pakistan's secret dirty war in balochistan

8/3/2019 Pakistan's Secret Dirty War in Balochistan

1/13

PAKISTAN'S SECRET DIRTY WAR IN BALOCHISTAN

Even if the president or chief justice tells us to releaseyou, we wont. We can torture you, or kill you, or keep youfor years at our will. It is only the Army chief and the[intelligence] chief that we obey.

Pakistani official to Bashir Azeem, the 76-year-oldsecretary-general of the Baloch Republican Party,during his unacknowledged detention, April 2010

In Balochistan, mutilated corpses bearing the signs of torture keep

turning up, among them lawyers, students and farm workers. Why is no

one investigating and what have they got to do with the bloody battle for

Pakistan's largest province?

y

y

y

o Declan Walsh

o guardian.co.uk

y

The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. Theycome in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate

mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty.

Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh

is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed


2/13

with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable,

sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot

wound in the head.

Lala Bibi with her father and son Saeed Ahmed and photographs of

her murdered son Najibullah and his cousin, who was also abducted.

Photograph: Declan Walsh for the Guardian

This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in

Balochistan, Pakistan's largest province, since last July. Several

human rights groups, including Amnesty International, have accounted

for more than 100 bodies lawyers, students, taxi drivers, farm workers.

Most have been tortured. The last three were discovered on Sunday.

If you have not heard of this epic killing spree, though, don't worry:

neither have most Pakistanis. Newspaper reports from Balochistan are

buried quietly on the inside pages, cloaked in euphemisms or, quite

often, not published at all.


3/13

The forces of law and order also seem to be curiously indifferent to the

plight of the dead men. Not a single person has been arrested or

prosecuted; in fact, police investigators openly admit they are not even

looking for anyone. The stunning lack of interest in Pakistan's greatest

murder mystery in decades becomes more understandable, however,

when it emerges that the prime suspect is not some shady gang of

sadistic serial killers, but the country's powerful military and its

unaccountable intelligence men.

This is Pakistan's dirty little war. While foreign attention is focused

on the Taliban, a deadly secondary conflict is bubbling in

Balochistan, a sprawling, mineral-rich province along the western

borders with Afghanistan and Iran. On one side is a scrappy coalition

of guerrillas fighting for independence from Pakistan; on the other is a

powerful army that seeks to quash their insurgency with maximum

prejudice. The revolt, which has been rumbling for more than six years,

is spiced by foreign interests and intrigues US spy bases, Chinese

business, vast underground reserves of copper, oil and gold.

And in recent months it has grown dramatically worse. At the airport in

Quetta, the provincial capital, a brusque man in a cheap suit marches up

to my taxi with a rattle of questions. "Who is this? What's he doing here?

Where is he staying?" he asks the driver, jerking a thumb towards me.

Scribbling the answers, he waves us on. "Intelligence," says the driver.

The city itself is tense, ringed by jagged, snow-dusted hills and crowded

with military checkposts manned by the Frontier Corps (FC), a

paramilitary force in charge of security. Schools have recently raised

their walls; sand-filled Hesco barricades, like the ones used in Kabul and

Baghdad, surround the FC headquarters. In a restaurant the waiter


4/13

apologises: tandoori meat is off the menu because the nationalists blew

up the city's gas pipeline a day earlier. The gas company had plugged

the hole that morning, he explains, but then the rebels blew it up again.

The home secretary, Akbar Hussain Durrani, a neatly suited, well-

spoken man, sits in a dark and chilly office. Pens, staplers and

telephones are neatly laid on the wide desk before him, but his computer

is blank. The rebels have blown up a main pylon, he explains, so the

power is off. Still, he insists, things are fine. "The government agencies

are operating in concert, everyone is acting in the best public interest,"

he says. "This is just a . . . political problem." As we speak, a smiling

young man walks in and starts to take my photo; I later learn he works

for the military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.

