home front; the changing face of balochistan’s separatist insurgency

8/12/2019 Home Front; The changing face of Balochistans separatist insurgency

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Home Front

The changing face of Balochistans separatist insurgency

By MAHVISH AHMA

IN THE EARLY HOURS of 25December 2012, the paramilitaryFrontier Corps of PakistansBalochistan province launched anoperation in the small, remotevillage of Mai. The operation wentunnoticed by all save a handful of

local newspapers. According toresidents of Mai, which lies deepinside Balochistan, six helicoptersand up to two hundred cars carrying soldiers arrived on that winter morning.The soldiers went door-to-door pointing guns, and were surprised when peopleanswered their accusations of being foreign spies with recitations of the kalima.They thought we were Hindu agents, said Muhammad Amin, a wrinkledfarmer who witnessed the soldiers arrival.

Three helicopters circled above the village, and shelled some mud homes. A fewabandoned huts with mortar holes still dot the landscape. It was as if the earthwas on fire, and the sky was raining bullets, Amin said. Three other chopperslanded in front of a mosque, where the villages women and children had hiddenthemselves. Soldiers pulled us outside to stand in the cold for several hours,Mahnaz, a peasant woman, said. Other villages nearby underwent similarattacks. By the time the operation ended, the Frontier Corps had set up 12checkpoints controlling every entry and exit around Mai.

At first glance, Mai does not look like a sufficiently grave threat to warrant anykind of troop deployment. It is a 12-hour drive from the nearest cityKarachiand its sandy-brown mud huts are home to a couple of hundred peasants who

spend their days grazing sheep and goats. After the operation, critics in Balochnewspapers raged against the Pakistani media for failing to cover it. Abdul Malik,then a member of the provincial assembly and now the chief minister ofBalochistan, claimed the operation had taken innocent lives, and that heavybombardment had destroyed several villages. It was a genocide that had to bestopped, Malik fumed, and a brutality that needed to end. For those who did


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not know Mai, the attack was a clear example of the rampant violence exercisedby Pakistani security forces within their own country.

However, several eyewitnesses claimed that the Frontier Corps had run a highlytargeted operation. At the far edge of Mai, atop a small incline, a hamlet of

dilapidated mud huts still stands amid much rubble. Inside the huts, long steelbars that supported the ceilings have collapsed, and shards of glass from brokenwindows can pierce the feet of unsuspecting visitors. On the floor of one hut liethe burnt and scattered pages of a medical textbook. The ripped pages of a bookof Islamic political philosophy lie in a heap in a corner. Crumbled pages of aseparatist newspaper called the Daily Tawarits Karachi offices were attacked,either by unknown assailants or security forces, depending on whom you asked,a few months after the operation in Maiflutter around the empty rooms.Mahnaz said that when the soldiers came that morning, they were looking for aman who used to live in one of these huts: her brother, Dr Allah Nazar, the

commander of the Baloch Liberation Frontan ethno-nationalist militia that isbattling for the complete independence of Balochistan.

Today, when war and militancy in Pakistan are often equated with the activitiesof al-Qaeda and the Taliban, few, even within Pakistan, know much aboutBalochistan and the separatist movement that has brewed there for decades.Stories of Balochistans disappeared have received some attention in the pressand from the authoritiesespecially from courts investigating accusationsagainst Pakistani security forcesbut have rarely been placed within the contextof an ongoing war between Baloch separatists and the Pakistani state. Fewer still

have heard of Nazar, a doctor-turned-guerrilla commander who was abductedand tortured by Pakistani security forces for his involvement in Baloch studentmovements, including the Baloch Student OrganisationAzaad, which hefounded over a decade ago. Nazar now leads a middle-class insurgencyofengineers, peasants, college dropouts, ex-policemen, shopkeepers and othersthat is the latest iteration of Balochistans 67-year-old movement forindependence. In a country full of battle lines, Nazar is engaged in an old warbetween the Pakistani state and a motley group of separatist sarmacharsaBalochi word for militants that means those who are willing to sacrifice theirheads.

For the Pakistani state, Balochistan is both a strategic asset and an inseparablepiece of the puzzle that makes up the country. The province is Pakistans largest;it forms 45 percent of the countrys territory, and borders Iran and Afghanistan.It has the countrys longest coastline and largest natural gas reserves, andcontains a vast array of resources such as coal, oil, copper, gold, lead and zinc.Other countries have not only kept a close eye on Balochistan, but have, atvarious points, been involved in its internal affairs. The nature of that


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involvement has varied from support for the separatist rebellion (Afghanistan,allegedly India); the deployment of fighter jets and gunships to squash therebellion (Iran); the construction and operation of a lucrative deepwater port(China); the hunting of the provinces fowl (Saudi Arabia); an old lease on partsof its territory (Oman); the requisition of its long and winding roads to transport

goods to troops in Afghanistan (the United States); and billion-dollarinvestments to mine its mineral-rich earth (anyone who can get their hands on acontract).

Rumours of Afghan and Indian support for Baloch separatists regularly causeuproar among Pakistani officials. Last October, Pakistans then foreign secretary,

Jalil Abbas Jilani, presented previously unavailable evidence of foreign hands inBalochistan violence to Indian authorities. A 2010 WikiLeaks cable confirmedthat the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, sheltered Brahamdagh Bugti, a youngBaloch separatist leader, for several years. (He was eventually packed off to

political asylum in Switzerlanda move backed by the United States.)

