Home Front

The changing face of Balochistans separatist insurgency

By MAHVISH AHMA
IN THE EARLY HOURS of 25
December 2012, the paramilitary
Frontier Corps of Pakistans
Balochistan province launched an
operation in the small, remote
village of Mai. The operation went
unnoticed by all save a handful of
local newspapers. According to
residents of Mai, which lies deep
inside Balochistan, six helicopters
and up to two hundred cars carrying soldiers arrived on that winter morning.
The soldiers went door-to-door pointing guns, and were surprised when people
answered their accusations of being foreign spies with recitations of the kalima.
They thought we were Hindu agents, said Muhammad Amin, a wrinkled
farmer who witnessed the soldiers arrival.
Three helicopters circled above the village, and shelled some mud homes. A few
abandoned huts with mortar holes still dot the landscape. It was as if the earth
was on fire, and the sky was raining bullets, Amin said. Three other choppers
landed in front of a mosque, where the villages women and children had hidden
themselves. Soldiers pulled us outside to stand in the cold for several hours,
Mahnaz, a peasant woman, said. Other villages nearby underwent similar
attacks. By the time the operation ended, the Frontier Corps had set up 12
checkpoints controlling every entry and exit around Mai.
At first glance, Mai does not look like a sufficiently grave threat to warrant any
kind of troop deployment. It is a 12-hour drive from the nearest cityKarachi
and its sandy-brown mud huts are home to a couple of hundred peasants who
spend their days grazing sheep and goats. After the operation, critics in Baloch
newspapers raged against the Pakistani media for failing to cover it. Abdul Malik,
then a member of the provincial assembly and now the chief minister of
Balochistan, claimed the operation had taken innocent lives, and that heavy
bombardment had destroyed several villages. It was a genocide that had to be
stopped, Malik fumed, and a brutality that needed to end. For those who did
not know Mai, the attack was a clear example of the rampant violence exercised
by Pakistani security forces within their own country.
However, several eyewitnesses claimed that the Frontier Corps had run a highly
targeted operation. At the far edge of Mai, atop a small incline, a hamlet of
dilapidated mud huts still stands amid much rubble. Inside the huts, long steel
bars that supported the ceilings have collapsed, and shards of glass from broken
windows can pierce the feet of unsuspecting visitors. On the floor of one hut lie
the burnt and scattered pages of a medical textbook. The ripped pages of a book
of Islamic political philosophy lie in a heap in a corner. Crumbled pages of a
separatist newspaper called the Daily Tawarits Karachi offices were attacked,
either by unknown assailants or security forces, depending on whom you asked,
a few months after the operation in Maiflutter around the empty rooms.
Mahnaz said that when the soldiers came that morning, they were looking for a
man who used to live in one of these huts: her brother, Dr Allah Nazar, the
commander of the Baloch Liberation Frontan ethno-nationalist militia that is
battling for the complete independence of Balochistan.
Today, when war and militancy in Pakistan are often equated with the activities
of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, few, even within Pakistan, know much about
Balochistan and the separatist movement that has brewed there for decades.
Stories of Balochistans disappeared have received some attention in the press
and from the authoritiesespecially from courts investigating accusations
against Pakistani security forcesbut have rarely been placed within the context
of an ongoing war between Baloch separatists and the Pakistani state. Fewer still
have heard of Nazar, a doctor-turned-guerrilla commander who was abducted
and tortured by Pakistani security forces for his involvement in Baloch student
movements, including the Baloch Student OrganisationAzaad, which he
founded over a decade ago. Nazar now leads a middle-class insurgencyof
engineers, peasants, college dropouts, ex-policemen, shopkeepers and others
that is the latest iteration of Balochistans 67-year-old movement for
independence. In a country full of battle lines, Nazar is engaged in an old war
between the Pakistani state and a motley group of separatist sarmacharsa
Balochi word for militants that means those who are willing to sacrifice their
heads.
For the Pakistani state, Balochistan is both a strategic asset and an inseparable
piece of the puzzle that makes up the country. The province is Pakistans largest;
it forms 45 percent of the countrys territory, and borders Iran and Afghanistan.
It has the countrys longest coastline and largest natural gas reserves, and
contains a vast array of resources such as coal, oil, copper, gold, lead and zinc.
Other countries have not only kept a close eye on Balochistan, but have, at
various points, been involved in its internal affairs. The nature of that
involvement has varied from support for the separatist rebellion (Afghanistan,
allegedly India); the deployment of fighter jets and gunships to squash the
rebellion (Iran); the construction and operation of a lucrative deepwater port
(China); the hunting of the provinces fowl (Saudi Arabia); an old lease on parts
of its territory (Oman); the requisition of its long and winding roads to transport
goods to troops in Afghanistan (the United States); and billion-dollar
investments to mine its mineral-rich earth (anyone who can get their hands on a
contract).
Rumours of Afghan and Indian support for Baloch separatists regularly cause
uproar among Pakistani officials. Last October, Pakistans then foreign secretary,
Jalil Abbas Jilani, presented previously unavailable evidence of foreign hands in
Balochistan violence to Indian authorities. A 2010 WikiLeaks cable confirmed
that the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, sheltered Brahamdagh Bugti, a young
Baloch separatist leader, for several years. (He was eventually packed off to
political asylum in Switzerlanda move backed by the United States.)
