BALOCHISTAN GEOPOLITICS AND AKBAR BUGTI - Part I
The killing of Nawab Bugti by Pakistan’s ’commando regime’ has sent
shockwaves across the country and has reinforced Baloch nationalism
like never before. However, nationalism, insurgencies, militancy and
guerrilla warfare, which has acquired a chronic historic persistence
in this region, is inextricably linked with the geopolitical history
of this antique land. Perhaps more than anything else, Bugti
certainly was not the first victim of the geopolitics that is driven
by cut-throat capitalist competitions and the world powers’
alternating interests.
Balochistan, the province, comprises forty-three per cent of
Pakistan’s land mass, and a 770 km coastline, but only makes up five
per cent of the country’s population. These five per cent people are
perhaps also sitting on the wealthiest land mass in the country.
However, these people are no ordinary people. They are the Baloch.
The mythological and much romanticised narrative of this region
reinforces the power of the tribesmen and their legendary armour,
their horses and their fighting prowess. The Baloch, whose origins
are considered Semitic, came in a caravan from Aleppo in Syria —
pushed out perhaps by invasions and conflicts, or geographic
necessities. Then a mythico-historical war between two brothers
Gwaram and Mir Chakar went on for a hundred years, leading to a vast
diaspora of the Balochi nation across the lands of Sindh, Punjab, and
north in the Pushtoon belt. Thus the narratives of their very making,
their diasporas, their tribal structures, their turbans, beards and
swords sustains and feeds into their everlasting war.
However, Baloch nationalism, more than anything else, is a by-product
of imperial and neo-imperial capitalist struggles in the context of a
weak and ineffective state. In the 56 years of Pakistan, four
insurgencies have been suppressed leading to many executions,
arrests, disappearances and massacres. A history of the area also
shows a contested space in the 19th century imperial designs resisted
frantically by the tribesmen.
The Great Game was a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling in the empire
building competition between Tsarist Russia, Victorian England and
the Ottoman Empire for the control of trade routes in northern India
in the nineteenth century. To counteract Persian and Russian designs
the British empire-makers constructed this area as a frontier of
tribes and landscapes through which they would contain the designs of
their rivals.
Sovereignty and concentration of power in Balochistan can be traced
to the seventeenth century Khanate of Kalat, a Brahui speaking
region. Even though the Kalat chiefs, and the Ahmedzais, maintained
their dynastic hold for nearly three centuries, very frequently the
region would break out in rebellion. The contests of power between
the three empires were often tested on the Khanate of Kalat who
always depended on external powers to hold them together. The Khanate
was never a complete state unto its own and its sovereignty was
always subject to protection either from the kingdoms in Delhi or the
rulers in Afghanistan or Persia.
The British, in the 19th century, were intensely impressed by what
they called, the ’freebooter’ tribes, who maintained their
independence, with their incessant skills to attack, raid and
plunder. The Marri and the Bugti tribes were constructed in the
British imagination as the fiercest of them all. The perception of
the exaggerated danger of the Balochi ’freebooter’ led the British to
organise campaigns for decades to suppress their rebellions by
carrying out physical massacres; breaking their spatial structures by
capturing their chiefs; shifting the tribes into different
territories; and replacing their material culture of mares and
matchlocks with ploughs and hoes.
The Bugtis, for instance, were decreed as enemies of the British, but
also as offenders and outlaws, and a proclamation was announced in
1846 where a reward of Rs10 was given to anyone who captured a Bugti.
Under Colonel Mereweather, in October 1847, about five hundred and
sixty Bugtis were killed by the British troops, and in this fight
with the ’dangerous, turbulent hill tribes’ only one British soldier
lost his life. In the aftermath of this campaign, Mereweather is
praised extensively, his action described as an act of gallantry and
skill, the "most perfectly successful affair ever witnessed or heard
of", echoing today’s congratulatory posture of the Pakistani army
after killing Nawab Bugti and his men.
However, parallel to the aggressive military posture was a
’civilising’ one. Other ’plundering and raiding’ tribes, such as the
Jakhranis and Domkis were moved out from the area and settled in
Sindh and therefore subdued. Sporadically under Robert Sandamen’s
frontier policy the Marri and the Bugti tribesmen were temporarily
contained by the ’humane’ indirect rule, which allowed the Marris and
Bugtis their independence in lieu of certain concessions or
cooperation with the British. Hence, for one and a half centuries,
the British had to constantly use diplomacy and force, but never
entirely succeeded in containing tribal incursions.
Balochistan is yet a border country and a frontier region for the
Pakistani metropolis. Frontiers have more often than not porous
borders and economic and social ties with their alien neighbours.