In this conflict, Nazar is emerging as one of the most important militant leadersoperating today. Of the three commanders of active separatist militias in theprovince, he is the only one who remains in Balochistan, and the only one whodoes not hail from tribal royalty. The other two commanders of his generationBugti and Hyrbyair Marri, who is also living in exile in Europeare descendantsof powerful tribes whose patriarchs once held cabinet-level positions in theprovincial government, and also formed and led insurgencies against the state.The Baloch movement has had a leftist cast since the 1970s; the veteran separatist

leader Khair Baksh Marri, who died in June this year, was famously Marxist, andthe predilection continues among younger leaders, including Nazar.Nevertheless, Nazars rise through the ranks of the provinces ethno-nationalistsrepresents a fundamental shift within the hierarchy of the movement. From oneled by sardars, or tribal leaders, it is becoming one spearheaded and populatedby a non-tribal cohort of middle-class Baloch. Nazars leadership exemplifies theshift of the movements epicentre from Balochistans north-easthome to theMarris and Bugtis, and known for its longstanding separatist sentimentsto theremittance-rich, urbanising south, which is home to a burgeoning educated andprofessional class, which has historically remained on the sidelines of theprovinces politics.

Over two years and more than a hundred interviews with Baloch in the province,as well as in cities such as Karachi and Islamabad, it became clear that the BLF,and other middle-class organisations such as the Baloch National Movement andthe Baloch Student OrganisationAzaad, are gaining in influence. Middle-classBaloch are increasingly forsaking statist, electoral politics out of sympathy for arapidly changing separatist movement. The states heavy-handed response


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army operations, kidnappings, and bans on the movements political wingshasspurred further support for separatists.

Nazars role in the separatist movement has placed him squarely on the radar ofthe Islamabad establishment. During an interview right after the May 2013

general election, a high-ranking politician from the National Party, whichgoverns Balochistan, began to trip over his words when I mentioned Nazar. Heasked that his and Nazars names not be mentioned side by side. My life couldbe in danger, he said. (The National Party and the BLF have long been at odds,since the former holds the BLF responsible for the 2010 murder of one of its mostsenior leaders, Maula Bakhsh Dasti. The BLF vehemently denies the charge.)Questions sent to the Balochistan desk of the Inter-Services Intelligence agencywent unanswered, as did a request to interview the inspector general of theFrontier Corps in Balochistan, Major General Muhammad Ejaz Shahid.Interviews with other security officialsfrom the Frontier Corps and the

Pakistan Armywere only granted after I promised to keep them anonymous.

At a cocktail reception in Islamabad, Abdul Qadir, a former army corpscommander in Balochistan who is now a minister in the federal government, toldme that Nazar was a student leader gone popular. Indeed, for Nazarssupporters, he is something of an everyday herosomeone who went fromstudent to medical doctor to guerrilla. The obvious reason for Nazarspopularity is his middle-class background, Malik Siraj Akbar, the editor of theBaloch Hal, a banned online magazine, told me. The Baloch view him as theguy we met at school, or the guy who rode the local bus.

Nazar does not make public appearancessince his abduction by Pakistanisecurity forces in 2005, he has been in hiding in the mountains of Balochistan. But,speaking to Baloch around the country, I discovered something of the breadth ofhis appeal. I once met a young boy who blushed, speaking of the first time hetouched Nazars feet. Girls wrote him long and frustrated letters asking himwhen they could join him in the mountains. I discovered poets who composedBalochi songs in his name. In the small Baloch village of Teertej, a group ofwomen at a zikr khanaa mosque for Balochistans Zikri Muslimseven toldme they named the intricate patterns on their enormous frocks after him.

On the wall of a study centre that Nazar attended as a student at the BolanMedical College in Balochistans capital, Quetta, young Baloch had scrawled hisname in large, cursive red letters. In another wall-chalking, members of the BSOAzaad had drawn the face of the Communist revolutionary Che Guevara next tohis famous quote, Every person who fights for his nation is my elder brother.When I asked Baloch students about the mural, they told me Guevararepresented the founder of their organisation, the doctor.


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IN NOVEMBER 2013, following several months of vague email exchanges andgarbled calls from satellite phones and unrecognisable numbers, I finally cameface to face with Nazar himself. After two days of travel, by plane, van,motorbike and foot, and a final ten-hour stretch in an armed motorbike-caravan

of nine, I arrived at a small mountain clearing in southern Balochistan. Two hutsbuilt of date-palm leaves stood out resolutely on the landscape, defended on allsides by lanky, Kalashnikov-carrying sarmachars perched on the crags, under astar-studded night sky.

A young woman dressed in pink, sent along to accompany me, served qahwa inthe hut where she and I were to rest while we awaited Nazar. Blankets and strawmats were strewn across the floor. Our only sources of light were a single lightbulb, attached to a portable battery, and a golden-red hearth prepared to keep uswarm. It was almost midnight, and we sat enveloped by the total silence of the

mountains. My chaperone leaned over to grab some twigs and dry leaves from asmall pile next to the fireplace, to keep the fire burning.

