Dawn Editorial
Wednesday, 24 Jun, 2009
Balochistan is simmering. A low-grade insurgency has gradually been gaining strength and the law-enforcement agencies are finding it difficult to check the violence that now erupts with unfailing regularity in the province. Last Friday, a judge and his aide were killed. The same day a bomb blast in Dera Murad Jamali injured a number of people while two were wounded in a grenade attack in Quetta. There have been more incidents of violence since then.
In May the police disclosed that since the beginning of 2009, more than 200 incidents of shooting, bomb blasts, grenade attacks and abductions had taken place. More than 150 people had died while approximately 400 were injured. Add to this the toll of the last one month — over 20 deaths and at least 125 injured — and the picture is one of war.
So grave is the crisis that talk of all-parties conferences, committees and enhanced budgetary allocations does not have any impact. Why should it be taken seriously when no concrete steps are being taken to indicate that Islamabad means business? The government’s broken promises are now becoming embarrassing for the Baloch leadership that threw in its lot with the rulers at the centre. Some of the leaders have tried to resign but have been held back. Others have demonstrated public dissent at the way matters are being handled. Take the APC.
The PPP promised a dialogue to resolve Balochistan’s problems but has so far failed to honour its word. The last time the prime minister pledged to convene an APC was in May and it was supposed to be ‘within days’. Nothing has come of these assurances except for the establishment of a PPP committee headed by Senator Raza Rabbani to study earlier reports and formulate a common position.
The Rabbani report makes many worthwhile points. But will they help if they remain on paper as previously? There is also the question of Baloch participation in the APC. Not all nationalists are willing to attend. So strong is their distrust of Islamabad that they are no longer willing to be appeased by words. If Islamabad is serious about resolving the Balochistan problem, some confidence-building measures are in order.
Palpable steps to trace the missing people, release political prisoners and rein in the military presence in the province might help pave the way for a dialogue on political and economic issues. At the heart of the problem is the desire of the Baloch to control their own political destiny and natural resources. Is this really an unreasonable demand?
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/16-conflict-in-balochistan-hs-02
II. Balochistan’s poverty
Dawn Editorial
Tuesday, 23 Jun, 2009
People must get complete ownership of their natural resources as well as of their coasts.
Balochistan’s budget for 2009-10 is a reminder of the province’s deep-rooted economic and political problems. Facing the challenges of growing political violence and rising poverty, Quetta is in dire need of permanent sources of funds for development.
Though the provincial government will spend Rs18.5bn on development next year, the amount is not nearly enough to build a durable economic infrastructure or to provide quality public services like education, healthcare, drinking water, roads, etc to the population of the province. Given its vast size, sparsely scattered population and difficult terrain, Balochistan must spend a lot more on its development than the rest of the country. For example, a road 500km long in Punjab would link scores of villages, towns and cities and connect hundreds of thousands of people if not millions. The same length of road in Balochistan would cost more and hardly connect a couple of villages and a few hundred people.
Nevertheless, in spite of its meagre resources, the Raisani government has done a good job during its first year in power. It created more than 4,200 jobs, constructed schools, colleges and hospitals and tried to provide some relief to the poverty-stricken people. Its budget for the next fiscal also contains several pro-poor measures: food subsidy, increase in the minimum pension of provincial employees, subsidy on agricultural tube-wells, etc. In addition, the provincial development outlay, which is just twice the size of Lahore’s development programme for the outgoing year, seeks to build a definitive social and economic infrastructure and to create employment. The federal government has helped the Raisani government undertake development works.
Islamabad has picked up the province’s overdraft with the State Bank of Pakistan freeing annual resources of Rs4.2bn for its development. The federal government will spend Rs71bn under its Public Sector Development Programme in Balochistan during the next one year. There is a clear-cut shift in the federal attitude towards Balochistan’s problems.
The change also reflects growing realisation in Islamabad that the ongoing political violence stems partly from the large-scale frustration among the people, resulting from the lack of development over the past six decades. The people of Balochistan must get complete ownership of their natural resources as well as of their coasts. That may not bring about peace in the immediate future.
But that would be the single-most important step towards a lasting solution to the province’s economic and political problems.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/provinces/16-balochistans-poverty-hs-02
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