Pakistan: A Hard Country (60 page)

Another energy pipeline is already being built by China from Iran through Pakistan and across the Himalayas along the route of the famous Karakoram Highway. It is intended to help China to escape the threat of blockade of its seaborne energy routes by the US or Indian navies. The great new port of Gwadar which China built at General Musharraf’s request in south-western Balochistan (as part of what has been cal ed China’s ‘string of pearls’ strategy in the Indian Ocean), near the entrance to the Persian Gulf, is intended as the starting point of that route. Gwadar could in future be of great benefit to the province in terms of Pakistani trade not only with China but with Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and India.

Together with the road from Karachi through Quetta to Afghanistan, Gwadar makes Balochistan of great strategic importance as a supply route to the Western forces fighting in Afghanistan. So far, however, the development of Gwadar has only led to bitter Baloch nationalist complaints that non-Baloch are being settled in Quetta and that ethnic Baloch are not benefiting from the port. Pakistani officials retort that the local tribesmen in fact sold their land for a great profit, and are living off the proceeds. As so often in Pakistan, objective truth on this seems impossible to determine.

The ethnic Baloch are certainly the least developed and least privileged of al Pakistan’s ethnic groups – or, at least, they are when they stay in Balochistan. Elsewhere, as noted, Baloch tribes which moved hundreds of years ago to Sindh and southern Punjab have provided a range of leading Pakistani politicians, including two presidents – Sardar Farooq Khan Leghari and the present incumbent (as of 2010), Asif Ali Zardari. This, however, has done almost nothing to benefit Balochistan itself.

Great dams (‘gabrbands’) from previous eras attest to the presence of civilizations long ago, but since the last round of climate change, Balochistan’s desert soil has not generated its own civilization.

Instead, poverty has mixed with tribal tradition to keep the Baloch poorly educated and unable to participate ful y in the economy, administration and development of their own province. This has been left to other ethnicities – who are then blamed by the Baloch for ‘exploiting’ them.

Radical Baloch nationalists see their nation almost as the Red Indians of the American West in the middle decades of the nineteenth century – their territory dotted with mining camps and patches of alien settlement guarded by the forts of the US cavalry, and in imminent danger of ethnic swamping and extinction. This is exaggerated, and for most of their problems the Baloch have their own culture and social structures to blame. It is true, however, that they have been dealt a rather poor hand by modern history, and that they have not general y been treated with vision or generosity by Pakistani governments.

Baloch legends say that they original y moved into their present territories from the Middle East. Modern nationalism by contrast has sought to claim that they have lived where they are now for thousands of years. One very curious feature suggests that some of them at least may in fact have been around for that long: the fact that the Baloch are divided between two different languages, the main one being of Indo-European origin like those of al the surrounding peoples, but the smaller, Brahui (or Brouhi), being largely Dravidian, which is the language-group of southern India, and – so it is presumed – of the Indus Val ey civilization.

The Baloch, since records began, have been divided into several dozen tribes. At various times either outside empires or local princes exercised a loose hegemony over some of these tribes. In the late fifteenth century, the leader of one such short-lived tribal confederation, Mir Chakar, chieftain of the Rind tribe (1487 – 1511 CE), briefly conquered parts of Punjab and Sindh, laying the basis for large-scale Baloch migration into those lands.

However, the principality which Baloch nationalists regard as the historic Baloch national state was that of Kalat, founded in 1638

around another oasis like that of Quetta, fed by two natural springs (now dry because of tube-wel s and the radical sinking of the water table). The British arrived in the region in the 1830s, and from 1839 to 1847 fought a fierce war with the Bugti tribe, which in many ways prefigured the present Pakistani war with the Bugti that began in 2005.

In 1876, the British frontier official Sir Robert Sandeman signed a treaty with the Khan bringing Kalat and its dependent territories under British suzerainty. According to the Pakistan state, this placed Kalat in the same position as the other princely states of British India, which after 1947 were voluntarily or involuntarily annexed to India or Pakistan.

Baloch nationalists, however, claim that the relationship with the British empire was closer to that of the British protectorate of Nepal, which after 1947 became an independent state. There seems a good deal of truth in this – but, so far, the Pakistani army has been in a position to rule on this question.

The British put together the territories of what is now the Pakistani province of Balochistan for geographical, administrative and security reasons, but out of historical y and ethnical y disparate elements; in fact the province is almost as much of an artificial creation as Pakistan itself. Moreover, just as was the case with the Pathans and Afghanistan to the north, the British drew a frontier with a neighbouring state which cut the ethnic Baloch lands in two, dividing them between the British empire of India and the Persian empire to the west (with a smal number in the deserts of Afghanistan to the north).

Baloch nationalists today claim a large chunk of Iran as part of the ‘Greater Balochistan’ that they hope to create – thereby guaranteeing the undying hostility of the Iranian as wel as the Pakistani state. The Jundal ah movement for the independence of Iranian Balochistan is active in the western parts of Pakistani Balochistan on the Iranian border, in al iance with the Baloch tribal gangs who smuggle heroin from Afghanistan to Iran and the Gulf states through Pakistani territory.

Pakistani and Iranian officials both firmly believe (though with little real evidence) that the US and British intel igence services are supporting Jundal ah so as to put pressure on Tehran over its nuclear programme.

In October 2009 Jundal ah kil ed several senior Iranian officers in a suicide bombing in Iranian Balochistan. The Iranian government accused US, British and Pakistani agents of being behind the attack.

Pakistan hit back by arresting what it said were several Iranian intel igence agents operating in Balochistan.

However, in a sign of the hel ish complexity of this part of the world, Jundal ah and the Baloch smugglers are also responsible for smuggling weapons and recruits to the Taleban and Al Qaeda.