After a few moments, we heard crunching leaves and murmured Balochi at thedoorway. I saw a moustache, a brown leather jacket, and an M16 rifle. Nazarentered, flanked by nervous boys clutching RPGs, whose shawls covered theirfaces. The whites of their eyes were nearly neon-bright in the darkness of the hut.Quiet, almost reverent in front of their leader, they stood back, preferring not togreet me before he had done so. Under the light of the bulb, I saw Nazars shorthair, shalwar kameez, and the chappals on his feet. He nodded and said,

unassumingly, Almost like a Hollywood movie, isnt it?


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[ II ]

NAZARS EARLIEST MEMORIES

were bound up with army action. In

1973, when Nazar was three yearsold, Pakistans Prime Minister,Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, discovered acache of arms at the Iraqi Embassy inIslamabad. In a letter sent to Nixonfour days later, Bhutto blamed India,Afghanistan, Iraq and the SovietUnion for hatching a conspiracy,

with subversive and irredentist elements which seek to disrupt Pakistansintegrity. Linking the cache to the countrys Baloch ethno-nationalists (among

other groups), Bhutto dismissed and arrested the first democratically-electedprovincial government in Balochistan, shipped its leaders off to jail in theneighbouring province of Sindh, and eventually initiated legal proceedingsagainst 55 people in what came to be known as the Hyderabad Conspiracy Case.

Just two years earlier, after a bloody civil war, Pakistans eastern wing hadbroken off to form Bangladesh; he was eager to avoid a repeat of 1971.

What followed was reportedly one of the murkiest and most brutal operationscarried out by the Pakistani security forces in Balochistan. In his book InAfghanistans Shadow: Baluch Nationalism and Soviet Temptations, the

American political scientist Selig Harrison wrote that Bhutto deployed H-1helicopter gunships and F-14 fighter jetslent to him by the Shah of Iranin theprovince, and sent 80,000 troops to clamp down on the insurgency that thedismissal of the provincial cabinet had sparked.

Balochistan rose in anger. Nazars older brother, who would have been no olderthan 25 at the time, joined the sarmachars in the mountains. Nazar said his fatherwas punished for his brothers decisionhe was detained during one of severalsearch operations carried out by the security forces, and released only monthsafterwards.

Nazar was born sometime around 1970 in Mai, in Balochistans southern Awaranplains. From the tales of village elders, he learned that he was a descendant ofthe Damanis of western Balochistanor southern Iran. The Damani clan, lorehad it, once famously stood up for a woman who had been raped, taking her inand fighting her rapist. That long-ago decision embroiled the clan in a feud thatpushed them eastward, into modern-day Pakistan.


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We inherit our history, Nazar told me. It is transferred to us in these sorts ofstories.

Such stories directly challenged the founding myths of Pakistan. In mainstreamhistory books, Balochistan is said to have acceded peacefully to the new republic

in 1948. But Nazar was told that Balochistan was annexed when MuhammadAli Jinnah, Pakistans founder, deployed troops to the province.

It was as if we did not exist, Nazar said about discovering the version ofhistory told in state textbooks. Our history, our language, our very identity waseviscerated. They wanted us to be gungasmute and hollow men. The story of1948 was not the only disputed narrative, he learned: there was also no mentionof the four separatist uprisings in Balochistan since its integration into Pakistan,or any record of the brutal army operations in their wake.

When he was 15 years old, Nazar moved from Mai to the nearby town ofMashkey-Gajjar, where he first met members of the Baloch Student Organisation.The BSO had long been a forum for educated Baloch who were not closelyaffiliated with any of Balochistans notorious sardars. The groups politics wereunderpinned by an incipient nationalism, rather than the tribal affiliations thatknit early insurgents together. It was the beginning of a political engagement thatwould define Nazars life. In the late 1980s, he moved to Quetta to attendmedical school, at a time when Afghanistan, only three hours away, was in thefinal throes of the long Cold War between the Americans and the Soviets. Thewar left an indelible impact on Quetta, which became a magnet for the roshan-e-

khyaal, or enlightened thinkers, of leftist Pakistan. Nazar himself soon beganto read revolutionary literature.

We got our hands on Balochi translations of Frantz Fanons The Wretched of theEarth. We read Jean-Paul Sartres preface to Fanon, and Paulo Freires Pedagogyof the Oppressed. And we read the greats: Marx, Lenin, Castro, Kafka, Mao, HoChi Minh. Even Gabriel Garca Mrquez. I loved his One Hundred Years ofSolitude.

With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, Nazar and his comrades grewincreasingly dissatisfied with what he called the compromised politics of theethno-nationalists they were working with. Throughout that decade, middle-class moderates worked under the collective banner of the Balochistan NationalYouth Movement, and the larger BSO. These groups were predecessors to two ofBalochistans major political parties: the pro-Pakistan National Party, formed in1993, and the anti-Pakistan Baloch National Movement, formed in 1994 and nowconsidered the political wing of the BLF. (The two parties formed following a


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split between members of the BNYM and the BSO, and have been at loggerheadsever since.)

By 1999, Nazar told me, he and his friends in the BSO had started to talk ofarmed rebellion. At a party congress in January 2002, he marched out and

declared that he was breaking away to establish an organisation committed toBaloch independence. Shortly afterwards, he formed the BSOAzaad, whichwould become Balochistans most popular student organisation, as a seniorNational Party politician told me. In the run-up to last years general elections,the Pakistani government, in its own way, confirmed the fact of this popularity:it placed the professedly non-violent BSOAzaad on a list of bannedorganisations alongside militant Islamist groups such as the Sipah-e-Sahaba andthe Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.

