledge it.
Over the last six months in particular, Baloch rebels have been hard at
work 153 out of 156 working days, to be precise planting mines, firing
rockets have, exploding bombs or ambushing military convoys. Their
attacks have turned bloody on t least 25 occasions, killing over 40
persons including military and paramilitary personnel, levies, security
agents, government officials and also some civilians. The Sui airport
building has been blown up, gas pipelines and electricity grids have
been repeatedly hit and bomb explosions have taken place close to the
official’s residence of the chief minister as well as the governor.
Even military installations in Quetta have not been spared. Though many
such attacks remain unclaimed to this day, a group called the Baloch
Liberation Army (BLA) has claimed the responsibility for quite a few,
demanding and end to garrisons and Mega-projects. For those who have
seen the actors in this bloody confrontation take form, this ragtag
group of rebellious nationalists may take a lot more force to dissipate
then the ideologues from the mind-1970s required.
The key to the events currently unfolding in Balochistan-tempting many
analysts to employ the term insurgency perhaps lies in the early days of
2003, a year that will go down in Baloch political history as the year
of mergers and coalitions between nationalist groups. By September, four
Baloch parties had fallen together in an alliance called the Baloch
Ithehad. Its two-point agenda, unsurprisingly, was exactly the same as
the one professed by the armed rebels: opposition to military garrisons
and Mega-projects in the province. Within a year, it became an active
and violently articulated agenda in the province. As such, the
Ittehad’s significance as the de facto political front for armed
struggle cannot be exaggerated. In other words, regardless of their
numerical strength, the armed Baloch nationalists who style themselves
as the BLA have a visible political face.
Even more significant is the less visible face of BLA, scattered all
across the province in the shape of training camps and infrastructure.
Evidence of these camps fist came to public light in the last week of
July 2004, when a group of Sindhi and Baloch journalists visited Kahan,
the native town of Balochistan’s former strongman Nawab Khair Bakhsh
Marri, in Kohlu district. The journalists found these camps manned by
“mostly Marri tribesmen,” equipped with wireless sets,
walkie-talkies and satellite phones. Each camp had one or more electric
generators as well as fleets of motorbikes and four wheel drive trucks.
Their hosts claimed that there were 60 such camps in the Kohlu area
alone.
The government, it seems, was not unaware of such installations at the
time of the journalists, visit. Similar camps had been discovered during
a Pakistan Army operation in the distant Mekran hills in early July. The
operation was launched to arrest perpetrators of Gwadar’s May 4 car
bombing that killed three Chinese engineers. Though the government
initially denied the operation, Balochistan Chief Minister Jam Mohammed
Yousaf admitted on August 13 that the army was searching for 25 BLA
camps in the Gwadar-Kech region in the extreme sough-west of the
province (see Army
Versus the Rebels). He has since stated that the Indian
intelligence agency RAW may have been running 40 camps in different
parts of Balochistan.
The CM’s admission, however, still seems to be a case of under
reporting. Official sources in Quetta confirmed to the Herald
that more than 150 camps, housing between 3000 to 5000 armed rebels,
have been operating in different parts of Balochistan over the last tow
years. The camps are scattered wide across the province, from Kohlu and
Sibi in the northeast to Kech and Gwadar in the southwest and from
Khuzdar and Kalat in eastern and central Balochistan to Kharan and
Chaghi in the northwest. The BLA’s geographical spread is matched only
by the diversity of its weapons: assault rifles, rocket-propelled
grenades (RPG’s) mortars and even anti-aircraft guns.
 Starting
somewhere in the latter part of 2003 the BLA has been detonating small
and mostly harmless bomb in Quetta and elsewhere apparently to test the
nerves of the administration. But there have been some deadly attacks as
well, such as the car bombing in Gwadar on May 4th that killed three
Chinese engineers or the August 1st ambush in Khuzdar that led to the
death of five military personnel and one civilian. A major attack also
took place on a frontier Corps (FC) checkpoint in Mand on June 25th in
which 15 persons, including civilians, were reported killed. To lend a
symbolic touch to the proceedings, the militants rocked both Quetta and
Gwadar with bomb blasts on the night before August 14th, Pakistan’s
Independence Day.