It’s vast land area, which borders with Iran and Afghanistan, has
made it a politically and socially scattered area where people are
among the poorest and the most backward in Pakistan. The sparse and
often nomadic and pastoral populations traverse borders and have
defied boundaries earlier in the movement of large herds, and now
weapons, drugs, and goods.
Frontier tribes are still suspicious of foreigners, and while these
frontiers are often primary suppliers of raw materials to the rest of
the country, they still lag behind in services.
The Baloch are intrinsically a herding people. Therefore it is a
contradiction that the Baloch should be concerned with nationalism or
identity. However, pastoral people are considered ’natural’ fighters.
Their mobility contributes to their resilience and their contest for
scarce resources, for protection of their herds, and in fragile lands
makes them always ready for a competition for turf.
Ironically the state of Pakistan has reinforced the tribal identity
and structure of Balochistan by refusing to integrate it into the
metropolis on the terms of the Balochis. The Bugti and Marri tribes,
like 200 years ago, hold their own. But they are also projected as
fearsome, war-like, defiant, and dangerous by the military
establishment rather like their colonial predecessors.
Pakistani Balochistan however is not an ordinary borderland. It is
simply not marginalised on the basis of its geographical remoteness.
It is also marginalised because of its wealth. It is estimated that
the Balochis are sitting on 24 trillion cubic feet of natural gas,
and 6 billion barrels of oil, besides vast reserves of copper, zinc,
antimony, and chromites in the Chaghai district at Saindak. It is
ironical that an area subject to seasonal droughts and extreme water
shortages should be hiding not only treasures in its midst but also
become a geographic passage for global capitalist interests. The
competition and control of energy resources and energy routes, will,
more than any other factor, reshape perhaps both the map of the
region and its socio-political landscape.
The first claimant to Baloch resources is the state of Pakistan,
which considers this area, its hinterland for development of the
metropolitan Pakistan. A predatory centre has been cannibalising
Balochistan’s resources with little or no return in an
institutionalized way, to the people of the area. Second, it has over
the years become a centre of free market competitions between China,
and the US, on the one hand, and to a lesser extent, Iran and India.
The new dimension to the geopolitics is now complicated by the
Balochi borderlands seated between the new oil and gas wealthy
central Asian states and the new markets in Asia Pacific with its
brand new deep seaport, Gwadar. Politically its geographical location
neighbouring Iran, has enhanced its importance for the US. Its vast
border with Afghanistan makes Balochistan a key player in terror and
war-against-terror politics. India extends itself through Afghanistan
which has strategically come together for their individual interests.
BALOCHISTAN GEOPOLITICS - Part II
Much of the nineties was spent by global oil companies trying to
design how to provide accessible markets to the newly exposed Central
Asian Republics. Gas resources in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan are estimated to equal 236 trillion cubic
feet, and oil resources comprise more than 60 billion barrels of oil.
This oil must reach the markets. The shortest route to the markets in
the Asia Pacific region, as you would have guessed by now, is first
through Iran and then Afghanistan and Balochistan.
Several proposals of oil and gas routes are afloat. One of the
proposed pipelines is to begin from Gharzhou, in northern
Turkmenistan, and extend southeastern through Afghanistan, to an
export terminal that would be constructed on the Pakistan coast along
the Arabian Sea. Another gas pipeline linking Turkmenistan’s vast
natural gas reserves in Daulatabad Field with markets in Pakistan and
later India. Similar routes are drawn across Iran, China, and
Afghanistan. Historical imaginations of the nineteenth century are
being re-invoked by these companies. The drooling oil companies are
terming all of these networks of pipelines the new Silk roads while
the politics of accessing oil and gas routes from Central Asia to the
markets is the New Great Game. The ’spheres of influence’ terminology
in vogue then in the Great Game is being re-invoked as well by these
neo-imperial projects.
China too is interested in having its share in the new Silk roads.
Shanghai Five has brought together China, and the Central Asian
republics, primarily to counter the US influence in Central Asia.
China has not only initiated the longest gas pipeline in the world to
take central Asian oil to Xingzian and then Shanghai, it has also
succeeded in accessing Balochistan’s Gwadar.
The first phase of the much coveted billion dollar strategically
located Port of Gwadar has been completed, with the Chinese
contributing 200 billion dollars. The gas pipeline from Central Asia
will pass from here, and this will be the outlet to the land corridor
between South Asia and Central Asia. The Chinese have been subject to
attacks by the Baloch insurgents who see their interest in the port
as a threat to their survival. In May 2003, four Chinese engineers
were killed in Gwadar area.