In this conflict, Nazar is emerging as one of the most important militant leaders
operating today. Of the three commanders of active separatist militias in the
province, he is the only one who remains in Balochistan, and the only one who
does not hail from tribal royalty. The other two commanders of his generation
Bugti and Hyrbyair Marri, who is also living in exile in Europeare descendants
of powerful tribes whose patriarchs once held cabinet-level positions in the
provincial government, and also formed and led insurgencies against the state.
The Baloch movement has had a leftist cast since the 1970s; the veteran separatist
leader Khair Baksh Marri, who died in June this year, was famously Marxist, and
the predilection continues among younger leaders, including Nazar.
Nevertheless, Nazars rise through the ranks of the provinces ethno-nationalists
represents a fundamental shift within the hierarchy of the movement. From one
led by sardars, or tribal leaders, it is becoming one spearheaded and populated
by a non-tribal cohort of middle-class Baloch. Nazars leadership exemplifies the
shift of the movements epicentre from Balochistans north-easthome to the
Marris and Bugtis, and known for its longstanding separatist sentimentsto the
remittance-rich, urbanising south, which is home to a burgeoning educated and
professional class, which has historically remained on the sidelines of the
provinces politics.
Over two years and more than a hundred interviews with Baloch in the province,
as well as in cities such as Karachi and Islamabad, it became clear that the BLF,
and other middle-class organisations such as the Baloch National Movement and
the Baloch Student OrganisationAzaad, are gaining in influence. Middle-class
Baloch are increasingly forsaking statist, electoral politics out of sympathy for a
rapidly changing separatist movement. The states heavy-handed response
army operations, kidnappings, and bans on the movements political wingshas
spurred further support for separatists.
Nazars role in the separatist movement has placed him squarely on the radar of
the Islamabad establishment. During an interview right after the May 2013
general election, a high-ranking politician from the National Party, which
governs Balochistan, began to trip over his words when I mentioned Nazar. He
asked that his and Nazars names not be mentioned side by side. My life could
be in danger, he said. (The National Party and the BLF have long been at odds,
since the former holds the BLF responsible for the 2010 murder of one of its most
senior leaders, Maula Bakhsh Dasti. The BLF vehemently denies the charge.)
Questions sent to the Balochistan desk of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency
went unanswered, as did a request to interview the inspector general of the
Frontier Corps in Balochistan, Major General Muhammad Ejaz Shahid.
Interviews with other security officialsfrom the Frontier Corps and the
Pakistan Armywere only granted after I promised to keep them anonymous.
At a cocktail reception in Islamabad, Abdul Qadir, a former army corps
commander in Balochistan who is now a minister in the federal government, told
me that Nazar was a student leader gone popular. Indeed, for Nazars
supporters, he is something of an everyday herosomeone who went from
student to medical doctor to guerrilla. The obvious reason for Nazars
popularity is his middle-class background, Malik Siraj Akbar, the editor of the
Baloch Hal, a banned online magazine, told me. The Baloch view him as the
guy we met at school, or the guy who rode the local bus.
Nazar does not make public appearancessince his abduction by Pakistani
security forces in 2005, he has been in hiding in the mountains of Balochistan. But,
speaking to Baloch around the country, I discovered something of the breadth of
his appeal. I once met a young boy who blushed, speaking of the first time he
touched Nazars feet. Girls wrote him long and frustrated letters asking him
when they could join him in the mountains. I discovered poets who composed
Balochi songs in his name. In the small Baloch village of Teertej, a group of
women at a zikr khanaa mosque for Balochistans Zikri Muslimseven told
me they named the intricate patterns on their enormous frocks after him.
On the wall of a study centre that Nazar attended as a student at the Bolan
Medical College in Balochistans capital, Quetta, young Baloch had scrawled his
name in large, cursive red letters. In another wall-chalking, members of the BSO
Azaad had drawn the face of the Communist revolutionary Che Guevara next to
his famous quote, Every person who fights for his nation is my elder brother.
When I asked Baloch students about the mural, they told me Guevara
represented the founder of their organisation, the doctor.
IN NOVEMBER 2013, following several months of vague email exchanges and
garbled calls from satellite phones and unrecognisable numbers, I finally came
face to face with Nazar himself. After two days of travel, by plane, van,
motorbike and foot, and a final ten-hour stretch in an armed motorbike-caravan
of nine, I arrived at a small mountain clearing in southern Balochistan. Two huts
built of date-palm leaves stood out resolutely on the landscape, defended on all
sides by lanky, Kalashnikov-carrying sarmachars perched on the crags, under a
star-studded night sky.
A young woman dressed in pink, sent along to accompany me, served qahwa in
the hut where she and I were to rest while we awaited Nazar. Blankets and straw
mats were strewn across the floor. Our only sources of light were a single light
bulb, attached to a portable battery, and a golden-red hearth prepared to keep us
warm. It was almost midnight, and we sat enveloped by the total silence of the
mountains. My chaperone leaned over to grab some twigs and dry leaves from a
small pile next to the fireplace, to keep the fire burning.
After a few moments, we heard crunching leaves and murmured Balochi at the
doorway. I saw a moustache, a brown leather jacket, and an M16 rifle. Nazar
entered, flanked by nervous boys clutching RPGs, whose shawls covered their
faces. The whites of their eyes were nearly neon-bright in the darkness of the hut.