The military authorities have responded by resorting to a blackout of
information in the troubled zones. FC guards were posted to control
access to the hospital in Mand where most of the June 25th rocket attack
victims were taken. In July, the army cleared out and took over the
children’s ward of Gwadar’s district hospital so as to keep military
casualties from the Mekran operation away from public view. A credible
levies source in Turbat told the Herald that at least 16 military
casualties, some of whom may have already been dead, were airlifted from
Makran’s Dadam area to a health facility in the Ormara naval base on
the Makran coast in July. Their fate remains unknown.
To some extent, this secrecy explains why such little information is
trickling out of Balochistan. A better explanation, though, is the
nature of the province itself, a sprawling wilderness where large
swathes of territory are uninhabited or remote, with lines of
communication either scanty or non-existent. But even the most
conservative estimates by officials in Quetta put the casualty figures
on the government side-mostly of FC personnel-since late 2003 at over 40
dead and more then 100 injured.
The BLA’s seemingly massive capacity for violence has generated
curiosity regarding the magnitude of its operational expenses as well as
their source. Intelligence agencies in Islamabad and government circles
in Quetta estimate the monthly expenses of BLA’s operations from 40 to
90 million rupees respectively. Their understanding of the
organizational nature of BLA’s economy also differs. The intelligence
sources take into account amounts of money probably doled out to what
they describe as “a few hundred mercenaries” operating in loosely
knit groups, working on a case-to-case basis and procuring their own
weapons and explosives. But government sources in Quetta, while
acknowledging some degree of independence on the part of BLA group
operating in different areas of the province, work out their estimates
on the basis of expenses incurred of the purchase of the weapons and
ammunition, logistics and what they call the BLA’s monthly salary
bill.
The latter claim seems to hold true in light of information corroborated
from independent sources. Some residents of Makran’s Dasht area who
have relatives among the BLA camps in Makran told the Herald in
Turbat that BLA members were paid monthly salaries ranging from 5,000 to
15,000 rupees. They added that a majority of BLA members in the Makran
camps are educated Baloch youth having past or present links with the
nationalist Baloch Students Organization. In addition, both government
sources in Quetta and people from Dasht confirm that the rebels are led
by the Marri and Mengal activists who had constituted the younger lot of
the 1970s resistance and are now in their early or mid-fifties.
As for the source of their money, America tops the list of speculation,
with a senior government official in Quetta pointing out that the US may
want to put a damper on the growing Chinese presence in Balochistan.
Some influential business groups in Dubai and Qatar are also said to be
piqued over what they perceive as potentially adverse effects of the
Gwadar port on business opportunities in the Gulf. The intelligence
community in Islamabad believes Iran is another possible opponent of the
Gwadar port because this project would compete with Iran’s newly built
Chahbahar Port on the Balochistan coast. India, of course, is an old
time rival and would like to get even with Pakistan over Kashmir.
While BLA’s links with any of these foreign funding sources remain
unknown, there are authentic reports that the Baloch nationalist leaders
have been seeking funds for their campaign over the last few years. The
lateral spread of the rebel network in Balochistan suggests that such
funds may indeed be flowing in. But observers warn the Pakistani
establishment against reading too much into this aspect of the conflict.
“Much of what is happening in Balochistan today has a strong internal
dimension that connects with its recent history and it will be a folly
to ignore it any longer,” says one analyst.
On the policy front, BLA’s inception can be linked to Islamabad’s
attempts to explore oil and gas in Kohlu between 1999 and 2000. Armed
Marri tribesmen led by Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri, resisted this attempt.
Islamabad retaliated by recruiting a 1000-strong levies force of the
rival Bijarani tribe in Kohlu to contain Nawab Marri’s influence. The
government also implicated Nawab Marri in the murder of the
pro-exploration former chief justice of Balochistan Mohammed Nawaz
Marri. He was arrested in early 2000 and put in jail where be remained
for 18 months. During this period, pressure from the so-called Bijarani
Militia gradually pushed the Marri tribesmen underground, creating
conditions for a militant backlash.
