Pakistan: A Hard Country (61 page)

Lack of consultation and intel igence meant that the administration was unaware of the risk that many Baloch would see these projects as increasing Punjabi immigration into Balochistan and threatening them with new ‘swamping’. Islamabad seems to have been unsympathetic to Baloch demands that many of the jobs in these projects be reserved in advance for ethnic Baloch.

The result was a growth in armed protest – which was initial y limited to some of the Marri tribe, and was led by a younger member of its Sardari family, Balach Marri. He later based himself in Afghanistan, where he was kil ed in obscure circumstances, probably by Pakistani intel igence, possibly by a misdirected US air strike, or – a remoter possibility – by an accurately directed US strike at Pakistan’s request.

The insurgency took on a more serious aspect when it spread to parts of the Bugti tribe, led by their Sardar, Nawab Akbar Bugti.

Nawab Bugti was not an inveterate enemy of Pakistan. On the contrary, he pursued throughout his life an opportunist course. After spending many years in gaol under Ayub Khan, in 1973 he sided with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in dismissing the moderate nationalist government of Balochistan – thereby sparking the Baloch rebel ion of that year – and was rewarded with the post of governor, which he held for a year before fal ing out with Bhutto. In 1989 – 90 he was chief minister. Bugti therefore demonstrates not implacable nationalist separatism, but rather the old tribal tradition of alternating between rebel ion and participation in government, depending on circumstances. The old Italian principle that ‘he who draws sword against his king should throw away the scabbard’ has never applied in Balochistan, at least as the tribes see things.

Much of the Pakistani army, however, does not see rebel ion simply as another form of legitimate political pressure, and this has led to what one might cal fatal misunderstandings. They certainly proved fatal in the case of Nawab Bugti. The details of Bugti’s rebel ion after 2005 have been obscured by rival propaganda and myth-making, but the two main versions are as fol ows. According to Baloch nationalists, Bugti launched increasingly strong protests against the Musharraf administration’s policies and in favour of a greatly increased share of revenues from Sui Gas for Balochistan. When these were rejected, he eventual y took to the hil s with his armed fol owers, where he was kil ed by the military in August 2006.

Alternatively, according to officials of Sui Gas, officers of the Pakistan army and rival Baloch politicians, Bugti was interested only in increased money and favours for his immediate family, and opposed a new military cantonment in Sui because it would threaten his control of the Bugti tribe. He ordered his men to start sabotaging the gas pipelines in order to blackmail the state; and when Musharraf failed to yield to this blackmail, Bugti took to the hil s, where he was kil ed by accident in the course of military operations, or even – depending on which military version you listen to – kil ed himself and the Pakistani military delegation sent to negotiate with him. The supposed reason for this was that he knew that he was, in any case, dying of disease.

Senator Mushahid Husain Syed, who led a parliamentary delegation which negotiated with Bugti on behalf of the Musharraf administration, told me that the administration and high command were divided between those who wished to go on negotiating with Bugti, and hardliners who had become exasperated with what they regarded as his blackmail and who were determined to crush armed rebel ion by force. In the senator’s view, however, Bugti was not out for personal gain, but to defend his honour and his leadership of his tribe, which he regarded as threatened by the increasing military presence in his area; and to receive guaranteed jobs for Bugtis in the gas fields.

Two incidents pushed matters from skirmishing between the Bugtis and the military into ful -scale revolt: in January 2005 a woman doctor in the military base in Bugti’s area was raped. The military immediately al eged that a Bugti tribesman was responsible. Bugti took this as a personal insult and broke off talks with the government. As with Bugti’s death, the actual facts of the case have been completely obscured by misinformation on al sides. The second critical incident came in December 2005, when Musharraf visited Kohlu in Balochistan (the first Pakistani leader to visit the region in many years), and rockets were fired at his helicopter. No one knows which Baloch group was responsible, but this attack in turn gave hardliners in the Pakistani military the chance to argue to Musharraf that no further concessions should be made to Bugti.