Quiet, almost reverent in front of their leader, they stood back, preferring not to
greet me before he had done so. Under the light of the bulb, I saw Nazars short
hair, shalwar kameez, and the chappals on his feet. He nodded and said,
unassumingly, Almost like a Hollywood movie, isnt it?
[ II ]
NAZARS EARLIEST MEMORIES
were bound up with army action. In
1973, when Nazar was three years
old, Pakistans Prime Minister,
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, discovered a
cache of arms at the Iraqi Embassy in
Islamabad. In a letter sent to Nixon
four days later, Bhutto blamed India,
Afghanistan, Iraq and the Soviet
Union for hatching a conspiracy,
with subversive and irredentist elements which seek to disrupt Pakistans
integrity. Linking the cache to the countrys Baloch ethno-nationalists (among
other groups), Bhutto dismissed and arrested the first democratically-elected
provincial government in Balochistan, shipped its leaders off to jail in the
neighbouring province of Sindh, and eventually initiated legal proceedings
against 55 people in what came to be known as the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case.
Just two years earlier, after a bloody civil war, Pakistans eastern wing had
broken off to form Bangladesh; he was eager to avoid a repeat of 1971.
What followed was reportedly one of the murkiest and most brutal operations
carried out by the Pakistani security forces in Balochistan. In his book In
Afghanistans Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations, the
American political scientist Selig Harrison wrote that Bhutto deployed H-1
helicopter gunships and F-14 fighter jetslent to him by the Shah of Iranin the
province, and sent 80,000 troops to clamp down on the insurgency that the
dismissal of the provincial cabinet had sparked.
Balochistan rose in anger. Nazars older brother, who would have been no older
than 25 at the time, joined the sarmachars in the mountains. Nazar said his father
was punished for his brothers decisionhe was detained during one of several
search operations carried out by the security forces, and released only months
afterwards.
Nazar was born sometime around 1970 in Mai, in Balochistans southern Awaran
plains. From the tales of village elders, he learned that he was a descendant of
the Damanis of western Balochistanor southern Iran. The Damani clan, lore
had it, once famously stood up for a woman who had been raped, taking her in
and fighting her rapist. That long-ago decision embroiled the clan in a feud that
pushed them eastward, into modern-day Pakistan.
We inherit our history, Nazar told me. It is transferred to us in these sorts of
stories.
Such stories directly challenged the founding myths of Pakistan. In mainstream
history books, Balochistan is said to have acceded peacefully to the new republic
in 1948. But Nazar was told that Balochistan was annexed when Muhammad
Ali Jinnah, Pakistans founder, deployed troops to the province.
It was as if we did not exist, Nazar said about discovering the version of
history told in state textbooks. Our history, our language, our very identity was
eviscerated. They wanted us to be gungasmute and hollow men. The story of
1948 was not the only disputed narrative, he learned: there was also no mention
of the four separatist uprisings in Balochistan since its integration into Pakistan,
or any record of the brutal army operations in their wake.
When he was 15 years old, Nazar moved from Mai to the nearby town of
Mashkey-Gajjar, where he first met members of the Baloch Student Organisation.
The BSO had long been a forum for educated Baloch who were not closely
affiliated with any of Balochistans notorious sardars. The groups politics were
underpinned by an incipient nationalism, rather than the tribal affiliations that
knit early insurgents together. It was the beginning of a political engagement that
would define Nazars life. In the late 1980s, he moved to Quetta to attend
medical school, at a time when Afghanistan, only three hours away, was in the
final throes of the long Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. The
war left an indelible impact on Quetta, which became a magnet for the roshan-e-
khyaal, or enlightened thinkers, of leftist Pakistan. Nazar himself soon began
to read revolutionary literature.
We got our hands on Balochi translations of Frantz Fanons The Wretched of the
Earth. We read Jean-Paul Sartres preface to Fanon, and Paulo Freires Pedagogy
of the Oppressed. And we read the greats: Marx, Lenin, Castro, Kafka, Mao, Ho
Chi Minh. Even Gabriel Garca Mrquez. I loved his One Hundred Years of
Solitude.
With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Nazar and his comrades grew
increasingly dissatisfied with what he called the compromised politics of the
ethno-nationalists they were working with. Throughout that decade, middle-
class moderates worked under the collective banner of the Balochistan National
Youth Movement, and the larger BSO. These groups were predecessors to two of
Balochistans major political parties: the pro-Pakistan National Party, formed in
1993, and the anti-Pakistan Baloch National Movement, formed in 1994 and now
considered the political wing of the BLF. (The two parties formed following a
split between members of the BNYM and the BSO, and have been at loggerheads
ever since.)
By 1999, Nazar told me, he and his friends in the BSO had started to talk of
armed rebellion. At a party congress in January 2002, he marched out and
declared that he was breaking away to establish an organisation committed to
Baloch independence. Shortly afterwards, he formed the BSOAzaad, which
would become Balochistans most popular student organisation, as a senior
National Party politician told me. In the run-up to last years general elections,
the Pakistani government, in its own way, confirmed the fact of this popularity:
it placed the professedly non-violent BSOAzaad on a list of banned
organisations alongside militant Islamist groups such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba and
the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
But Nazar himself quickly moved on from his own organisation, which became
(and remains) a purely political one. He joined an avowedly militant
organisation, to take up arms, to fight for a sovereign, welfare state, he said. At
that point, Nazar and his fellows were mere rookies compared to outfits such as
the Baloch Liberation Army, associated with the Marris, which had long
experience in the arts of guerrilla warfare. But, before long, the newcomers
established themselves firmly on the frontlines of a new wave of the insurgency.