But Nazar himself quickly moved on from his own organisation, which became

(and remains) a purely political one. He joined an avowedly militantorganisation, to take up arms, to fight for a sovereign, welfare state, he said. Atthat point, Nazar and his fellows were mere rookies compared to outfits such asthe Baloch Liberation Army, associated with the Marris, which had longexperience in the arts of guerrilla warfare. But, before long, the newcomersestablished themselves firmly on the frontlines of a new wave of the insurgency.

ON 2 MAY 2004,a bomb went off in Balochistans southern port city of Gwadar,killing three Chinese engineers and injuring 11 other people. The attack wasclaimed by the Baloch Liberation Front, a militant separatist outfit that had been

either established or resuscitated, depending on whom you ask, in 2003. Likemany organisations of its ilk, the BLF has many differing accounts of itsfoundation. Some trace it to Jumma Khan Marri, a Baloch ethno-nationalist saidto have established the group while living in Damascus in 1964. Others,including Nazar, say the group was conceived in 1999 and established in 2003. Iwas unable to establish which of these versions, or others, hewed most closely tothe truth. But it is certain that the BLF in its current avatar began operating in2003, and that Nazar, who joined a training camp in March that year, was one ofits members, though not yet leaders, at its inception. Nazar told me that the newBLF found support from many separatist groups with greater experience, andalso from the Baloch leader Akbar Bugti, a historically pro-establishment figurewho became a hardened separatist in his later years.

That same year, Pakistans military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, set abouttransforming Gwadar, a tiny coastal village, into a lucrative Pakistani asset, withhelp from China. Gwadar was a symbolic attack, Nazar said, and the Chineseengineers a perfect target. They had come here to exploit us, to be part of thecolonial machinery, not to distribute halwa. Nazar told me he did not take part


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in the attack himselfboth he and his comrades refused to talk about anyoffensives in which he might have participated.

To the BLF, Gwadar did not seem like the welcome opportunity for economicgrowth that the Musharraf government was promising the people of Pakistan.

Poor fishermen who had lived on the coast for generations were forcibly evictedin the melee of construction. Contractors arrived, but employment for localBaloch did not. Money poured insuddenly there were broad roads, newgovernment buildings, high-tech equipment and docksbut it made littledifference in the lives of the BLFs friends and families. The group was convincedthat the Pakistani state was doing what it had always done: using developmentas an excuse to exploit Balochistans natural resources.

The building of Gwadar was not the first time that the Baloch clashed with thestate over resource exploitation. In 1952, prospectors discovered north-eastern

Balochistans Sui gas fields, believed to be among the largest of their kind in theworld. Baloch accusations against the central governmentthat gas and profitswere being siphoned away from Balochistan to enrich the rest of the countrybecame a major source of disagreement and conflict. Even today, according tothe Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, the government meets only 41percent of urban Balochistans demand for gas. The government blames thespotty supply on the provinces vast distances and scattered, sparse population,essentially casting it as a logistical rather than political issue.

In our interview, Nazar maintained that the colonial tactics of the Pakistani

state justified the BLFs bloody actions. But if he had ever nurtured doubts aboutthe path the BLF had chosen, they were erased just a year later, on the day thePakistani state disappeared him.


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[ III ]

AT 3 AM ONE MORNING inMarch 2005, the 35-year-old

Nazar was nodding off over abook when he heard strangesounds in the room next to his.He was in a friends apartmentin Karachis Gulistan-e-Joharneighbourhood. At first, hethought the noises came fromsomeone bringing home waterand milk. He was surprised when the knuckles emerged from the darkness.

By 2005, stories of men being pulled off buses, attacked in the dead of night anddisappeared by Pakistani security forces had already started to trickle out. Noone knows just how many Baloch have disappeared over the course of the lastdecade. Between November 2013 and February 2014, Voice for Baloch MissingPersons, a campaign group of relatives of the missing, completed a 100-day,2,150-kilometre-long march from Quetta to Islamabad to protest thegovernments inaction over Baloch disappearances. The group claims to havedocumented more than 2,825 cases of missing persons. The Commission ofInquiry for Missing Persons, established by the Pakistani Supreme Court in 2010,says it is currently dealing with 1,475 cases, an undisclosed number of which are

from Balochistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan lists over sixhundred missing Baloch, but admits that the numbers might be underreported.Human Rights Watch says three hundred people were abducted between

January 2011 and February 2012 alone. Several benches of the Supreme Courtand the Balochistan High Court are hearing groups of petitions filed byconcerned relativessometimes ten, sometimes 35, sometimes seven togetherto try and get to the bottom of the mystery of the vanished Baloch. Some of thedisappeared are armed insurgents or political activists; others are innocentindividuals, at most marginally sympathetic towards the separatist movement.

That March morning, Nazar remembered, he found himself surrounded byanywhere between twenty and 25 men. Fists grabbed him by the throat, andpushed him to the ground. Feet kicked at him, and lathis slammed into his back.He felt fingers clawing at his neck, searching for a cyanide capsule that he mightswallow. At that moment he wished he had one, so he would not have to livethrough what would follow. His captors blindfolded him, and put a bag over hishead. He felt the sharp edges of the three or four steps they threw him down,


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arms pressed up against him in the backseat of a car, the musty heat of anunderground basement.