Once completed, the Gwadar port will rank among the world’s largest
deep-seaports. To connect western China with Central Asia by land
routes, Pakistan is working on a network of road links to Afghanistan
from its border town of Chaman in Balochistan to Qandahar. In the
northwest, it is building similar road links like the recently
completed road to Torkham, to Jalalabad, and eventually the Gwadar
port will be accessible for Chinese imports and exports through
overland links that will stretch to and from the Karakoram Highway in
Pakistan’s Northern Areas that border China’s Muslim-majority
Autonomous Region of Xingjian. In addition, the port will have a
modern air defence unit, a garrison, and a first-rate international
airport capable of handling airbus service.
India’s objectives are to impede Pakistan’s strategic depth in
Balochistan, and to impede China from projecting its power in the
Arabian Sea, which India wants to have as its exclusive domain, and
also at the same time, to prevent Pakistan from offering safe transit
routes to the Central Asian Republics, so that they opt for the
alternative Afghanistan-Iran route in which India is a major
investor. Afghanistan and India are the only two countries that
condemned the killing of the Baloch chief. Pakistan sees the hand of
India in instigating local insurgency through Afghanistan.
It is interesting to note a tit for tat response on each of these
ventures. When the Chinese began the Gwadar port, the Indians began
to help Iranians construct the Chabahar port next door. The Chabahar
port ironically also located in the Baloch part of Iran, will be
accessible for Indian imports and exports, with road links to
Afghanistan and Central Asia. India is helping build a 200-kilometre
road that will connect Chabahar with Afghanistan. And in response to
the Chinese presence in Pakistan, the Indians are now trying to
accomplish an air base in Tajikistan making India the fourth power
after Russia, the US and Germany to have a base in Central Asia.
Moreover, the Indians have secured diplomatic missions in the South
of Afghanistan in Kandahar, which is dangerously close to the Baloch
border.
Meanwhile, the US is the grand surveyor. While it keeps speaking of a
unified and strong Pakistan it would definitely like to limit Chinese
activity. It would also like to peep into Iran as a regular exercise.
Pakistan offered the US exclusive access to two of its critical
airbases in Jacobabad (Sindh) and Pasni (Balochistan) during the US
invasion of Afghanistan.
So while the US is making this ’the sphere of influence’, India is
encircling Pakistan, and Pakistan is trying to get its circle back,
while China is making its own arcs, exploiting the Central Asian and
Pakistani resources and encircling India, while the Indians are
responding by counter circling China. All are attempting to make new
Silk routes and playing new games.
For Pakistan offering Balochistan as the corridor means vast transit
earnings, besides enormous geopolitical levers to its advantage. More
than forty thousand ground troops; major intelligence operations; air
bases in Pasni, Quetta, Ormara and Gwadar; a naval base in Ormara and
Gwadar; and cantonments all over the place with new ones coming up in
Sui, Kohlu and Gwadar are just a few examples. This militocracy
protects and enables the intense colonisation which is a
multinational project, involving the US and the Chinese whose
interests are both establishment of economic and military bases vis a
vis India and Iran respectively, but also to expand their corporate
empires. Pakistan is courting all and everyone, and is equally
foreign and alien to the Baloch.
It is in this context that the colonisation and militarisation of
Balochistan must be seen; and in response to that, a people
struggling to give meaning to their very histories, their future and
their survival. The Baloch are swiftly becoming irrelevant in these
back to back competitions between world powers, the new race for
bases, for gas and oil routes, for oil and gas explorations, for
copper mining and gold mining, and are being crushed in Pakistan’s
presentation of Balochistan as a territory up for grabs for
commercial exploitation.
The military reasserts its political power by giving the US all the
space to establish its bases, while at the same time, offering the
land of the Baloch to China to establish their first warm-water
foothold in the Indian Ocean. The military then must always clear the
debris of nationalisms and insurgencies through their short-term
brute force. It is then, no wonder that the targets of the Baloch are
the intrusive ugly pipelines, the grid stations, the roads, the port,
the army men, all seen as serving other people and other places. And
perhaps, the centre can expect everlasting fighting as a mode of the
area, because of the geographic access to vanishing, consolidating
and remerging, that this vast hilly territory with labyrinths of
mountain passes and obstructions allows.
Eventually, for the Baloch, as I see it, the emergence of nationalism
is trying to put a name to a struggle that is between their sheer
relevance and their becoming nothing. And in this do or die game,
scapegoats like Mehrab Khan, Nauroz Khan, and Nawab Akbar will be
presented by the Baloch, and destroyed by the colonial masters in
this everlasting and solitary battle for survival of the Baloch,
against vast multiple empire making projects.