ON 2 MAY 2004, a bomb went off in Balochistans southern port city of Gwadar,
killing three Chinese engineers and injuring 11 other people. The attack was
claimed by the Baloch Liberation Front, a militant separatist outfit that had been
either established or resuscitated, depending on whom you ask, in 2003. Like
many organisations of its ilk, the BLF has many differing accounts of its
foundation. Some trace it to Jumma Khan Marri, a Baloch ethno-nationalist said
to have established the group while living in Damascus in 1964. Others,
including Nazar, say the group was conceived in 1999 and established in 2003. I
was unable to establish which of these versions, or others, hewed most closely to
the truth. But it is certain that the BLF in its current avatar began operating in
2003, and that Nazar, who joined a training camp in March that year, was one of
its members, though not yet leaders, at its inception. Nazar told me that the new
BLF found support from many separatist groups with greater experience, and
also from the Baloch leader Akbar Bugti, a historically pro-establishment figure
who became a hardened separatist in his later years.
That same year, Pakistans military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, set about
transforming Gwadar, a tiny coastal village, into a lucrative Pakistani asset, with
help from China. Gwadar was a symbolic attack, Nazar said, and the Chinese
engineers a perfect target. They had come here to exploit us, to be part of the
colonial machinery, not to distribute halwa. Nazar told me he did not take part
in the attack himselfboth he and his comrades refused to talk about any
offensives in which he might have participated.
To the BLF, Gwadar did not seem like the welcome opportunity for economic
growth that the Musharraf government was promising the people of Pakistan.
Poor fishermen who had lived on the coast for generations were forcibly evicted
in the melee of construction. Contractors arrived, but employment for local
Baloch did not. Money poured insuddenly there were broad roads, new
government buildings, high-tech equipment and docksbut it made little
difference in the lives of the BLFs friends and families. The group was convinced
that the Pakistani state was doing what it had always done: using development
as an excuse to exploit Balochistans natural resources.
The building of Gwadar was not the first time that the Baloch clashed with the
state over resource exploitation. In 1952, prospectors discovered north-eastern
Balochistans Sui gas fields, believed to be among the largest of their kind in the
world. Baloch accusations against the central governmentthat gas and profits
were being siphoned away from Balochistan to enrich the rest of the country
became a major source of disagreement and conflict. Even today, according to
the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, the government meets only 41
percent of urban Balochistans demand for gas. The government blames the
spotty supply on the provinces vast distances and scattered, sparse population,
essentially casting it as a logistical rather than political issue.
In our interview, Nazar maintained that the colonial tactics of the Pakistani
state justified the BLFs bloody actions. But if he had ever nurtured doubts about
the path the BLF had chosen, they were erased just a year later, on the day the
Pakistani state disappeared him.
[ III ]
AT 3 AM ONE MORNING in
March 2005, the 35-year-old
Nazar was nodding off over a
book when he heard strange
sounds in the room next to his.
He was in a friends apartment
in Karachis Gulistan-e-Johar
neighbourhood. At first, he
thought the noises came from
someone bringing home water
and milk. He was surprised when the knuckles emerged from the darkness.
By 2005, stories of men being pulled off buses, attacked in the dead of night and
disappeared by Pakistani security forces had already started to trickle out. No
one knows just how many Baloch have disappeared over the course of the last
decade. Between November 2013 and February 2014, Voice for Baloch Missing
Persons, a campaign group of relatives of the missing, completed a 100-day,
2,150-kilometre-long march from Quetta to Islamabad to protest the
governments inaction over Baloch disappearances. The group claims to have
documented more than 2,825 cases of missing persons. The Commission of
Inquiry for Missing Persons, established by the Pakistani Supreme Court in 2010,
says it is currently dealing with 1,475 cases, an undisclosed number of which are
from Balochistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan lists over six
hundred missing Baloch, but admits that the numbers might be underreported.
Human Rights Watch says three hundred people were abducted between
January 2011 and February 2012 alone. Several benches of the Supreme Court
and the Balochistan High Court are hearing groups of petitions filed by
concerned relativessometimes ten, sometimes 35, sometimes seven together
to try and get to the bottom of the mystery of the vanished Baloch. Some of the
disappeared are armed insurgents or political activists; others are innocent
individuals, at most marginally sympathetic towards the separatist movement.
That March morning, Nazar remembered, he found himself surrounded by
anywhere between twenty and 25 men. Fists grabbed him by the throat, and
pushed him to the ground. Feet kicked at him, and lathis slammed into his back.
He felt fingers clawing at his neck, searching for a cyanide capsule that he might
swallow. At that moment he wished he had one, so he would not have to live
through what would follow. His captors blindfolded him, and put a bag over his
head. He felt the sharp edges of the three or four steps they threw him down,
arms pressed up against him in the backseat of a car, the musty heat of an
underground basement.