When his captors uncovered Nazars eyes, he saw a white room with a table, twochairs, and a screen set into a wall on one side. For a moment, someone turned

on the light in the room behind the screen, and he glimpsed the faces of somemen who were likely brought in to identify him.

They already knew my name when I entered, he said.

As Nazar waited under a rickety fan, he suspected that he had been picked up,like many others, by the security agencies. He could vaguely make out two mensitting on the chairs in the chamber he was in. One of them, a drunk, don-looking character, the type you see in Indian movies, told him what he woulddo with him. Youre the chairman, Nazar remembered him saying. Well turn

you into a schizo.

Nazar cracked a smile, remembering a friend of his who suffered fromschizophrenia. In response, the men forced him to lie down on the table. Thenone of them stood on his legs, and the other began to hit his hands and buttockswith a lathi. When they were finished they threw him back in the chair.Muskaraane ki sazaa, they told hima punishment for laughing.

They took his picture, took off his handcuffs, and locked his feet in fetters beforethrowing him into an even smaller cell. After that, everything was a blur: several

hour-long interrogations about his comrades, friends, the BSO, and threats thathe would have to end up selling his body just like the Bengalis. They told mea Bengali only cost 300 rupees, Nazar recalled. I was shocked that they knewthe price. Did they pay for this sort of thing? There was the thump-thump of along pole that one of the men slapped repeatedly on his own palm as hethreatened to stick it to Nazar. Nazars interrogators told him to pray for anaza-e-tanasul, a healthy penis. When I asked Nazar what they meant, he shookhis head and said it was an inappropriate topic for us to discuss.

In interviews with Nazar and eight other Baloch men in Awaran, Quetta, Karachiand Islamabadincluding a sociology student picked up by security forces fromQuetta who dropped out of school to join the insurgency after two months intorture chambers; a peasant from Mashkey-Gajjar picked up in an armyoperation who has now gone crazy, according to his neighbour and friend; anda doctor who left his practice after a year-long disappearance; all of whom askednot to be namedthe stories of torture by unidentified officials of the securityagencies were chillingly consistent. It seems Quetta had two torture chambers.The sociology student told me one was pitch black, used for mental torture; the


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other painted with spirals on the floor, walls and ceiling, used for physicaltorture. The doctor described how they hang our bodies upside down andelectrocute our stomachs.

The peasants neighbour said his tortured friend would not want to talk about

what happened to him inside the chamber. It is because he was raped, he said.They smeared a pole with oil and spices and stuck it up his behind.

Nazar denied that his captors had acted on their threat of sexual assault. NoBaloch would ever admit if that happened to him, he said. Their interrogationtechniques were inhumane ... We were their test objects.

In a 2011 report titled We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years: EnforcedDisappearances by Pakistan Security Forces in Balochistan, Human RightsWatch squarely blames Pakistani security forces for disappearances in the

province. The organisation found that the disappeared are typically held inunacknowledged detention facilities run by the Frontier Corps and intelligenceagencies, of which one is believed to be in an army cantonment named Kuli inQuetta. The report also states that most of those who have been released arereluctant to talk of their time in the torture cells, but that HRW has been able toascertain that the methods of torture included beatings, often with sticks orleather belts, hanging detainees upside down, and prolonged food and sleepdeprivation.

The men watching over Nazar repeatedly told him: We will dump your corpse

in a gutter, just like we do to everyone else. The mutilated bodies of many of thedisappeared have turned up on desolate mountain tops, rotting on empty cityroads, or dumped in isolated alleys. Often their arms and legs are cut off, theirfaces mauled beyond recognition, and their bodies punctured with gaping holes.In just seven months, between July 2010 and February 2011, HRW reported thatseventy bodies of missing persons were discovered in Balochistan. In late

January this year, a group of levieslocal Baloch serving as a police forcemadea chilling discovery in Tootak, a few hours outside Quetta: a mass grave with 13bodies of missing people, shot dead. (Locals later told journalists that the numberof dead in the grave was under-reported.)

In the months that followed his capture, Nazars family and friends campaignedfor his release. In August 2005, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistanissued a statement saying that the condition of Dr Allah Nazar is said to beespecially grave, and demanding that all illegally detained people held in thecountry be produced before courts. An HRCP report claimed that Nazar wasvirtually paralysed and has lost a substantial part of his memory; the torturehad physically and mentally impaired him. On 13 August, he was finally


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produced before a court at Rahim Yar Khan in Punjab, then moved toBalochistan and charged with acts of terrorism. This recourse to judicialprocedure should have been a relief from what had preceded it, especially asNazar began to emerge as a figure in the public eye over the course of hisdetention. But the men who handed him over to the police and then remanded

him back told him that his supporters efforts to free him would be of no use.We own the courts, he said he was told. We decide what happens inBalochistan.

The Supreme Court only really took up the issue of missing persons inBalochistan in 2009, and the matter has yet to be resolved. When the sitting chief

justice first tried to address the issue in 2007, under Musharrafs rule, he wasdeposed, sparking a famous lawyers movement that eventually led to thereinstatement of democratic rule. The enquiry was reopened in 2009, and in May2010, under public pressure and on the orders of the Supreme Court, the

government established the Commission of Inquiry for Missing Persons.Presently, at least three benches of the Supreme Court, as well as several benchesof the Balochistan High Court, hear individual and group petitions filed byconcerned relatives.