Thirteen suspected international Islamist volunteers, including three from Russia (apparently Tatars), were intercepted by the Pakistani army during my stay in Balochistan. One was a doctor, seemingly on the way to boost the Taleban’s primitive medical services. I do not know what happened to them.

To the Kalat territories and those of the independent tribes, the British added Pathan territories to the north. These were taken from the nominal sovereignty of Afghanistan and, like the tribes of FATA, the tribes of northern Balochistan were split in two by the Durand Line drawn by the British to divide their sphere of influence from Afghanistan. They retain close tribal links to southern Afghanistan, and strong sympathies for the Afghan Taleban.

Some of the leading Pathan tribal families of northern Balochistan originated in what is now Afghanistan, and fled to British territory to escape from the ruthless state-building of Emir Abdur Rahman towards the end of the nineteenth century. After 1977, Pathan numbers in Balochistan were swel ed greatly by a new wave of Pathan Afghan refugees, this time from the wars which erupted after the Communist takeover and the Soviet and Western occupations of Afghanistan.

Balochistan’s third major ethnicity, the Hazara, also fled from Afghanistan to escape from Abdur Rahman. They are Shia of Mongolian origin from the central highlands of Afghanistan, and between 200,000 and 300,000 of them now live in Quetta and a few other towns. The only moment when I thought that Quetta might be, if not Paris, then a transmogrified provincial town in southern France in a particularly hot summer, was when I visited the Hazara cemetery.

Like the Mohajirs of Sindh, their uprooting from their ancestral territory in Afghanistan has helped turn the Hazaras of Quetta into a remarkably wel -educated and dynamic community (possibly also with the help of aid from Iran, though they deny this fervently). They have by far the best hospitals and schools outside the cantonment, and their cemetery breathes a sort of Victorian municipal pride in their community’s heroes. They are especial y proud of their prominence in the Pakistani military, and of the fact that a Hazara woman has become the first female fighter pilot in the Pakistani air force.

Tragical y, though, their cemetery also bears witness to the many Hazara kil ed in recent years in anti-Shia terrorist attacks by the Sunni sectarian extremists described in previous chapters.

Final y, there are the Punjabi and Mohajir ‘settlers’ (as they are known by the Baloch), who moved to the region under British and Pakistani rule. Put al these other ethnicities together, and the ethnic Baloch (i.e. the Baloch-and Brahui-speakers) are at best a smal majority in Balochistan. In Quetta itself, Baloch may be as little as a quarter of the population, with Pathans the majority. But nobody real y knows for sure. In 1901 British officials conducted a census which recorded down to the last child the population of al but the most remote tribes in Balochistan. More than a century later, in 2009, the Commissioner Quetta Division could not tel me within half a mil ion people the population even of Quetta itself. This, however, was not mostly his fault. Apart from the general weakness of the Pakistani bureaucracy when it comes to gathering information, the main parties among the Pathans successful y urged their Pathan fol owers to boycott the last census in 1998, in the hope that this would help the Pathan Afghan refugees to merge with the local Pathan population, become Pakistani citizens, and boost Pathan political weight in Balochistan.

This boycott meant that the official figure of 6.5 mil ion people for that year (4.9 per cent of Pakistan’s population) was almost certainly a serious underestimate. According to the 1998 census, ethnic Baloch formed 54.7 per cent and Pathans 29.6 per cent, with the rest divided between Punjabis, Hazaras and others. But the Pathans claim to be 35

– 40 per cent of the population, and they may wel be right. Almost as many ethnic Baloch live outside Balochistan as within it, though the figures are very hard to determine because many no longer speak Baloch but, while retaining Baloch tribal customs, consider themselves Sindhi or Punjabi.

Fear of ethnic swamping has been one factor in repeated Baloch revolts in both Iran and Pakistan, and the development of Gwadar has only increased these fears. In Pakistan, until the Islamist revolts after 2001, the Baloch were the most persistently troublesome of al the ethnic groups. There was armed resistance in 1948 – 9, after Kalat’s accession (under considerable duress) to Pakistan; unrest again in the late 1950s, after Balochistan was merged into the ‘one unit’ of West Pakistan and the promises of ful autonomy to Kalat state were broken; and a serious revolt between 1973 and 1977, after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dismissed the moderate nationalist government of Balochistan as part of his moves to centralize power in his own hands, and arrested its leading members.

In al of these cases, however, most of the unrest was concentrated chiefly in one tribal group, and only parts of that group – in the late 1940s and 1950s, parts of the Mengel and other tribes of the old Kalat state and, in the 1970s, parts of the Marri tribe with certain al ies. This al owed the Pakistani state to play on the deep traditional rivalries between the tribes and between sub-tribes of the same tribe, and eventual y through a mixture of force and concessions to the Sardars of the rebel tribes, to bring these revolts to an end. In al of these cases, it was also never entirely clear if the rebel ions concerned were themselves real y aiming at ful independence, at greater autonomy within Pakistan, or at benefits and redress of grievances for the particular tribes concerned.

THE BALOCH INSURGENCY AFTER 2000

Initial y, this also seemed to be the case with the recent round of violent unrest which began after General Musharraf took power in 1999.

Baloch fears were aroused by what may have been basical y wel -

intentioned projects on the part of the Musharraf administration for the construction of the new deep-water port at Gwadar in south-western Balochistan near the Iranian border, and for the construction of new military cantonments in the province. These were intended to increase ethnic Baloch recruitment into the armed forces and spread employment in their neighbourhoods. Things were made worse by the high-handed way in which local land was bought for these projects and distributed to workers and officials from elsewhere in Pakistan.