When his captors uncovered Nazars eyes, he saw a white room with a table, two
chairs, and a screen set into a wall on one side. For a moment, someone turned
on the light in the room behind the screen, and he glimpsed the faces of some
men who were likely brought in to identify him.
They already knew my name when I entered, he said.
As Nazar waited under a rickety fan, he suspected that he had been picked up,
like many others, by the security agencies. He could vaguely make out two men
sitting on the chairs in the chamber he was in. One of them, a drunk, don-
looking character, the type you see in Indian movies, told him what he would
do with him. Youre the chairman, Nazar remembered him saying. Well turn
you into a schizo.
Nazar cracked a smile, remembering a friend of his who suffered from
schizophrenia. In response, the men forced him to lie down on the table. Then
one of them stood on his legs, and the other began to hit his hands and buttocks
with a lathi. When they were finished they threw him back in the chair.
Muskaraane ki sazaa, they told hima punishment for laughing.
They took his picture, took off his handcuffs, and locked his feet in fetters before
throwing him into an even smaller cell. After that, everything was a blur: several
hour-long interrogations about his comrades, friends, the BSO, and threats that
he would have to end up selling his body just like the Bengalis. They told me
a Bengali only cost 300 rupees, Nazar recalled. I was shocked that they knew
the price. Did they pay for this sort of thing? There was the thump-thump of a
long pole that one of the men slapped repeatedly on his own palm as he
threatened to stick it to Nazar. Nazars interrogators told him to pray for an
aza-e-tanasul, a healthy penis. When I asked Nazar what they meant, he shook
his head and said it was an inappropriate topic for us to discuss.
In interviews with Nazar and eight other Baloch men in Awaran, Quetta, Karachi
and Islamabadincluding a sociology student picked up by security forces from
Quetta who dropped out of school to join the insurgency after two months in
torture chambers; a peasant from Mashkey-Gajjar picked up in an army
operation who has now gone crazy, according to his neighbour and friend; and
a doctor who left his practice after a year-long disappearance; all of whom asked
not to be namedthe stories of torture by unidentified officials of the security
agencies were chillingly consistent. It seems Quetta had two torture chambers.
The sociology student told me one was pitch black, used for mental torture; the
other painted with spirals on the floor, walls and ceiling, used for physical
torture. The doctor described how they hang our bodies upside down and
electrocute our stomachs.
The peasants neighbour said his tortured friend would not want to talk about
what happened to him inside the chamber. It is because he was raped, he said.
They smeared a pole with oil and spices and stuck it up his behind.
Nazar denied that his captors had acted on their threat of sexual assault. No
Baloch would ever admit if that happened to him, he said. Their interrogation
techniques were inhumane ... We were their test objects.
In a 2011 report titled We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years: Enforced
Disappearances by Pakistan Security Forces in Balochistan, Human Rights
Watch squarely blames Pakistani security forces for disappearances in the
province. The organisation found that the disappeared are typically held in
unacknowledged detention facilities run by the Frontier Corps and intelligence
agencies, of which one is believed to be in an army cantonment named Kuli in
Quetta. The report also states that most of those who have been released are
reluctant to talk of their time in the torture cells, but that HRW has been able to
ascertain that the methods of torture included beatings, often with sticks or
leather belts, hanging detainees upside down, and prolonged food and sleep
deprivation.
The men watching over Nazar repeatedly told him: We will dump your corpse
in a gutter, just like we do to everyone else. The mutilated bodies of many of the
disappeared have turned up on desolate mountain tops, rotting on empty city
roads, or dumped in isolated alleys. Often their arms and legs are cut off, their
faces mauled beyond recognition, and their bodies punctured with gaping holes.
In just seven months, between July 2010 and February 2011, HRW reported that
seventy bodies of missing persons were discovered in Balochistan. In late
January this year, a group of levieslocal Baloch serving as a police forcemade
a chilling discovery in Tootak, a few hours outside Quetta: a mass grave with 13
bodies of missing people, shot dead. (Locals later told journalists that the number
of dead in the grave was under-reported.)
In the months that followed his capture, Nazars family and friends campaigned
for his release. In August 2005, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
issued a statement saying that the condition of Dr Allah Nazar is said to be
especially grave, and demanding that all illegally detained people held in the
country be produced before courts. An HRCP report claimed that Nazar was
virtually paralysed and has lost a substantial part of his memory; the torture
had physically and mentally impaired him. On 13 August, he was finally
produced before a court at Rahim Yar Khan in Punjab, then moved to
Balochistan and charged with acts of terrorism. This recourse to judicial
procedure should have been a relief from what had preceded it, especially as
Nazar began to emerge as a figure in the public eye over the course of his
detention. But the men who handed him over to the police and then remanded
him back told him that his supporters efforts to free him would be of no use.
We own the courts, he said he was told. We decide what happens in
Balochistan.
The Supreme Court only really took up the issue of missing persons in
Balochistan in 2009, and the matter has yet to be resolved. When the sitting chief
justice first tried to address the issue in 2007, under Musharrafs rule, he was
deposed, sparking a famous lawyers movement that eventually led to the
reinstatement of democratic rule. The enquiry was reopened in 2009, and in May
2010, under public pressure and on the orders of the Supreme Court, the
government established the Commission of Inquiry for Missing Persons.