Nazar was detained for over a year, and finally released in July 2006. I do notknow why they let me go, he said. They either thought I would not survive, orthat I was not important enough. Nazars sister, Mahnaz, told me that he cameby Mai for a few hours to say goodbye to his family after his release, and thenescaped into the mountains. The timing was strangely apt; less than a month

later, the death of Akbar Bugti caused Balochistan to rise up again, andpermanently changed the character of the insurgency.


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[ IV ]

FOR THE FIRST FEW YEARS after the 2004 attack on Gwadar, Baloch militantslimited themselves to a handful of small-scale operations, mostly targeting

soldiers and gas pipelines. In 2005, just before Nazar was abducted, Akbar Bugti,who had loomed large over Balochistans political fortunes for three decades andwas widely considered a pro-Pakistan politician, launched a scathing critique ofthe military regime under Musharraf. The catalyst for this change of heartappeared to be a horrific rape that took place in Sui, a gas-producing town inBugtis backyard, the district of Dera Bugti.

On the night of 2 January 2005, Shazia Khalid was asleep in her bedroom when aman entered it. He pulled her by the hair, pressed down on her throat, wrappeda telephone cord around her neck and beat her head with the receiver. He

proceeded to rape her repeatedly. According to a 35-page confidential summary,released at the end of that month by an independent tribunal headed by a judgeof the Balochistan High Court, Khalid was semi-conscious when she stumbledinto a nurses office the next morning, with a swelling on her forehead, bleedingfrom her nose and ear. In his report on the incident, the New York Times

journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote that officials from her employers, PakistanPetroleum Limited, rushed to the scene, and allegedly told her to stay quiet. Ininterviews with journalists, Khalid accused a Captain Hammad of the PakistanArmy of the crime, and claimed that security forces had tried to cover it up. In areport in the Daily Times, Sherry Rehman, then an opposition member of the

National Assembly, stated that Musharraf pronounced Captain Hammad, oneof the accused in the case, innocent before the judicial enquiry was completed.

The incident echoed the old story about Allah Nazars Damani ancestors, exiledfrom their lands for standing up for a rape victim. It also provoked widespreadoutrage in Balochistan. The Baloch Liberation Army, a militant group that usedto be headed by another tribal leader, the recently deceased Khair Bakhsh Marri,resurfaced with renewed vigour after years in obscurity. Other groups steppedup activity too, firing rockets on PPL gas pipelines to protest the cover-up andclaiming solidarity with Khalid.

Bugti, who attended Oxford University, was appointed the governor ofBalochistan in 1973, after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dismissed the provincialgovernment. Less than a year later, Bugti resigned the post in protest against theatrocities of Pakistani security forces in the region. Still, he was generallyconsidered an assimilationist, until Khalids rape allegedly forced him to changehis views. (Nazar, among others, disputed this, telling me that Bugti hadswitched sides long before.) For over a year and a half, Bugti and Musharraf


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remained locked in battle. The governments response to Balochistans outragewas swift and harsh; in an interview on GEO TV, Musharraf remarked, It is notthe seventies, where they will climb mountains and we will go running afterthem. They will not know what hit them, and they will not know where it camefrom. On the night of 26 August 2006, 37 militants and 21 military personnel

died in a clash between security forces and armed separatists. Bugti was amongthose killed.

His death prompted Baloch parties to declare a 15-day mourning period. Shutter-down and wheel-jam strikes were announced across the province. Balochprotestors flooded the streets in cities across Pakistan. Hundreds of students inQuettamany from Nazars alma mater, Bolan Medical Collegeblocked roadsand attacked government buildings. This incident, a mournful pro-Pakistanpolitician by the name of Akhtar Mengal said to the Friday Times, has cut ourlast link, if there was any, with Pakistan.

Soon, many Baloch separatist leaders began to escape the country, applying forpolitical asylum abroad. Others turned up dead. In November 2007, a little over ayear after Bugtis killing, Balaach Marri, a commander in the BLA, wasassassinated in Afghanistan. In April 2009, the decomposed bodies of GhulamMohammad Baloch, the chairman of the Baloch National Movement, Lala Munir,the general-secretary of the Baloch National Front, and Sher Mohammad Bugti,the vice chairman of the Baloch Republican Party, were dumped in Pidrak, 35kilometres from the southern Baloch city of Turbat. They had been abducted,tortured and killed just five days after attending a court hearing in the city.

About a year later, following many threats, Hyrbyair Marri, the allegedcommander of the Baloch Republican Army, and Brahamdagh Bugti of the BLA,escaped the country. Their organisations had been the only major militantgroups operating in Balochistan, save onethe BLF.

