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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
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o Declan Walsh
o guardian.co.uk
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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