The tribes arise
May 5th 2005 | DERA BUGTI
from the Economist print edition
Can Pakistan tame the restive province?
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IN THE Hindu ghetto, a maze of winding alleys and bright-coloured temples, Lal Chand sluices water over the dried blood and innards of his neighbour. Of 67 people killed in a battle in March between tribal militiamen and government troops in Dera Bugti, a small town in Pakistan’s western province of Balochistan, around half perished when the ghetto was shelled by the government’s men. Their target was a large white house adjoining the ghetto’s walls: the ancestral home of Mr. Akbar Khan Bugti, septuagenarian sardar (tribal lord) of the surrounding 5,000 square miles (13,000 sq km) and their 150,000-odd residents-and thorn in the flesh of Pakistani governments for half a century.
But the government failed to kill Mr. Bugti in the fray-which, it claims, began when his bearded tribesmen attacked its troops outside the town. Nor did its violence end a decades-old dispute with the wily and charismatic sardar over the sharing of revenues from local gas fields, or ease tensions across Balochistan, a vast and increasingly violent land.
All the same, in the contradictory way of Pakistani politics, the government in Islamabad may after decades of occasionally brutal rule over the provinces be about to adopt more moderate policies. On May 3rd, a parliamentary committee headed by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the leader of President Pervez Musharraf’s ruling Pakistan Muslim League, issued 32 recommendations on how the government should address grievances in Balochistan.
It is Pakistan’s poorest province. The committee’s recommendations include giving Balochistan’s inhabitants a bigger share of gas revenues and more jobs in gas exploitation. The committee wants the government to pay the province arrears, estimated at 6 billion rupees ($100m), and to give Baloch a far bigger part in the building of a new deep-water port on the province’s coastline, at Gwadar. These recommendations, if adopted (for it is by no means certain they will be adopted) would signal a big concession from Pakistan’s central powers, dominated by mostly Punjabi military elite, to the country’s unhappy margins. They would also be long strides towards ending a conflict that has recently started to cause serious unease around the region.
The people of Balochistan have good reason to resent their government-or "Pakistan" as they sneeringly refer to it, as if to a foreign country. Eight out of ten lack safe drinking water and nine out of ten have no gas. This last rankles especially; given that Balochistan produces most of Pakistan’s gas, including about 1 billion cubic feet (28m cubic meters) per day-roughly 45% of total production-from a single gas field at Sui, on Mr. Bugti’s estate. The neighbouring fief of Mr. Khair Bakhsh Marri, the most belligerent of Balochistan’s sardars, contains oil and coal, but the government has not dared to exploit it.
In a province flush with guns-and ruled by them in its most tribal parts-insurgency has flickered in almost every decade of Pakistan’s existence. In the mid-1970s the government sent 80,000 troops to crush an uprising of Marri tribesmen and Marxist guerrillas, with great bloodshed on both sides. In each of the last two years, around 100 policemen, soldiers and civilian officials have been murdered, and pipelines and railways blown up. In January, the Sui gas field was closed after an attack by gunmen. A little-known group, dominated by Marri tribesmen and calling itself the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), has often claimed responsibility for these actions. Perusal of the province’s newspapers suggests that most districts of Balochistan see an insurgent attack every few days.
The foreign hand
unwittingly, outsiders have stoked the conflict. Thirsting for oil, America and India want to build a pipeline through the province, running south from the wells of Central Asia, or, in India’s case, east from Iran. India’s dynamic oil minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar-who also dreams of a pan-Asian gas grid-has suggested that the second pipeline could be completed by 2011. On reaching the coast, the Central Asian pipeline would disgorge into supertankers gathered off the emerging port at Gwadar. Chinese engineers are building the port with an initial loan from China of $200m. As its capacity increases, Gwadar will halve the distance between Xinjiang, the westernmost province of China, and it’s nearest accessible port-currently some 2,000 miles (3,000 km).
Balochi nationalists, and especially the BLA, take particular exception to the emerging port. Last May, three Chinese engineers were killed and 11 injured in Gwadar by a car bomb. The nationalists consider it another avenue for the government to plunder their resources. But more important, with an eye on the teeming slums of nearby Karachi, they fear it may draw in millions of outsiders, making the Balochi a minority in their own land.
Under the current system, this increased population would at least give the province a bigger slice of the national pie: 37% of the budget is divided among Pakistan’s provinces on the basis of population size, with Punjab taking over half the total, and Balochistan’s current population of 6.5m a mere 5%. Mr. Hussein’s parliamentary committee recommends distributing such revenues according to need, with the most backward areas receiving most money. It also proposes a raft of measures to make the Gwadar development more palatable to locals: a majority of jobs in its construction would be reserved for them and special scholarships awarded to their children. Yet even all this may not placate the nationalists whose real fear is of becoming an ethnic minority and so losing their influence at the polls.
Conspiracy unlimited
Where the pipelines are concerned, the nationalists appear to be gripped by a common delusion that America secretly wants Balochistan to secede from Pakistan, in order to secure the superpower a new source of oil. Indeed, the uniformity of the nationalists’ expressed grievances and conspiracy theories, is striking. Traditionally, the government found it easy to use patronage to divide the warring tribes. Of late, however, a greater coherence has emerged. Last year, the four Balochi nationalist parties, including three headed by sardars, formed an alliance to put their demands to the parliamentary commission. Also last year, the Bugti and the Marri ended a 50-year feud. No Baloch nationalist seems to condemn the BLA’s murderous campaign. In his handsome Karachi home, Ataullah Mengal, the third senior sardar-and another grand old man-says: "The armed struggle has begun, the Chinese engineers have been killed, and bomb-blasts are going off every day. The cost will be dear, but we are asking
for something dear and for that we must pay dearly, even with our lives."
Another novelty in the nationalists’ campaign is the part played by Mr. Bugti, in his blood-splattered town. A former minister of interior and of defence, Mr. Bugti is no separatist. He has long sparred with successive governments for money and political influence, and has spent nearly a decade in prison. But the status quo has given him untrammeled power over his tribe and a fund of gas royalties amounting, by one estimate, to 120m rupees a year. Nonetheless, since Bugti tribesmen arose against the government in January, to decry the rape of a female doctor at the Sui gas field, he has appeared to adopt the nationalist cause. "It’s not all about pounds, shillings and pence. Man cannot live on bread alone," he told this correspondent-"though I’m sure it was not an Englishman who said it."
After shelling its own citizens in Dera Bugti, the government backed down. In effect it agreed a truce with Mr. Bugti and withdrew some troops from his area. Even before considering the parliamentary committee’s recommendations, in fact, the government had some sensible policies on Balochistan in place. There is a plan to raise a 25,000-strong Balochi border force, whose recruits will be subject to less stringent educational requirements than normal. Several new army bases are also planned for the province. Though unpopular with the nationalists, these will boost local businesses.
If such measures were to be reinforced by the adoption of at least some of the committee’s recommendations, Pakistan’s government could go a long way towards satisfying the demands of Balochistan’s aggrieved people. All the same, when Mr. Bugti says that money is not the whole answer, he has a point. In Quetta and other towns, the BLA has strong support among educated young people. Typically, they are not only unemployed but also-since Mr. Musharraf launched his coup in 1999-disenfranchised. At a dubious election in 2001, the president’s supporters ensured that a coalition of Islamists from the Pushtun minority took over the provincial government. Without restoring real democracy, Mr. Musharraf may find that the gifts he can afford to give Balochistan are never quite enough.
Source: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3941524
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