THE SOUTHERN MEKRAN BELT, which borders Iran and Balochistanslucrative coastline, had historically been on the margins of the provinces post-1947 political movements. But, in the ten years leading up to Nazars abduction,the emigration of Baloch to neighbouring Karachi, the Gulf states and Iran pavedthe way for a rapid rise in smuggling and remittances, which prompted theurbanisation of this southern corner of Pakistan. Concurrently, an educatedmiddle class emerged, in an area that remained desperately poor. In the course ofelevating itself above the concerns of everyday survival, this class becameincreasingly involved in broader political questions, and so shifted the epicentreof Baloch politics from the primarily tribal north to the increasingly urbanisedsouth. One section of this class became active promoters of pro-Pakistan politics.In 2013, acknowledging the demographic and cultural shifts in the province, thenewly elected prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, nominated Nazars more moderate,


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middle-class colleague, Dr Abdul Malik, as chief minister of Balochistan. Maliksappointment ended decades of sardari dominance in the provinces highest office(although the assembly remains dominated by sardars).

But the shift that brought Malik to power also produced the new Baloch

separatist: usually an educated middle-class youth, as Malik Siraj Akbar, editorof the Baloch Hal, wrote in his book The Redefined Dimensions of BalochNationalist Movement. The new separatist movement even includes womenand children, according to Akbar, who actively participate in peaceful protestrallies in support of a free Balochistan.

In the years following Bugtis death, the BLF allied with other militant groups,including the BLA and the BRA, as well as lesser-known organisations such asthe Balochistan Liberation United Front and the United Baloch Army. Today, theBLF expresses unequivocal solidarity with all attacks carried out in the name of

separatism. A Human Rights Watch report released in 2010 said those attackshave included numerous targeted abductions and killings of teachers,professors and school administrators. In one of the more recent offensivescarried out by the UBA, 16 people were killed and 44 injured when a bomb wasdetonated on a passenger train in April this year. The UBA, allegedly a splintergroup of the BLA that aims to export the insurgency beyond Balochistan, alsotook responsibility in the same month for a bomb that killed 24 people andinjured 116 in an attack on a vegetable market outside a Pashtun slum inIslamabad.

Over the last ten years, the BLF, which conducts most of its attacks in southernBalochistan, has been accused of targeting Frontier Corps soldiers and otherrepresentatives of the Pakistani state. In 2011, the spokesperson of theBalochistan Frontier Corps told me that there were 27 platoons (almost 1,000soldiers) patrolling Quetta alongside the police force. The spokesperson alsoidentified southern Balochistan, the headquarters of the BLF, as a place wheretroops have been concentrated. In conversations with soldiers I met atcheckpoints while travelling through Balochistan over the last two years, I foundthat many of them were simply young and afraid, deployed from Punjab, unableto speak the language, and frequently afraid for their lives. A security officialtold me that the armed forces ensured that an increasing number of Baloch were

joining their rankseven if the Pakistan Army states on its website that only asmall number of Baloch youth have preferred this profession, mainly because ofilliteracy and ignorance. Some of the Baloch I spoke to told me that soldiers atcheckpoints would try to send them to markets to pick up supplies like water,milk or cigarettes. They are told we are traitors, Raheema, a young woman Istayed with in Mashkey-Gajjar, told me, but are surprised when they find thatwe are normal people.


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Two months ago, the BLF kidnapped two coast guards in Gwadar, promptingthe Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to issue a press statement asking fortheir release. Most controversially, the group has been accused of targeting localBaloch suspected of ties to the Pakistani state. The BLF has killed the highest

number of fellow Baloch by accusing them of spying for Pakistani agencies orbeing traitors, Akbar said. These incidents, according to Akbar, hadsignificantly eroded their support base. Hasil Khan Bizenjo, a senior memberof the National Party, agreed. They have lost support among the Baloch, hesaid, because they have shut down shops, killed Punjabis, and sometimesattacked and murdered their own people.

But for many Baloch, attacks by the BLF and other separatist groups areovershadowed by the atrocities carried out by the Pakistani security forces. Thatfact was even admitted by Bizenjo, who credited increased support for separatist

politics to the atrocious policies of the Pakistani state. Recently, Lateef Johar, amember of the BSOAzaad, carried out a 46-day hunger strike in front of theKarachi Press Club to protest the kidnapping of the secretary-general of hisorganisation, Zahid Baloch. More tellingly, thousands turned up for the funeralof the 86-year-old Khair Baksh Marri last month. The authorities attempted togive Marri a state funeral, but young female separatists from the BSOAzaadcordoned off his body, draped his casket with the flag of independentBalochistan, and whisked him away to a graveyard of their martyrs.


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[ V ]

THE CAST OFCHARACTERS I met during

the course of my reportingrevealed to me how stark thechanges within Balochistanipolitics in the last decade hadbeen. In Karachi, I met 27-year-old Kareema, whorecently became the actingchairman of the BSOAzaadafter Zahid Baloch, the headof the organisation, was

picked up at gunpoint in front of her by people Kareema claimed wereintelligence men. From the pillion of a motorbike in southern Balochistan, Ispoke for several hours with the young man driving me, an English literaturemajor who loved George Orwell and said Thomas Hardys Tess of theDUrbervilles made him cry (How could anyone treat poor Tess like that?). InIslamabad, a high-school student told me she was compelled to keep thewhereabouts of her favorite Uncle Manan, a senior member of the separatistmovement, a secret. I love talking with him about Kajol, she said. He washeartbroken when she married Ajay Devgn.

In the southern village of Teertej, a medical student explained how he spent ayear at Lahores King Edwards College, one of the best medical schools in thecountry, before dropping out when a friend of his was disappeared, making himfear that he might be next. And at a medical camp for earthquake survivors insouthern Balochistans Awaran district, a former policeman, wrapped in a shawland clutching a Kalashnikov, confessed he had found it increasingly difficult tofollow orders to arrest his own people. That, he said, was what made him defectto the insurgency.

