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Pakistan

Ethnic Separatism in Balochistan: Tribal Turbulence on the Energy Corridor

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Fixing Fractured Nations

Part of the book series: Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific Series ((CSAP))

Abstract

In Afghanistan’s Shadow, a book published in 1981 by well-known author Selig S. Harrison, examined that era’s threat of Soviet expansionism in the light of Baloch nationalism. It was in Balochistan,2 the vast and sparsely populated province in southwestern Pakistan, that the Pakistan army had ruthlessly suppressed a tribal separatist insurgency in the course of the 1970s. Rebellious Balochistan lay between Afghanistan and the sea; and since Soviet forces had occupied Afghanistan militarily in late 1979, the possibility that Soviet leaders might be tempted to realize the long-cherished Russian goal of securing a warm-water port by exploiting lingering separatist grievances in neighbouring Pakistan had naturally arisen. ‘A glance at the map’, Harrison wrote at the outset of the book, ‘quickly explains why strategically located Baluchistan and the five million Baluch tribesmen who live there could easily become the focal point of superpower conflict.’3

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Notes

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  42. A case in point is the description veteran writer Selig Harrison gave of the methods the Musharraf government employed against its Baloch nationalist adversaries. A ‘slow-motion genocide’, he wrote, is being inflicted on the Baloch. In August 2006, thousands of them were forced to flee their villages ‘to escape bombing and strafing by the US-supplied F-16 fighter jets and Cobra helicopter gunships of the Pakistan air force’. Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, he alleged, ‘is using new methods, more repressive than those of his predecessors, to crush the insurgency’. Baloch spokesmen, he says, ‘have reported large-scale kidnappings and disappearances, charging that Pakistani forces have rounded up hundreds of Baloch youths on unspecified charges and taken them to unknown locations’. S. S. Harrison, ‘Pakistan’s Baluch Insurgency’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 5 October 2006, www.mondediplo.com/2006/10/05baluchistan, accessed 4 August 2007. With most of Harrison’s description there is no need to quibble. Some of it, however, is unnecessarily provocative. For one thing, his use of the word ‘genocide’, even if slow motion, is unwarranted. And his mention of F-16 fighter jets presents a real problem. In his article, Harrison cites the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan as the source for the reported use of F-16s in recent fighting. A careful reading of that group’s meticulously assembled report, published in early 2006, reveals, however, that there is no mention of that aircraft anywhere in it. It does mention bombings and, also, strafing by gunship helicopters; but it leaves to the reader’s judgement whether Pakistan would have used for this militarily rather piddling task some of the hundreds of much cheaper Chinese-supplied fighter aircraft in its inventory as opposed to any of the dwindling stock of its very expensive, nuclear capable, ageing but still highly prized F-16s. Similarly, the 2006 International Crisis Group report on Balochistan also states categorically that ‘US-supplied Cobra helicopters and F-16s’ are being used against the Baloch. ICG, Pakistan: The Worsening Conflict in Balochistan, p. 22 (reference 180). The ICG report cites an article in The New York Times contributed by correspondent Carlotta Gall in support of its contention. Gall’s sole cited source for this information, however, was an interview with the Baloch nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, at the time a guiding force of the Baloch insurgency and a shrewd but hardly impartial witness, who had told the American journalist (with perhaps the hope of bringing American pressure down upon Islamabad) ‘that the government was using its American-supplied jets and helicopter gunships against them’. C. Gall, ‘In Remote Pakistan Province, a Civil War Festers’, The New York Times, 2 April 2006. Given the extraordinary strategic significance that has for decades been attached to America’s sale of F-16s to Pakistan, any reference to their use against Pakistan’s own citizens (especially when linked with the politically charged reference to the ‘genocidal’ onslaught of Pakistan’s armed forces) is inevitably freighted with potentially momentous political consequences.

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  1. Robert G. Wirsing
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Service in Qatar, Georgetown University, State of Qatar

    Robert G. Wirsing (Visiting Professor) (Visiting Professor)

  2. Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, USA

    Ehsan Ahrari (Professor of Security Studies) (Professor of Security Studies)

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© 2010 Robert G. Wirsing

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Wirsing, R.G. (2010). Pakistan. In: Wirsing, R.G., Ahrari, E. (eds) Fixing Fractured Nations. Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281271_5

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