While the earthquake has with good reason taken up most media attention, and now kalabagh dam seems to have popped up from nowhere..Baluchistan has been getting little attention..you might remember that the government promised to release a constitutional package to address Baloch grievances and it was to be announced early this year..well the package seems to be stalled..and besides that..more distubringly..there have been constant reports coming out from Quetta of Baloch being picked up at random and vanishing..the numbers have been increasing exponentially and many have accused the federal government of torture..anyway this is the first mention of it by the mainstream English media:
Flames flicker on in Balochistan
Kamila Hyat
The writer is a freelance columnist and former newspaper editor
While news of the turmoil in Balochistan has largely vanished from the national press, it is quite evident that within the province, perceptions of injustice continue to give rise to feelings of anger directed against the State and its institutions.
The reports that a grandson of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti has been named among those accused of involvement in bomb blasts in Karachi that killed three people last month comes as further evidence of the issues brewing within the province. Outside the Quetta press club, families gather each day, week after week, month after month, to demand the release of relatives who they allege have been picked up by agencies.
The eight children of Ali Asghar Bangulzai, who his wife says ‘disappeared’ almost four years ago, gather regularly with their placards and banners. The youngest children do not remember their father any longer, but the family is desperate to ensure he is not entirely forgotten by the world. The children had staged a hunger strike a few months ago to draw attention to the plight of the family. More women and children have joined the protesting Bangulzais over the years. They include the relatives of at least eight young Baloch student activists, some of whom have been missing for over a year.
Both the Balochistan and the federal government have denied knowledge of these ‘disappearances’, and insist, uttering a kind of mantra which has its origins in Washington, only that they are determined to battle terror.
On websites apparently maintained by young Baloch radicals, an overwhelming number of respondents in polls state they believe only an armed struggle can enable the people of the province to gain their rights. Even if the results, stating 72 per cent back this opinion, are somewhat skewed, given the fact that the sites reach out to a specific shade of opinion among Baloch youth, the findings are still significant in the backdrop of the persisting unrest within the territory.
But what is perhaps most extraordinary is the fact that the news from Balochistan rarely draws comment or concern in other parts of the country.
The pictures of the children holding up photographs of vanished fathers, in a chilling replay, although mercifully on a far smaller scale, of the scenes from Chile and other Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, do not make the national press. News items concerning the regular blasts that rock Quetta and other towns in Balochistan at best receive a few centimetres of space within national newspapers. The voices of Baloch leaders warning of the crisis in the province are rarely heard.
Yet surely, the fact that Balochistan has experienced at least 261 bomb blasts and 167 rocket attacks in 2005 alone; that for the first time in the country’s history people have gone ‘missing’ after being illegally detained, or that the shadowy entities claiming to represent Baloch radicals have claimed they are behind terrorist attacks across the country are all events that deserve some notice. So the analyses of Baloch politicians and academics, today, seem to find space only in the Quetta-based press and, significantly, in more and more of the newspapers and television channels making up the vibrant Sindhi language media.
This trend is of course partially a reflection of the increased regionalisation of the press. With a few honorary exceptions, more and more national newspapers seem focused only on events taking place in their own region, effectively shutting out news from other parts of the country in favour of city-based coverage or, of course, the inevitable political statements from provincial and central leaders.
The result is that readers in say, Lahore, know less and less about what is happening in Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi or other smaller cities in each province. This feeds into a broader deprivation of knowledge about other parts of the country, which begins at the school level.
For instance, a recently introduced social studies book, intended for school children in the Punjab, provides, with quite stultifying monotony, details of each of the districts in the province, in terms of their area, agricultural produce, main occupations etc. Astonishingly, information about the other three provinces making up the federation seems to have been omitted almost entirely – with the books based on the deeply flawed premise that people from a specific part of the country need to know only about their own region.
The result of course is ignorance, and with it, indifference. Today, even though the crisis in Balochistan is extremely important in the context of the federation as a whole, it is rarely included in the national discussions that take place at various forums.
Yet, better understanding the sentiments that exist in Balochistan is crucial to finding solutions to the problem. Such solutions cannot emerge through talks between central leaders and tribal chiefs alone. The sense of isolation of some in Balochistan from national events can be gauged by the fact that along the province’s long border with Iran, many people living in remote communities seem uncertain that they are in fact within Pakistani territory – their links to Iranian towns across the border are often stronger in terms of travel and trade. The State of Pakistan has, over the past five decades since independence, made no apparent impact on their lives, with schools, hospitals or other facilities still not accessible for many.
The people, not only of Balochistan but also the rest of the country, need to be included and involved in the process of finding a solution to the province’s problems. Guns, bomb blasts and rocket attacks are, after all, no answer. Nor are vague assurances of development made by national leaders.
A resolution to an issue that has persisted since independence can come only by granting the people who live within the country’s biggest problem greater say over their own future, and their own resources. What better time to remember this than in December, the month during which, 34 years ago, the then province of East Pakistan tore itself away from the country in a blood fest of violence, stirred up by years of discrimination and a refusal to take note of the feelings of ordinary people.
The task of drawing Balochistan into the wider picture is especially important at a time when the challenge of national integration is growing more complex than ever before. It is quite evident that people have little knowledge, and therefore little sympathy, for political feelings that exist in other parts of a strained federation, and this, in the longer term, can lead only to greater dangers in the years ahead.