We cut across the city, twisting through the backstreets, my guide

glancing nervously out the rear window. The car halts before a tall gate

that snaps shut behind us. Inside, a 55-year-old woman named Lal Bibi

is waiting, wrapped in a shawl that betrays only her eyes, trembling as

she holds forth a picture of her dead son Najibullah. The 20-year-old,

who ran a shop selling motorbike parts, went missing last April after

being arrested at an FC checkpost, she says. His body turned up three

months later, dumped in a public park on the edge of Quetta, badly

tortured. "He had just two teeth in his mouth," she says in a voice

crackling with pain. She turns to her father, a turbaned old man sitting

beside her, and leans into his shoulder. He grimaces.


5/13

Suspected

members of the Baloch Liberation Army are paraded by Pakistani police.

Photograph: Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images

Bibi says her family was probably targeted for its nationalist ties

Najibullah's older brother, now dead, had joined the "men in the

mountains" years earlier, she says. Now a nephew, 28-year-old

Maqbool, is missing. She prays for him, regularly calling the hospitals for

any sign of him and, occasionally, the city morgues.

Over a week of interviews in Karachi and Quetta, I meet the relatives of

seven dead men and nine "disappeared" men presumed to have been

abducted by the security forces. One man produces a mobile phone

picture of the body of his 22-year-old cousin, Mumtaz Ali Kurd, his eyes

black with swelling and his shirt drenched in blood. A relative of Zaman

Khan, one of three lawyers killed in the past nine months, produces

court papers. A third trembles as he describes finding his brother's body

in an orchard near Quetta.

Patterns emerge. The victims were generally men between 20 and

40 years old nationalist politicians, students, shopkeepers,

labourers. In many cases they were abducted in broad daylight


6/13

dragged off buses, marched out of shops, detained at FC checkposts

by a combination of uniformed soldiers and plain-clothes intelligence

men. Others just vanished. They re-emerge, dead, with an eerie tempo

approximately 15 bodies every month, although the average was

disturbed last Saturday when eight bodies were found in three locations

across Balochistan.

Activists have little doubt who is behind the atrocities. Human Rights

Watch says "indisputable" evidence points to the hand of the FC, the ISI

and its sister agency, Military Intelligence. A local group, Voice for

Missing Persons, says the body count has surpassed 110. "This is

becoming a state of terror," says its chairman, Naseerullah Baloch.

The army denies the charges, saying its good name is being blemished

by impersonators. "Militants are using FC uniforms to kidnap people and

malign our good name," says Major General Obaid Ullah Khan Niazi,

commander of the 46,000 FC troops stationed in Balochistan. "Our job is

to enforce the law, not to break it."

Despairing relatives feel cornered. Abdul Rahim, a farmer wearing a

jewelled skullcap, is from Khuzdar, a hotbed of insurgent violence. He

produces court papers detailing the abduction of his son Saadullah in

2009. First he went to the courts but then his lawyer was shot dead.

Then he went to the media but the local press club president was killed.

Now, Rahim says, "nobody will help in case they are targeted too. We

are hopeless."

Balochistan has long been an edgy place. Its vast, empty deserts and

long borders are a magnet for provocateurs of every stripe. Taliban

fighters slip back and forth along the 800-mile Afghan border; Iranian


7/13

dissidents hide inside the 570-mile frontier with Iran. Drug criminals

cross the border from Helmand, the world's largest source of heroin, on

their way to Iran or lonely beaches on the Arabian Sea. Wealthy Arab

sheikhs fly into remote airstrips on hunting expeditions for the houbara

bustard, a bird they believe improves their lovemaking. At Shamsi, a

secretive airbase in a remote valley in the centre of the province, CIA

operatives launch drones that attack Islamists in the tribal belt.