Fighting in the Bugti areas escalated, and on 26 August 2006 Bugti was kil ed, or died, along with three Pakistani officers when an explosion destroyed the cave where he had taken refuge. It is a mark of just how disastrous this was that every Pakistani officer with whom I have spoken has sought to absolve the army of responsibility.

However, since they have come up with several different and incompatible accounts of what actual y happened, it is difficult to attach too much credence to what they say.

What is certain is that senior Pakistani officials – including most probably Musharraf himself – had developed a deep personal contempt and loathing for Bugti. This is in part a matter of class and culture, and of a very different set of attitudes to the authority of the state. Representing both the Pakistani state and what they see as modernity, Pakistani generals were infuriated by Bugti’s mixture of aristocratic contempt for them, democratic posing, economic blackmail and authoritarian and retrograde rule over his own tribe.

The result of Bugti’s death was a surge of support for his even more radical grandson (and, in the view of the Pakistani military, evil genius) Baramdagh Bugti, who is now leading one wing of the Baloch insurgency from bases in Afghanistan. According to both Pakistani and Western intel igence sources, this is with the covert support of Indian intel igence. The resulting fighting in Balochistan has caused almost 1,000 deaths among militants, Pakistani soldiers and police, and local Punjabi and other ‘settlers’. Between 600 and 2,500

suspected militants were arrested and held without charge by the Pakistani intel igence services (the figures differ wildly depending on whom you listen to), and, while most were eventual y released again, some have disappeared for good. Many of the militants supposedly kil ed in battles with the Frontier Corps have also undoubtedly been subjected to extrajudicial execution.

When it comes to the Bugtis themselves, the Pakistani military has done a pretty effective job of divide and rule – just as previously in the case of the Marris, who are also split into several sub-tribes most of which are siding with Pakistan against the insurgency. The Kalpur sub-tribe of the Bugtis is stil in arms against Sardar Akbar Bugti’s family for control of the benefits of Sui Gas; and in that family, apart from Baramdagh in Afghanistan, there are two other claimants to the leadership of the Bugtis. The eldest son of Akbar Bugti’s eldest son, Sardar Ali Bugti, holds the family base in Dera Bugti, though only under heavy military protection; and one of Bugti’s sons, Talal Bugti, holds the family mansion in Quetta and the leadership of what is left of Bugti’s Jamhoori Watan Party. Talal Bugti spent most of his life in Karachi, and only returned to Balochistan after his father’s death.

When I attended a meeting of the party in Quetta, the not very resolute-looking Sardar Talal Bugti on the platform was rather cast into the shade by the fierce features and impressively bristling beard of his nephew Baramdagh, whose large picture was being held aloft by two fifteen-year-old children from – of al places – the elite St Mary’s School. And this il ustrates the most worrying aspect of the insurgency as far as the Pakistani state is concerned: that it seems to have spread from sections of the Marri and Bugti tribes to parts of the new Baloch educated youth who have emerged in recent years.

As in so much of the developing world, there are not nearly enough state jobs to provide for these people, and their often worthless education certificates do not equip them for modern technical or managerial jobs in gas, mining or at Gwadar – which they believe that they should be given as representatives of the indigenous ethnicity.

The more moderate elements try to use their Sardars and the Pakistani political system to force the state to give them jobs; the more radical ones have turned to armed revolt.

So far, this revolt has not been impressive in military terms (which also means that Indian help to the insurgents must so far be at a pretty low level). Attacks on the army, the Frontier Corps and even the wretched police (many of whom in Balochistan are stil armed with Second World War-era Lee Enfield bolt-action rifles) are stil relatively infrequent. The great majority of the militants’ targets are ‘soft’ ones – the Punjabi and other ‘settlers’ who have moved to Balochistan over the past 150 years to work in a variety of technical occupations for which the Baloch lack the education (like teachers) or which they consider beneath them (like barbers).2

What is happening is a sort of low-level ethnic cleansing, with more than 250 ‘settlers’ kil ed across Balochistan in the year before my visit in August 2009. The district of Kalat was typical. In the first seven months of 2009, the militants had kil ed three Kashmiri bakers (together with a Baloch customer), three Punjabi tube-wel dril ers, one Punjabi teacher and one Baloch policeman.

