The attempts to placate Baloch opinion by appointing someone from Balochistan caretaker PM seems not to have worked, because the wider issue of displaced persons seems to have become a particularly Baloch issue, and can thus be left to them.
The attempt by the Baloch Yakjehti Council to bring the issue to national attention has led to the March on Islamabad, the arrest of the marchers, their release on bail, and the resumption of a sit-in. The marchers managed to throw light on a long-running sore that had been put on the backburner, almost as if those who had enforced the disappearances hoped that those marchers would disappear.
The marchers are already desperate. They all have horror stories. There are two issues: disappeared persons and extrajudicial encounters. This is on top of Balochistan being the country’s most sparsely populated, poorest and most dominated province.
Balochistan is a province with a split personality. That is because, despite its name, it is not purely a Baloch province. It includes a large Pushtun population. To the extent that the Baloch are not really represented in the province’s capital of Quetta. Indeed, of the four provincial capitals, only Lahore in Punjab is inhabited by people of the province– Karachi is dominated by Muhajirs, Quetta by Pashtuns and Peshawar by Hiindko speakers.
Ensuring that there are no more missing persons would mean identifying those responsible. That would prove an embarrassment for those so identified, and might even mean some form of punishment, though that is highly unlikely. So basically, the country is being put through this experience merely to spare the blushes of some middle-aged men. Is the game worth the candle?
The late Zafarullah Jamali illustrated another strand of Balochistan. He was neither a Balochi-speaker nor a Pashtun, but a Seraiki-speaking Baloch. Seraiki not as a Punjabi dialect or a separate language, but as a Sindhi dialect. He said once that he had tried as Chief Minister to promote a Balochistani rather than a Baloch identity. He became Prime Minister, but was also sacked by Gen Pervez Musharraf.
Thus Anwarul Haq Kakar is not the first Balochistani to become PM. However, as he is a Pashtun rather than a Baloch, and thus represents another strand. He has called the protesters terrorists, thereby promoting the narrative that the missing persons are terrorists. This also reflects the fact that he does not seem to have risen above his local prejudices.
Balochistan is a combination of British Balochistan and the old Kalat state. British Balochistan consisted essentially of those provinces of Afghanistan which were conquered by the British in the First Afghan War. Apart from Pashtuns thus brought under British rule, a number of Persian-speaking Hazaras also came to Quetta.
The Baloch do not just speak Balochi, but also Brahui, which is a Dravidian language, and which is spoken from Quetta down to the coast. The province thus has a number of languages native to it, which are also fault lines for ethnic divisions. It is worth noting that there is no fault line between Brahui and Balochi speakers, as there is between Baloch and Pashtuns.
The Baloch and the Pashtuns both eke out a living from the harsh landscape, and where the Baloch have developed a nationalism, the Pashtuns have some nationalism in the shape of the Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party, they seem to have found greater traction in religion, more particularly in the JUI(F).
Thus among the Baloch proper, militancy manifests itself through separatist parties, while in Pashtun areas, the TTP has developed some strength. There have been indications that the two have begun cooperating, which might explain the terrorism charge. It should also be remembered that there were
Apparently, the caretaker PM does not agree with the idea that one is innocent until proven guilty. Disappeared persons are considered as such precisely because they have not been produced in court. There was a special law passed to regularize the arrests of people who were disappeared during the War on Terror, but that was done after several years, and when it was realized that the Constitution and laws demanded that they be produced in court.
Interestingly, those who disappeared during the War on Terror remain untraced, it not being known whether they live or die. Well, their captors know, but their families don’t. Now they have been joined by the Baloch. The argument that they are terrorists or Indian agents will not work, for the RAW operative Kulbhushan Yadav, literally an Indian agent and a terrorist if there ever was one, did not disappear, but was arrested and brought before a court.
The ‘desparecidos’ of South America present an earlier example. The USA, fearful during the 1970s and 1980s of a Communist takeover of South America, help South American militaries impose dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil and make;communists’ disappear, in Operation Condor, which led to about 60,000 deaths, half in Argentina alone. The pattern was hauntingly familiar: opponents of the regime would disappear, picked by men in civilian clothes, and there would be no indication of where they were. Their bodies might emerge, but sometimes not. One, but by means not the only, means of making them disappear were the ‘death flights’, where aeroplanes would leave Argentina and go to the Atlantic Ocean, where a planeload of ‘desparecidos’ would be made to jump to their deaths. There would be no inconvenient bodies to explain away.
There is no convenient ocean near the Makran Coast of Balochistan, and there are no convenient planes to be borrowed. However, there have been stories of bodies of terrorists killed in encounters turning out to be those of missing persons, or of missing persons turning up dead. As a matter of fact, the Long March was precipitated by the death of Balach Mola Bakhsh in police custody on December 16 in Turbat. He had been in police custody since October, and had even been produced in court.
It would be wrong to blame the USA for all such killings. Repressive regimes allied to Russia, like Belarus, have also faced allegations of disappearing political opponents. India, with missing persons in large numbers all over, but especially in Kashmir, is another example. The USA itself disappeared people during the War on Terror, with a relatively small number in the USA itself, and 759 held in the notorious Guantanamo Bay.
Missing persons have proliferated for international US undertakings. The Cold War, and then the War on Terror. But the concept and the methods were diverted to regime political opponents. The Baloch missing persons are not nationalists or religious militants; they simply oppose the way the province is treated, as a sort of backyard of undemocratic forces, where decisions are made for the benefit of the establishment, not of Balochistan or even Pakistan.
The whole country is involved, not just because the Baloch are fellow Pakistanis, or the province is the largest in the Federation. The real reason is because the quasi-colonial methods used in Balochistan are a sort of rehearsal for the rest of the country.
Ensuring that there are no more missing persons would mean identifying those responsible. That would prove an embarrassment for those so identified, and might even mean some form of punishment, though that is highly unlikely. So basically, the country is being put through this experience merely to spare the blushes of some middle-aged men. Is the game worth the candle?