Abdul Wahab Baloch, the head of the separatist advocacy group the BalochRights Council, called the Baloch a nation without a state, no different from the

Kurds. The separatists view of Balochistan is fundamentally different from thatof the Pakistani mainstream. Their Balochistan is part of the five-thousand-year-old homeland of the Baloch people, whose rightful territory stretches into Iran,Afghanistan, and some of Pakistans other areas, including the countrys richestand most densely populated province, Punjab. This contention is not without itscritics. Lest anyone forget, Balochistan houses other ethnic groups too, thesecurity analyst Ejaz Haider wrote in a 2010 editorial for the Express Tribune, a


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national daily, referring to Pashtuns, Sindhis, Punjabis, Hazaras and others.Haider pointed out that separatists target other ethnic groups on racial grounds.Yet, the left-wing activist Aasim Sajjad Akhtar said, this xenophobic tendency insome nationalist groups was superseded only by a parallel indifference in thedominant Punjab province to the authoritarian policies of the Pakistani state.

My last interview with Nazar ended early in the morning two days after I firstarrived in the mountain clearing where we met. We had spoken extensively ofBaloch dreams and aspirationsthe stuff on which the BLF is built. In mypolitics I began to meet more and more Baloch and realised that we are onepeople, Nazar told me. Our psyche is one. The way we view our lives, our joys,our grief, our values, our code of honour. From the northern tip of Kalat state tothe southern Kharan strip, we stood united. Our hours of conversation in thedate-palm hut took place over plates of Baloch sajjimutton cookedundergroundand cups of qahwa. Throughout the encounter, we were amid a

group of loyal sarmachars, many of whom sat close to us, listening to Nazarspeak.

Throughout the interview, Nazar denied all charges of kidnapping civilians,torture and murder levelled against him and the BLF. He said that attacksagainst individuals living within Balochistan took place only after a carefulbackground check that is reported directly to the BLF leadership. They onlykilled, he argued, those who threatened the survival of the movement. Thiswas a sentiment that resonated among separatists. Dr Abdul Mananthe Kajolfan known as Uncle Manan to his niece, and the head of the BNM, the BLFs

political wingtold me, It is a question of whether we should let that persondie, or the movement die. We choose the movement over the individual. Two ofhis own cousins had been killed a few months before our conversation, he said.

Two days after my initial visit to Nazars home in Mai, where I went a monthbefore I met him, Pakistani security forces launched a second operation inAwaran district. It was October 2013, and I was in Mashkey-Gajjar, close to Mai,asleep under an open sky and covered by a mosquito net, when they arrived.

An earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale had hit the area at the end ofSeptember. The Pakistani government, security forces and relief organisationshad started to distribute aid in the area, which was also the headquarters of theBLF, where many fighters went to ground. Several times, the army tried to wrestcontrol of a medical camp set up and administered by separatists. On that day,however, the army succeeded, and rounded up men to ask them about thewhereabouts of militants. I awoke to explosions and the sound of helicopterscircling above the town of Mashkey-Gajjar. Cell phone reception had stopped, or


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been cut off, and my hosts told me that the army had infiltrated the town to takeover the medical camp.

Several village residents, as well the ambulance driver who brought me to theseparts, said that around 25 army soldiers stormed the camp early that morning,

ostensibly seeking members of the BLF. A fighter who was in the camp escaped,and the soldiers beat the driver before realising he was an innocent bystanderand letting him go. The driver, who asked me not to name him, claimed that thearmy rounded up between four hundred and five hundred men and marchedthem into the camp. There, an officer gave a short speech announcing that thearmy had entered Mashkey-Gajjar and had plans to stay for the next five years.The army would protect the residents from militants, provided they helped thesecurity forces by identifying members of militant groups. The driver noticedthat everyone stayed quiet. They may have been frightened by the thought ofreprisals by the militants, and perhaps also wary of the deeply unpopular

Pakistan Army.

It took several more skirmishes between the army and the BLF before the formerconsolidated control over the camp, and named it the Army Relief Camp. In apress release issued a few days after news of the operation broke, the Inter-Services Public Relations office denied that any operation had taken place andinsisted that the armys presence in the area was solely for distributing reliefgoods. According to Riaz Suhail, a BBC Urdu journalist who covers Balochistan,these claims are difficult to verify independently but indicated that the warbetween the Pakistani state and Balochistans insurgents is entering a third phase.

After the disappearances and the dumping of mutilated bodies, the securityforces are now using encounters to eliminate separatists.

On the final leg of my trip, returning from meeting Nazar, I spent a night inTeertej. At the far end of the village, in a small zikr khannaa mud hut standingunder the starsa group of women sat in a circle chanting prayers. At the end,they sang a song in support of the insurgency. The song was originally sung incelebration of marriage, or shaadi. Now, they had replaced the shaadi withshahadat, or martyrdom:

Reza Jan, shahadat mubarakYou now have a new nameCome, my sisters, see what Reza Jan has doneReza Jan picked up a pen, Reza Jan made god happyReza Jan created, the agencies blackened his faceMother has sung you a song, she has come to your second shaadi

home front; the changing face of balochistan’s separatist insurgency

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