Pakistan: A Hard Country (59 page)
My meetings with Sindhi intel ectuals in Hyderabad were not encouraging as to the likely character of that nationalism. Like their East European equivalents in the past, their principal occupations appear to be folklore, nationalistical y coloured religion (in this case, Sindhi Sufism), and what might be described as folkloric historiography – an approach now extended from the glorious past of the Indus Val ey civilization and the Talpurs to the martyrs of the Bhutto dynasty. These have a huge gal ery devoted to them in the Folklore Museum of Hyderabad University, where you pass from the exquisite traditional embroidery of Sindh to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s worshipful y preserved socks.
With rare exceptions, repeated attempts on my part to discuss social, economic and ecological issues with Sindhi intel ectuals led to a few platitudinous statements of concern, fol owed by a rapid reversion to the eternal topics of Mohajir and Punjabi exploitation of Sindh. The eventual col apse of Pakistan was taken as a given by most of them, but very few had thought seriously as to what would come next, beyond a wonderful independent Sindhi national existence in ‘the most fertile part of Asia’, as Sindh was repeatedly described to me.
If al this was depressingly familiar from conversations in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union before their col apse, even more depressing was the light-hearted way in which a number of people on al sides talked of forthcoming ethnic war. The landowner brother of a PPP member of parliament described Sindh’s prospects to me as fol ows: We are a peace-loving people, but if you look at our history, we are also the greatest fighting people in Pakistan, and we have the Pathans and Baloch on our side. I tel you that if there is war with the Mohajirs, Sindhis may receive the first blow, but then we wil kil the Mohajirs like rats. They wil be like the Jews in World War I , hiding in cel ars and being hunted down. And in any case, Karachi could not live a week without Sindh’s food and water.
Hearing this, I remembered similarly vainglorious words the previous week from a Mohajir doctor in Karachi: ‘If Pakistan breaks up, the Mohajirs would conquer the whole of Sindh in a week and take their water. These waderos and their slaves wil never fight.’ Al this recal s an old German proverb, ‘He who speaks like this, also shoots.’
At the moment, however, al this remains just ugly talk. The leaderships of the various parties, the wadero class in the interior, and the businessmen of Karachi al know how much they have to lose from the disintegration of Pakistan. The tragedy of interior Sindh therefore does resemble that of some of the former Communist states – the revolution it so desperately needs would also spel its destruction.
Thus I remember Sindhi nationalists declaring back in 1989 how there would soon be a ‘war to the death’ against the Mohajirs. A debauched and repulsive younger member of the Soomro clan told me: ‘We have only one choice. Either we lose Sindh or we kick those bloody bastard Mohajirs into the sea.’ But twenty years on, no war to the death has occurred. And he was the least impressive nephew of a couple of pretty formidable brothers whom I met – both of them proud Sindhis but also completely pragmatic individuals who continue to draw patronage from the Pakistani state – which in Sindh, as elsewhere, has somehow managed to stumble on.
9
Balochistan
Might was right in days gone by, and the position of the party aggrieved was the principal factor in determining the price to be paid for blood; hence the compensation for a mullah, a said or a person belonging to a leading family was ordinarily double that for a tribesman. The ordinary rate of compensation (for a death) at present among the Jamalis, Golas and Khosas is a girl and Rs200; Umranis, a girl and Rs200 or Rs1,500 if no girl is given.
(District Gazetteers of Balochistan, 1906)1
Quetta is a garrison town in an oasis, on a high desert frontier.
Windblown dust is everywhere, covering the world with a fine, gritty film, and turning the coarse grass and dry shrubs to a uniform grey, so that from the air it sometimes seems as if you are flying over the moon.
Every now and again, whirlwinds stir the dust up into looming towers, which spread out and fal again in a stinging grey rain. At the end of the broad, straight streets of the cantonment, bare tawny mountains rise against the hard blue sky. In summer, the sun burns with a searingly dry heat. In winter, it is freezingly cold.
The kepis of the Foreign Legion would not feel out of place here, and as for the sola topees of the British Raj – wel , they built the place.