Presently, at least three benches of the Supreme Court, as well as several benches
of the Balochistan High Court, hear individual and group petitions filed by
concerned relatives.
Nazar was detained for over a year, and finally released in July 2006. I do not
know why they let me go, he said. They either thought I would not survive, or
that I was not important enough. Nazars sister, Mahnaz, told me that he came
by Mai for a few hours to say goodbye to his family after his release, and then
escaped into the mountains. The timing was strangely apt; less than a month
later, the death of Akbar Bugti caused Balochistan to rise up again, and
permanently changed the character of the insurgency.
[ IV ]
FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS after the 2004 attack on Gwadar, Baloch militants
limited themselves to a handful of small-scale operations, mostly targeting
soldiers and gas pipelines. In 2005, just before Nazar was abducted, Akbar Bugti,
who had loomed large over Balochistans political fortunes for three decades and
was widely considered a pro-Pakistan politician, launched a scathing critique of
the military regime under Musharraf. The catalyst for this change of heart
appeared to be a horrific rape that took place in Sui, a gas-producing town in
Bugtis backyard, the district of Dera Bugti.
On the night of 2 January 2005, Shazia Khalid was asleep in her bedroom when a
man entered it. He pulled her by the hair, pressed down on her throat, wrapped
a telephone cord around her neck and beat her head with the receiver. He
proceeded to rape her repeatedly. According to a 35-page confidential summary,
released at the end of that month by an independent tribunal headed by a judge
of the Balochistan High Court, Khalid was semi-conscious when she stumbled
into a nurses office the next morning, with a swelling on her forehead, bleeding
from her nose and ear. In his report on the incident, the New York Times
journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote that officials from her employers, Pakistan
Petroleum Limited, rushed to the scene, and allegedly told her to stay quiet. In
interviews with journalists, Khalid accused a Captain Hammad of the Pakistan
Army of the crime, and claimed that security forces had tried to cover it up. In a
report in the Daily Times, Sherry Rehman, then an opposition member of the
National Assembly, stated that Musharraf pronounced Captain Hammad, one
of the accused in the case, innocent before the judicial enquiry was completed.
The incident echoed the old story about Allah Nazars Damani ancestors, exiled
from their lands for standing up for a rape victim. It also provoked widespread
outrage in Balochistan. The Baloch Liberation Army, a militant group that used
to be headed by another tribal leader, the recently deceased Khair Bakhsh Marri,
resurfaced with renewed vigour after years in obscurity. Other groups stepped
up activity too, firing rockets on PPL gas pipelines to protest the cover-up and
claiming solidarity with Khalid.
Bugti, who attended Oxford University, was appointed the governor of
Balochistan in 1973, after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dismissed the provincial
government. Less than a year later, Bugti resigned the post in protest against the
atrocities of Pakistani security forces in the region. Still, he was generally
considered an assimilationist, until Khalids rape allegedly forced him to change
his views. (Nazar, among others, disputed this, telling me that Bugti had
switched sides long before.) For over a year and a half, Bugti and Musharraf
remained locked in battle. The governments response to Balochistans outrage
was swift and harsh; in an interview on GEO TV, Musharraf remarked, It is not
the seventies, where they will climb mountains and we will go running after
them. They will not know what hit them, and they will not know where it came
from. On the night of 26 August 2006, 37 militants and 21 military personnel
died in a clash between security forces and armed separatists. Bugti was among
those killed.
His death prompted Baloch parties to declare a 15-day mourning period. Shutter-
down and wheel-jam strikes were announced across the province. Baloch
protestors flooded the streets in cities across Pakistan. Hundreds of students in
Quettamany from Nazars alma mater, Bolan Medical Collegeblocked roads
and attacked government buildings. This incident, a mournful pro-Pakistan
politician by the name of Akhtar Mengal said to the Friday Times, has cut our
last link, if there was any, with Pakistan.
Soon, many Baloch separatist leaders began to escape the country, applying for
political asylum abroad. Others turned up dead. In November 2007, a little over a
year after Bugtis killing, Balaach Marri, a commander in the BLA, was
assassinated in Afghanistan. In April 2009, the decomposed bodies of Ghulam
Mohammad Baloch, the chairman of the Baloch National Movement, Lala Munir,
the general-secretary of the Baloch National Front, and Sher Mohammad Bugti,
the vice chairman of the Baloch Republican Party, were dumped in Pidrak, 35
kilometres from the southern Baloch city of Turbat. They had been abducted,
tortured and killed just five days after attending a court hearing in the city.
About a year later, following many threats, Hyrbyair Marri, the alleged
commander of the Baloch Republican Army, and Brahamdagh Bugti of the BLA,
escaped the country. Their organisations had been the only major militant
groups operating in Balochistan, save onethe BLF.
THE SOUTHERN MEKRAN BELT, which borders Iran and Balochistans
lucrative coastline, had historically been on the margins of the provinces post-
1947 political movements. But, in the ten years leading up to Nazars abduction,
the emigration of Baloch to neighbouring Karachi, the Gulf states and Iran paved
the way for a rapid rise in smuggling and remittances, which prompted the
urbanisation of this southern corner of Pakistan. Concurrently, an educated
middle class emerged, in an area that remained desperately poor. In the course of
elevating itself above the concerns of everyday survival, this class became
increasingly involved in broader political questions, and so shifted the epicentre
of Baloch politics from the primarily tribal north to the increasingly urbanised
south. One section of this class became active promoters of pro-Pakistan politics.
