Prime Minister Gilani has declared 2012 the ‘Year of Balochistan’. The Baloch people are naturally sceptical as they know not what it portends because the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan gift brought hundreds of brutally tortured bodies of the Baloch youth and intellectuals in its wake.
The Baloch are extremely suspicious of the Pakistani state’s gifts; they, like the Trojans, through bitter experience have learnt to ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. The Baloch understand the truth of the ancient proverb because all the gifts given to them have been laced with death, devastation and desolation.
Sophocles (496-406 BC), in Ajax, says:
“Nought from the Greeks towards me hath sped well.
So now I find that ancient proverb true,
Foes’ gifts are no gifts: profit bring they none.”
The Pakistani gifts have never benefitted the Baloch. The very first gift was the forced annexation to Pakistan in March 1948 on the plea that as Muslims all should give up their rights and submit to the Pakistani rulers’ ideology and this has been the source of all Baloch agony and anguish.
Then Nawab Nauroz Khan Zarakzai, who resisted injustices against the Baloch, accepted the gift of amnesty on May 19, 1959 on the covenant of the Holy Quran but that pledge was horrendously violated and his eldest son Battay Khan Zarakzai, along with Sabzal Khan Zarakzai and Ghulam Rasool Nechari were hanged at Sukkur while Jam Jamal Khan Zehri, Masti Khan Musiyani, Wali Mohammad Zarakzai, and Bahawal Khan Musiyani were hanged at Hyderabad on July 15, 1960.
The gift of the 1973 Constitution in August that year saw the incarceration of Khair Bakhsh Marri, Ghaus Bakhsh Bizenjo and Ataullah Mengal within hours. This was preceded by the gifts of dismissal of the elected Balochistan government of Ataullah Mengal in February and extensive army operations in May.
The much applauded gift of ‘freedom of the press’ has seen eight journalists from Balochistan being killed last year. Freedom of expression means nothing where freedom of life is denied, with hundreds going missing and ending up dead. Pakistan is truly generous in bestowing such gifts on the Baloch people.
The gift of Gwadar port to the Baloch people saw the military and civilian land mafias swoop to deprive the people of their land and to change the demography of the area. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, a respected developmental analyst, in his piece, ‘The limping Gwadar port’, wrote: “Pakistan Navy had acquired 584 acres of land with seafront from Balochistan government in 1980. On refusal of the Navy to hand over the land, the previous government (Musharraf’s) decided that Pakistan Navy would hand over only 30 acres to GPA for developing the road-rail-link leading to the free zone at Gwadar port.”
The irregularities, transgressions and frauds in land deals were so extraordinarily vicious that Justice Javed Iqbal and Justice Raja Fayyaz Ahmed of the Supreme Court in their October 2006 judgement ordered the cancellation of allotment of residential and industrial plots in Gwadar and said: “The allotment of land in Gwadar has been made in violation of the policies formulated by the government itself. The discretionary power has been exercised in an arbitrary and capricious manner, which has been cited as a clear example of abuse of authority and misuse of power. Nobody knows how the settled land owned by the state has been transferred to private sector, that too on peanut price which depicts lack of transparency and mismanagement.” The Supreme Court’s December 2009 decision regarding demolition of Makro-Habib on Webb Ground in Karachi has not yet been implemented so it is highly unlikely that powerful mafias will abide by the court’s decisions in Gwadar.
Much to the chagrin of the Baloch people and in utter disregard of their wishes, Gwadar is militarised. For the new Gwadar airport 6,500 acres were bought by the Military Estates Officer (MEO) in Quetta instead of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), making it the property of the Pakistan Army. London’s Heathrow (2,965 acres) is half its size and there at peak time a plane lands or takes off every 46 seconds; it handles more than 125 million passengers annually.
Moreover, there are restrictions on fishing due to their security concerns, thereby depriving the people of livelihood. Little wonder then that on December 30, 2009 when the prime minister, chief ministers and ministers with their hordes of officials landed in Gwadar with fanfare to gift the NFC Award, the people there observed a complete shutter down strike while these luminaries were there.
Chaghai has received more than a fair share of gifts; topped by nuclear weapons testing. On May 28, 1998, Raskoh Mountain died and dangerous radioactivity became a permanent gift for the people; abnormalities in the population are being regularly reported. France carried out 41 atmospheric nuclear tests between 1966 and 1974 and later 147 underground tests at Mururoa Atoll. When the people protested, France claimed zero fallout; they countered: then why were not tests carried out near Paris? Kazakhstan bore the brunt of Soviet nuclear tests. Colonies are treated similarly everywhere.
The Saindak copper and gold reserves could have been a blessing for future Baloch generations but as a gift for the Baloch people the Metallurgical Construction Company of China (MCC) was given the mining rights; their overexploitation has reduced the 19 years lifespan by a decade. Balochistan’s pathetic share is two percent only, i.e. $ 0.7 million royalty annually — the rest goes to Pakistan’s coffers. Reko Diq is the next on their gift list but it is not certain whose bonanza it will become.
Not only the mineral wealth is exploited, the endangered migratory Houbara Bustards too are being hunted to extinction by Arabs states’ rulers. Balochistan districts are allotted to one or the other ruler. The previously disused Bhandari Airstrip and now notorious Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan was leased to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1992 for game hunting by the royal family. They developed it into a jet-capable airfield and gave it to the US in 2001.
Even a heavy tome would be insufficient to list all the gifts but I suppose you get the drift why the Baloch are wary of gift-bearing Pakistani prime ministers and politicians. Imran Khan has apologised and Nawaz Sharif has floated the idea of an All Parties Conference (APC) for Balochistan. In the 1960s and 70s, hospitals dispensed medicine using tinctures and powders. The universal painkiller was APC, i.e. aspirin-phenacetin-caffeine in ratio of 3:2:1. The Balochistan problem has gone beyond the APC headache remedies and meaningless apologies.
The writer has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com