Their dead rest in the bleak, windswept Christian cemetery on the outskirts of the cantonment. Many of them are from the Welch Regiment, which served in Quetta in what seem to have been the especial y unhealthy years of 1905 and 1906. By an odd chance, both the Welsh when they were conquered by the English and Indians when they converted to Christianity often took Christian names as their surnames. So Private Wil iam Hughes rests beneath the carved ostrich feathers of his regiment next to Martin Wil iams, a Punjabi Christian clerk. Pairs of old British cannon and mountain guns stand outside the gates of the Pakistani generals who have succeeded them; and many of the chal enges that those guns were dragged on to this high plateau to face continue to face those Pakistani generals, though in new forms.
But Quetta, like Ougadougou or Fort Lamy, is today a garrison town with elephantiasis. For reasons that wil appear, people in Balochistan are even vaguer about figures than in the rest of Pakistan, but the general assumption is that Quetta has between 2 mil ion and 2.5
mil ion people – almost a quarter of Balochistan’s sparse population. It contains not just the government and the military headquarters, but the vast majority of Balochistan’s institutions of higher education and almost the whole of whatever little the province has of manufacturing industry.
Like so many colonial creations, Quetta sometimes seems like a ship moored to the land on which it sits, rather than growing from it. Its ethnic mixture, its economy and its official and commercial architecture al differ radical y from those of Balochistan as a whole and have always done. According to the census of 1901, there were more speakers of European languages (mostly British soldiers and their families) in Quetta than there were speakers of the local languages, Baloch, Brahui and Pathan. The biggest number of inhabitants consisted of Punjabis, fol owed by Urdu-speakers.
The city used to be known to its educated inhabitants as ‘Little Paris’. This is about as staggering a statement as one could wel imagine, and not one that I would like to make in Paris itself – except perhaps to a Roman frontier official in Lutetia Parisorum 2,000 years ago, who might have seen some similarities. The notion of Quetta as Paris certainly brings home the distance between most of Quetta and the rest of Balochistan.
Outside Quetta begins the world which Quetta was built to quel and hold at bay: the world of the tribes. Drive out along the Saryab Road, and, between the edge of the city and the ridges that fringe the Quetta val ey, you find yourself amid vil ages of yel ow-grey mud, which from the outside could be the first human towns of the Middle East 12,000
years ago. Regular driving on the Saryab Road is not, however, a good idea these days. This is the poor Baloch area of Quetta, where the patrols of the Frontier Corps clash nightly with Baloch nationalist militants; quite apart from the threat of common-or-garden banditry and kidnapping. The tribal frontier is now within the boundaries of the garrison city, just as the tribal leaders sit in the government buildings of the cantonment.
On 11 August 2009, on which day the militants had vowed to hold their own Baloch Independence Day, I drove out on the Saryab Road with the Frontier Corps in a Flag March – an old British tradition which is exactly what it says it is. The soldiers hoisted large Pakistani flags on their jeeps and armoured cars and drove slowly up and down the road and around the outskirts of the city.
I asked an officer what al this was for. ‘To show everyone that we are stil here, and no one is going to push us out,’ he replied. More specifical y, the Frontier Corps was there to tear down any Baloch nationalist flags, which pro-independence parties had sworn to fly on that day. So beside the tribes, around them, and watching them from without and within sits another power in the land, the Pakistan army, flexible, pragmatic, restrained – most of the time; but implacably determined that in the end, and in al essential matters, its wil should prevail.
However, since 2001, Balochistan has been menaced from another direction: the overspil of the war in Afghanistan, which has brought the Afghan Taleban to the Pathan areas of Balochistan – and Pathans make up as much as 40 per cent of Balochistan’s population, and are a majority in Quetta itself. According to US intel igence, much of the Taleban leadership itself, grouped in the so-cal ed ‘Quetta Shura’, was stil based in Balochistan in late 2009. So far, this hasn’t been bad for Balochistan. On the contrary, the Afghan Taleban seem to have struck a deal with the Pakistani security forces whereby they wil not stir up militancy among the Pathans of Balochistan, in return for being left alone.