In 2013, acknowledging the demographic and cultural shifts in the province, the
newly elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, nominated Nazars more moderate,
middle-class colleague, Dr Abdul Malik, as chief minister of Balochistan. Maliks
appointment ended decades of sardari dominance in the provinces highest office
(although the assembly remains dominated by sardars).
But the shift that brought Malik to power also produced the new Baloch
separatist: usually an educated middle-class youth, as Malik Siraj Akbar, editor
of the Baloch Hal, wrote in his book The Redefined Dimensions of Baloch
Nationalist Movement. The new separatist movement even includes women
and children, according to Akbar, who actively participate in peaceful protest
rallies in support of a free Balochistan.
In the years following Bugtis death, the BLF allied with other militant groups,
including the BLA and the BRA, as well as lesser-known organisations such as
the Balochistan Liberation United Front and the United Baloch Army. Today, the
BLF expresses unequivocal solidarity with all attacks carried out in the name of
separatism. A Human Rights Watch report released in 2010 said those attacks
have included numerous targeted abductions and killings of teachers,
professors and school administrators. In one of the more recent offensives
carried out by the UBA, 16 people were killed and 44 injured when a bomb was
detonated on a passenger train in April this year. The UBA, allegedly a splinter
group of the BLA that aims to export the insurgency beyond Balochistan, also
took responsibility in the same month for a bomb that killed 24 people and
injured 116 in an attack on a vegetable market outside a Pashtun slum in
Islamabad.
Over the last ten years, the BLF, which conducts most of its attacks in southern
Balochistan, has been accused of targeting Frontier Corps soldiers and other
representatives of the Pakistani state. In 2011, the spokesperson of the
Balochistan Frontier Corps told me that there were 27 platoons (almost 1,000
soldiers) patrolling Quetta alongside the police force. The spokesperson also
identified southern Balochistan, the headquarters of the BLF, as a place where
troops have been concentrated. In conversations with soldiers I met at
checkpoints while travelling through Balochistan over the last two years, I found
that many of them were simply young and afraid, deployed from Punjab, unable
to speak the language, and frequently afraid for their lives. A security official
told me that the armed forces ensured that an increasing number of Baloch were
joining their rankseven if the Pakistan Army states on its website that only a
small number of Baloch youth have preferred this profession, mainly because of
illiteracy and ignorance. Some of the Baloch I spoke to told me that soldiers at
checkpoints would try to send them to markets to pick up supplies like water,
milk or cigarettes. They are told we are traitors, Raheema, a young woman I
stayed with in Mashkey-Gajjar, told me, but are surprised when they find that
we are normal people.
Two months ago, the BLF kidnapped two coast guards in Gwadar, prompting
the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to issue a press statement asking for
their release. Most controversially, the group has been accused of targeting local
Baloch suspected of ties to the Pakistani state. The BLF has killed the highest
number of fellow Baloch by accusing them of spying for Pakistani agencies or
being traitors, Akbar said. These incidents, according to Akbar, had
significantly eroded their support base. Hasil Khan Bizenjo, a senior member
of the National Party, agreed. They have lost support among the Baloch, he
said, because they have shut down shops, killed Punjabis, and sometimes
attacked and murdered their own people.
But for many Baloch, attacks by the BLF and other separatist groups are
overshadowed by the atrocities carried out by the Pakistani security forces. That
fact was even admitted by Bizenjo, who credited increased support for separatist
politics to the atrocious policies of the Pakistani state. Recently, Lateef Johar, a
member of the BSOAzaad, carried out a 46-day hunger strike in front of the
Karachi Press Club to protest the kidnapping of the secretary-general of his
organisation, Zahid Baloch. More tellingly, thousands turned up for the funeral
of the 86-year-old Khair Baksh Marri last month. The authorities attempted to
give Marri a state funeral, but young female separatists from the BSOAzaad
cordoned off his body, draped his casket with the flag of independent
Balochistan, and whisked him away to a graveyard of their martyrs.
[ V ]
THE CAST OF
CHARACTERS I met during
the course of my reporting
revealed to me how stark the
changes within Balochistani
politics in the last decade had
been. In Karachi, I met 27-
year-old Kareema, who
recently became the acting
chairman of the BSOAzaad
after Zahid Baloch, the head
of the organisation, was
picked up at gunpoint in front of her by people Kareema claimed were
intelligence men. From the pillion of a motorbike in southern Balochistan, I
spoke for several hours with the young man driving me, an English literature
major who loved George Orwell and said Thomas Hardys Tess of the
DUrbervilles made him cry (How could anyone treat poor Tess like that?). In
Islamabad, a high-school student told me she was compelled to keep the
whereabouts of her favorite Uncle Manan, a senior member of the separatist
movement, a secret. I love talking with him about Kajol, she said. He was
heartbroken when she married Ajay Devgn.
In the southern village of Teertej, a medical student explained how he spent a
year at Lahores King Edwards College, one of the best medical schools in the
country, before dropping out when a friend of his was disappeared, making him
fear that he might be next. And at a medical camp for earthquake survivors in
southern Balochistans Awaran district, a former policeman, wrapped in a shawl
and clutching a Kalashnikov, confessed he had found it increasingly difficult to
follow orders to arrest his own people. That, he said, was what made him defect
to the insurgency.