This underground network soon proliferated to central Balochistan where
Sardar Attaullah Mengal threw in his lot with Marri, his comrade-in-arms
since the insurgency of the mid-1970s. Mengal comes from Wadh, district
Khuzdar, an area dotted with the most BLA camps after Kohlu. Unlike
Marri who despite his socialist credentials remains a lone ranger,
Mengal is the head of a political party, the Balochistan National Party
(BNP). This party has experimented with power sharing in Quetta and
Islamabad and has occasionally drawn criticism from Marri for doing so.
Its leaders now admit that their honeymoon with Islamabad failed to
obtain even the smallest concessions with regards to provincial autonomy
for Balochistan, the cherished dream of the nationalists.
The Bugti tribe was drawn into the conflict after a two-year lull in
militant activity during 2001 and 2002 due to development in
Afghanistan. The repeated bombing and rocketing of the gas pipelines in
the Sui area in late 2002 and early 2003 worked as a catalyst. Political
circles in Quetta say that Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the head of the Bugti
tribe and chief of the nationalist Jamhuri Watan Party (JWP), supports
Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri’s resistance to oil exploration in Kohlu. He
may even have egged Marri on by advising him to take heed from the way
Islamabad has handled Sui’s gas reserves, claims one observer (see Money,
Money, Money).
By mid-2003, the scattered forces of another Baloch nationalist leader
from the 1970s, the late Mir Ghaus Bux Bizenjo, were also closing ranks.
The non-tribal, essentially middle-class groups such as the Balochistan
National Democratic Party (BNDP), headed by Hasil Bizenjo and Sardar
Sanaullah Zehri, and the main faction of the Balochistan National
Movement (BNM) led by Dr Abdul Hayee Baloch announced a merger in
October 2003 and re-christened the new party as the National Party (NP).
The merger came a month after the four main Nationalist forces, namely
BNP, JWP, Nawab Khair Baksh Marri and the elements that have now formed
the NP, joined the Baloch Ittehad.
None of these political forces admit to having links with the BLA but
all of them justify attacks on military and FC targets. Bugti says that
the BLA camps are a by-product of state oppression and injustices meted
out the Baloch people through the generations. Mengal refuses to condemn
the Khuzdar attack in which five soldiers were killed, saying it
resulted from Islamabad’s refusal to recognize the national, political
and economic sovereignty of the people. NP’s MPA and leader of the
opposition in the Balochistan Assembly Kachkol Ali says that the Baloch
youth are in a state of revolt any and every time the BLA strikes, they
feel elevated.
Baloch people at different levels of the provincial hierarchy reflect
these views. People interviewed in the streets of Turbat, Gwadar and
Quetta consider the BLA as a potential bulwark against the indignity
they suffer in everyday life at the hands of the coastguards, the FC and
the intelligence agencies (see Army
Versus the Rebels). Community leadership at the local level
feels that all meaningful decisions in their areas are taken by the army
that represents Islamabad. The sense of deprivation is perhaps greatest
at the provincial level which has been divested of powers concerning the
district governments while at the same time the devolution of power from
the centre to the provinces remains a distant dream.
So where are things headed? A more sensible way to the future could be a
serious effort on the part of Islamabad to lay the foundations of a
truly participatory system of government in which provincial concerns
are addressed in a constitutional framework. This has only a remote
chance of happening, though. “It will be overoptimistic to expect the
establishment to resolve the national and democratic question”, says
senior NP leader Dr Abdul Malik.
Another way, and one that the ISI probably cannot resist, is to
infiltrate the militant ranks anew, engineer greater “collateral
damage” to discredit the struggle and effect a division in their ranks
as it did by infiltrating the BSO ranks in the late 1970s and early
1980s. On the political front, Islamabad has already launched efforts to
draw Bugti into talks while instituting criminal cases against Marri and
Mengal leaders.
This strategy can ensure “friendly” government in Quetta, as it did
during the past 30 years. But the fact remains that instead of the
bringing the Baloch people forward of the path of progress and
development, it has taken them full circle back to the dark ages of
1973. The future of this strategy cannot be any different. “The
establishment can play its game as long as it likes, but it can never
score a point in what is essentially a zero-sum game”, concludes BNP
leader Habib Jalib Baloch. Herald
September 2004
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