The US spies appreciate the lack of neighbours Balochistan covers

44% of Pakistan yet has half the population of Karachi. The province's

other big draw is its natural wealth. At Reko Diq, 70 miles from the

Afghan border, a Canadian-Chilean mining consortium has struck gold,

big-time. The Tethyan company has discovered 4bn tonnes of mineable

ore that will produce an estimated 200,000 tonnes of copper and

250,000 ounces of gold per year, making it one of the largest such

mines in the world. The project is currently stalled by a tangled legal

dispute, but offers a tantalising taste of Balochistan's vast mineral riches,

which also includes oil, gas, platinum and coal. So far it is largelyuntapped, though, and what mining exists is scrappy and dangerous. On

21 March, 50 coal workers perished in horrific circumstances when

methane gas flooded their mine near Quetta, then catastrophically

exploded.

Two conflicts are rocking the province. North of Quetta, in a belt of land

adjoining the Afghan border, is the ethnic Pashtun belt. Here, Afghan

Taliban insurgents shelter in hardline madrasas and lawless refugee

camps, taking rest in between bouts of battle with western soldiers in

Afghanistan. It is home to the infamous "Quetta shura", the Taliban war

council, and western officials say the ISI is assisting them. Some locals

agree. "It's an open secret," an elder from Kuchlak tells me. "The ISI


8/13

gave a fleet of motorbikes to local elders, who distributed them to the

fighters crossing the border. Nobody can stop them."

The other conflict is unfolding south of Quetta, in a vast sweep that

stretches from the Quetta suburbs to the Arabian Sea, in the ethnic

Baloch and Brahui area, whose people have always been reluctant

Pakistanis. The first Baloch revolt erupted in 1948, barely six months

after Pakistan was born; this is the fifth. The rebels are splintered into

several factions, the largest of which is the Balochistan Liberation Army.

They use classic guerrilla tactics ambushing military convoys, bombing

gas pipelines, occasionally lobbing rockets into Quetta city. Casualties

are relatively low: 152 FC soldiers died between 2007 and 2010,

according to official figures, compared with more than 8,000 soldiers and

rebels in the 1970s conflagration.

But this insurgency seems to have spread deeper into Baloch society

than ever before. Anti-Pakistani fervour has gripped the province. Baloch

schoolchildren refuse to sing the national anthem or fly its flag; women,

traditionally secluded, have joined the struggle. Universities have

become hotbeds of nationalist sentiment. "This is not just the usual

suspects," says Rashed Rahman, editor of the Daily Times, one of few

papers that regularly covers the conflict.

At a Quetta safehouse I meet Asad Baloch, a wiry, talkative 22-year-old

activist with the Baloch Students' Organisation (Azad). "We provide

moral and political support to the fighters," he says. "We are making

people aware. When they are aware, they act." It is a risky business:

about one-third of all "kill and dump" victims were members of the BSO.


9/13

Baloch anger is rooted in poverty. Despite its vast natural wealth,

Balochistan is desperately poor barely 25% of the population is literate

(the national average is 47%), around 30% are unemployed and just 7%

have access to tap water. And while Balochistan provides one-third of

Pakistan's natural gas, only a handful of towns are hooked up to the

supply grid.

The insurgents are demanding immediate control of the natural

resources and, ultimately, independence. "We are not part of

Pakistan," says Baloch.

Well-armed

Baloch insurgents in the contested region south of the capital Quetta.

Photograph: Banaras Khan/AFP

His phone rings. News comes through that another two bodies have

been discovered near the coast. One, Abdul Qayuum, was a BSO

activist. Days later, videos posted on YouTube show an angry crowd

carrying his bloodied corpse into a mortuary. He had been shot in the

head.


10/13

The FC commander, Maj Gen Niazi, wearing a sharp, dark suit and with

neatly combed hair (he has just come from a conference) says he has

little time for the rebel demand. "The Baloch are being manipulated by

their leaders," he says, noting that the scions of the main nationalist

groups live in exile abroad Hyrbyair Marri in London; Brahamdagh

Bugti in Geneva. "They are enjoying the life in Europe while their people

suffer in the mountains," he says with a sigh.

Worse again, he adds, they were supported by India. The Punjabi

general offers no proof for his claim, but US and British intelligence

broadly agree, according to the recent WikiLeaks cables. India sees

Balochistan as payback for Pakistani meddling in Kashmir which

explains why Pakistani generals despise the nationalists so much. "Paid

killers," says Niazi. He vehemently denies involvement in human rights

violations. "To us, each and every citizen of Balochistan is equally dear,"

he says.