The result natural y has been an exodus of non-Baloch teachers and technicians from vil ages and smal towns in the ethnic Baloch areas, except where (as in the case of Sui Gas, the mining camps and the cantonments) settlements are under the direct protection of the army.

The result has been to depress both Baloch educational levels and the Baloch economy stil further, but, unlike the Taleban in FATA, this less than heroic insurgency does not as yet pose a serious threat to the control of the Pakistani military.

BALOCH TRIBALISM

Whether this remains the case wil depend largely on how far Baloch tribal society is changing, and generating the kind of frustrated new class which wil identify with Baloch nationalism rather than their own tribe. From the point of view of government, Baloch tribalism, like Pathan tribalism, was always an infernal nuisance, but it was also a containable nuisance susceptible to bribes. Among the Pathan tribes, social change and disruption helped to bring about the Taleban movement. It is not clear yet if social change among the Baloch is capable of creating a modern nationalist movement.

In many respects, Baloch tribal culture is close to that of the Pathans.

Like the pashtunwali, the traditional Baloch code requires tribesmen: To avenge blood.

To fight to the death for a person who has taken refuge with them.

To be hospitable.

To refrain from kil ing a woman, a Hindu, a servant or a boy not yet in trousers.

To cease fighting on the intervention of a woman, Sayyid or mul ah bearing the Koran on her or his head.

Not to kil a man who takes refuge in a shrine.

To punish an adulterer with death.3

This last provision – extended to il icit sexual relations in general or the mere suspicion of them – has been responsible for the ghastly and continual stream of ‘honour kil ings’ among the Baloch tribesmen, who have an obsession with the purity of their female kinsfolk which is extreme even by the pathological standards of their Pathan neighbours.

In one respect, however, Baloch tribalism is very different from that of the Pathans: its leadership is hereditary, hierarchical and even monarchical, whereas the Pathan tradition is meritocratic and even in a sense democratic. In the Baloch tradition (and that of the Pathan tribes of northern Balochistan which are influenced by the Baloch), the position of Sardar – in principle at least – always passes from eldest son to eldest son. The ceremony of ‘turbanning’ the new Sardar resembles a coronation. Beneath the Sardar, a hierarchy of subordinate chieftains cal ed waderos (the same word as for a ‘feudal’

landowner in Sindh, il ustrating the close links between the provinces) and mirs rule over sub-sections of the tribe. Sardars can be savagely tyrannical in a way that Pathan chieftains are not; yet in one way both are alike. Over them stands a greater tyrant, which is tribal custom.

That said, the Baloch system in practice seems to have been more flexible than its formal appearance would suggest. Historical records suggest that, before the arrival of the British, tribes repeatedly either split into smal er tribes or grew by assimilating other tribes or bits of tribes. Leaders of sub-tribes revolted against their Sardars and founded separate tribes of their own. This was partly the result of migration from place to place, which British rule prevented. The British Gazetteer of 1906 describes the situation among some of the tribes near the Afghan border:

The local tribe is nominal y subject to Sardar Rustam Khan of Jebri, but he has no real influence over any Mamasani clan north of Kharan. The Mamasani tumandar or headman who appears to exercise most power over these wild tribes is Shah Khan Gul, Siahezai Mamasani, but even he has little influence except over his immediate fol owers.4

In fact, it has been suggested that the whole structure of single autocratic Sardars ruling over clearly marked tribes was in part at least a creation of the British, who found this convenient from the point of view of bribing and control ing the tribes. If this is so, then the process one can see today in Balochistan (and which is being encouraged by the army), of rival Sardars breaking up tribes into smal er feuding elements, is not real y new, but a return to the pre-British norm.