Abdul Wahab Baloch, the head of the separatist advocacy group the Baloch
Rights Council, called the Baloch a nation without a state, no different from the
Kurds. The separatists view of Balochistan is fundamentally different from that
of the Pakistani mainstream. Their Balochistan is part of the five-thousand-year-
old homeland of the Baloch people, whose rightful territory stretches into Iran,
Afghanistan, and some of Pakistans other areas, including the countrys richest
and most densely populated province, Punjab. This contention is not without its
critics. Lest anyone forget, Balochistan houses other ethnic groups too, the
security analyst Ejaz Haider wrote in a 2010 editorial for the Express Tribune, a
national daily, referring to Pashtuns, Sindhis, Punjabis, Hazaras and others.
Haider pointed out that separatists target other ethnic groups on racial grounds.
Yet, the left-wing activist Aasim Sajjad Akhtar said, this xenophobic tendency in
some nationalist groups was superseded only by a parallel indifference in the
dominant Punjab province to the authoritarian policies of the Pakistani state.
My last interview with Nazar ended early in the morning two days after I first
arrived in the mountain clearing where we met. We had spoken extensively of
Baloch dreams and aspirationsthe stuff on which the BLF is built. In my
politics I began to meet more and more Baloch and realised that we are one
people, Nazar told me. Our psyche is one. The way we view our lives, our joys,
our grief, our values, our code of honour. From the northern tip of Kalat state to
the southern Kharan strip, we stood united. Our hours of conversation in the
date-palm hut took place over plates of Baloch sajjimutton cooked
undergroundand cups of qahwa. Throughout the encounter, we were amid a
group of loyal sarmachars, many of whom sat close to us, listening to Nazar
speak.
Throughout the interview, Nazar denied all charges of kidnapping civilians,
torture and murder levelled against him and the BLF. He said that attacks
against individuals living within Balochistan took place only after a careful
background check that is reported directly to the BLF leadership. They only
killed, he argued, those who threatened the survival of the movement. This
was a sentiment that resonated among separatists. Dr Abdul Mananthe Kajol
fan known as Uncle Manan to his niece, and the head of the BNM, the BLFs
political wingtold me, It is a question of whether we should let that person
die, or the movement die. We choose the movement over the individual. Two of
his own cousins had been killed a few months before our conversation, he said.
Two days after my initial visit to Nazars home in Mai, where I went a month
before I met him, Pakistani security forces launched a second operation in
Awaran district. It was October 2013, and I was in Mashkey-Gajjar, close to Mai,
asleep under an open sky and covered by a mosquito net, when they arrived.
An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale had hit the area at the end of
September. The Pakistani government, security forces and relief organisations
had started to distribute aid in the area, which was also the headquarters of the
BLF, where many fighters went to ground. Several times, the army tried to wrest
control of a medical camp set up and administered by separatists. On that day,
however, the army succeeded, and rounded up men to ask them about the
whereabouts of militants. I awoke to explosions and the sound of helicopters
circling above the town of Mashkey-Gajjar. Cell phone reception had stopped, or
been cut off, and my hosts told me that the army had infiltrated the town to take
over the medical camp.
Several village residents, as well the ambulance driver who brought me to these
parts, said that around 25 army soldiers stormed the camp early that morning,
ostensibly seeking members of the BLF. A fighter who was in the camp escaped,
and the soldiers beat the driver before realising he was an innocent bystander
and letting him go. The driver, who asked me not to name him, claimed that the
army rounded up between four hundred and five hundred men and marched
them into the camp. There, an officer gave a short speech announcing that the
army had entered Mashkey-Gajjar and had plans to stay for the next five years.
The army would protect the residents from militants, provided they helped the
security forces by identifying members of militant groups. The driver noticed
that everyone stayed quiet. They may have been frightened by the thought of
reprisals by the militants, and perhaps also wary of the deeply unpopular
Pakistan Army.
It took several more skirmishes between the army and the BLF before the former
consolidated control over the camp, and named it the Army Relief Camp. In a
press release issued a few days after news of the operation broke, the Inter-
Services Public Relations office denied that any operation had taken place and
insisted that the armys presence in the area was solely for distributing relief
goods. According to Riaz Suhail, a BBC Urdu journalist who covers Balochistan,
these claims are difficult to verify independently but indicated that the war
between the Pakistani state and Balochistans insurgents is entering a third phase.
After the disappearances and the dumping of mutilated bodies, the security
forces are now using encounters to eliminate separatists.
On the final leg of my trip, returning from meeting Nazar, I spent a night in
Teertej. At the far end of the village, in a small zikr khannaa mud hut standing
under the starsa group of women sat in a circle chanting prayers. At the end,
they sang a song in support of the insurgency. The song was originally sung in
celebration of marriage, or shaadi. Now, they had replaced the shaadi with
shahadat, or martyrdom:
Reza Jan, shahadat mubarak
You now have a new name
Come, my sisters, see what Reza Jan has done
Reza Jan picked up a pen, Reza Jan made god happy
Reza Jan created, the agencies blackened his face
Mother has sung you a song, she has come to your second shaadi