Civilian officials in the province, however, have another story. Last

November, the provincial chief minister, Aslam Raisani, told the BBC

that the security forces were "definitely" guilty of some killings; earlier

this month, the province's top lawyer, Salahuddin Mengal, told the

supreme court the FC was "lifting people at will". He resigned a week

later.

However, gross human rights abuses are not limited to the army. As the

conflict drags on, the insurgents have become increasingly brutal and

ruthless. In the past two years, militants have kidnapped aid workers,

killed at least four journalists and, most disturbingly, started to target

"settlers" unarmed civilians, mostly from neighbouring Punjab, many of

whom have lived in Balochistan for decades. Some 113 settlers were


11/13

killed in cold blood last year, according to government figures civil

servants, shopkeepers, miners. On 21 March, militants riding motorbikes

sprayed gunfire into a camp of construction workers near Gwadar, killing

11; the Baloch Liberation Front claimed responsibility. Most grotesque,

perhaps, are the attacks on education: 22 school teachers, university

lecturers and education officials have been assassinated since January

2008, causing another 200 to flee their jobs.

As attitudes harden, the middle ground is being swept away in tide of

bloodshed. "Our politicians have been silenced," says Habib Tahir, a

human rights lawyer in Quetta. "They are afraid of the young." I ask a

student in Quetta to defend the killing of teachers. "They are not

teachers, they work for the intelligence agencies," one student tells me.

"They are like thieves coming into our homes. They must go."

The Islamabad government seems helpless to halt Balochistan's slide

into chaos. Two years ago, President Asif Ali Zardari announced a

sweeping package of measures intended to assuage Baloch grievances,

including thousands of jobs, a ban on new military garrisons and

payment of $1.4bn (800m) in overdue natural gas royalties. But

violence has hijacked politics, the plan is largely untouched, and

anaemic press coverage means there is little outside pressure for action.

Pakistan's foreign allies, obsessed with hunting Islamists, have ignored

the problem. "We are the most secular people in the region, and still we

are being ignored," says Noordin Mengal, who represents Balochistan

on the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

In this information vacuum, the powerful do as they please. Lawyer

Kachkol Ali witnessed security forces drag three men from his office in


12/13

April 2009. Their bodies turned up five days later, dead and

decomposed. After telling his story to the press, Ali was harassed by

military intelligence, who warned him his life was in danger. He fled the

country. "In Pakistan, there is only rule of the jungle," he says by phone

from Lrenskog, a small Norwegian town where he won asylum last

summer. "Our security agencies pick people up and treat them like war

criminals," he says. "They don't even respect the dead."

Balochistan's dirty little war pales beside Pakistan's larger problems

the Taliban, al-Qaida, political upheaval. But it highlights a very

fundamental danger the ability of Pakistanis to live together in a

country that, under its Islamic cloak, is a patchwork of ethnicities and

cultures. "Balochistan is a warning of the real battle for Pakistan, which

is about power and resources," says Haris Gazdar, a Karachi-based

researcher. "And if we don't get it right, we're headed for a major

conflict."

Before leaving Quetta I meet Faiza Mir, a 36-year-old lecturer in

international relations at Quetta's Balochistan University. Militants have

murdered four of her colleagues in the past three years, all because they

were "Punjabi". Driving on to the campus, she points out the spots where

they were killed, knowing she could be next.

"I can't leave," says Mir, a sparky woman with an irrepressible smile.

"This is my home too." And so she engages in debate with students,

sympathising with their concerns. "I try to make them understand that

talk is better than war," she says.

But some compromises are impossible. Earlier on, students had asked

Mir to remove a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding


13/13

father, from her office wall. Mir politely refused, and Jinnah an austere

lawyer in a Savile Row suit - still stares down from her wall.

But how long will he stay there? "That's difficult to say," she answers

pakistan's secret dirty war in balochistan

Documents