Given Pakistan’s problems with Baloch militancy, Islamabad considers it especial y important to keep the Pathans of Balochistan loyal. This is an additional reason for the shelter that Pakistan gives to parts of the Afghan Taleban leadership in Balochistan. Until early 2007, local journalists told me, the presence of these leaders was so open that it was very easy for Pakistanis (not Westerners) to gain interviews with them. Since then, however, US pressure has made Pakistan more careful, and the ‘Quetta Shura’ has been moved out of Quetta to more discreet locations in the Pathan areas in the north of the province.
The Afghan Taleban’s presence risks provoking the US into launching the kind of cross-border attacks that have been going on for years in FATA to the north; and there is also the risk that US and British military actions in southern Afghanistan wil lead to a major influx of Taleban fighters into Pakistani Balochistan. This could wel be disastrous for the province.
If the Pathans of the province are stirred up against the Pakistani state, their latent tensions with the Baloch would also be awakened, above al concerning who should rule Quetta itself. Baloch nationalists who say that an independent Balochistan would be prepared to let the Pathan areas break away to join a new Balochistan fal very silent when you ask them what then would happen to Quetta. With Pathans against Pakistan and Baloch (and other Pathans), and Baloch against Pathans, Pakistan and Iran (and other Baloch), and Hazaras and others caught in the middle, that would have al the makings of a real y unspeakable mess.
DISPUTED HISTORY, DISPUTED POPULATION
Balochistan is closely linked to the Sindh of the previous chapter – indeed, as previous chapters made clear, many ‘Sindhis’ and southern Punjabis are in fact from Baloch tribes, which retain their tribal loyalties and much of their tribal way of life. Like the Sindhis, the Baloch tribes worship saints and shrines, and most have so far been impervious to the appeals of modern radical Islamist thought. Neither the Islamist political parties nor the Taleban have made any serious inroads among the ethnic Baloch. There does however seem to be some Baloch support for the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba movement, which has carried out savage terrorist attacks on the Shia Hazara community in Quetta.
Balochistan is both much bigger and much smal er than Sindh – in fact it is both the biggest and smal est of Pakistan’s provinces. With 134,000 square miles and some 43 per cent of Pakistan’s land area, it is by far the biggest in terms of territory. With only some 9 – 11 mil ion people and around 7 per cent of Pakistan’s population, it is by far the smal est in terms of people.
Until 2010, the Pakistani central state al ocated its support to provincial budgets according to population, resulting in a very smal share for Balochistan. By the new National Finance Commission Award of that year, however, the al ocation was rebalanced to take account of poverty and revenue generation. This meant that Balochistan’s share went up from 7 per cent to 9.09 per cent, around 50 per cent above Balochistan’s share of Pakistan’s population. This was not nearly enough to satisfy more radical Baloch nationalists, but increased Pakistan’s appeal to more moderate Baloch.
The contrast between territory and population largely shapes Balochistan’s particular situation and problems. Balochistan’s huge territory is home to the greater part of Pakistan’s mineral and energy resources (with the colossal exception of the Thar coalfields of Sindh).
Its tiny population means that it has little say in Pakistani national politics and little control over how its huge resources are developed.
Up to now, Baloch grievances have centred on the gas fields (of which the biggest are around Sui in Bugti tribal territory), which provide around a third of Pakistan’s energy. Disputes over benefits from the field for the local tribal population sparked the latest Baloch insurgency. In future the giant copper mine under development at Reko Diq in western Balochistan may also be a fertile source of anger.
Plans have long been under consideration for two great overland energy corridors taking Iranian, Turkmen and Persian Gulf oil and gas across Pakistan. The first would go to India, to feed India’s rapidly growing economy. Should a settlement between India and Pakistan ever permit this to be built, much of it would cross Balochistan. This would give Baloch militants great new opportunities for pressure on the Pakistani government; but, on the other hand, it would also give India a strong incentive to withdraw its support from those militants.