Author Archives: Maqbool Ahmed

Vote versus veto

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Vote-detailed-1

Scores of women, wrapped in big chadors and holding photos of young men, shout at the top of their voices in the main bazaar of Balochistan’s Turbat city on a hot March afternoon. They want Baloch nationalist parties to boycott the upcoming general election, and instead support the separatists waging a bloody war against security forces. The women include mothers, sisters and wives of the young Baloch men who have either been found dead or have gone missing over the last few years.

Besides public agitation, separatist militants sometimes also use violent means to stop the nationalist parties from taking part in the polls. Similarly, security forces and intelligence agencies want to restrict the activities of the nationalist parties. When it comes to dealing with Baloch nationalist parties, both the intelligence and security apparatuses and the separatists appear to be on the same wavelength, although for different reasons, a political analyst tells the Herald in Turbat. Both want the nationalists to stay away from the election, he says without wanting to be named due to security reasons.

The separatists, according to him, interpret the participation of the nationalist parties in the election as a means to strengthen Islamabad’s writ over Balochistan. This, he says, also weakens the case the separatists are trying to make before the international community; that the Baloch people want Balochistan’s secession from Pakistan. The separatists know well that once the popular Baloch nationalist parties reach the parliament and manage to either form or became a part of the provincial government, armed struggle for Balochistan’s independence will lose sympathies and dissipate with the passage of time, he explains.

On the other hand, the analyst says, the election of popular Baloch nationalist parties into power will weaken the security forces’ grip over the affairs of the province. He claims that security and intelligence agencies prefer working with non-nationalist Baloch politicians who, like ministers in the outgoing provincial cabinet, connive with security forces in perpetuating the status quo — in return, benefitting from the illegal trade of petroleum and other goods from and to Afghanistan and Iran. These ministers, he says, have never raised their voices against the killing and kidnapping of young Baloch men or of political activists. The security and intelligence agencies want to maintain this situation as it exists now even after the election and this could be possible only if parties such as the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNPM) and the National Party (NP) either boycott the polls or are not allowed to carry out proper electioneering, the analyst adds.

These two parties indeed have paid a high price for sticking to electoral, democratic politics in the face of twin threats: The scores of party workers and leaders killed in the last few years and the steadily shrinking political space for the middle class from Makran, Kalat and Quetta divisions in the largely tribal and feudal society of Balochistan.

In the province, the situation on the ground is hardly helpful for these parties. Major cities in the Makran division are chock-a-bloc with graffiti appealing the masses not to cast their vote and threatening candidates that they could be killed for taking part in the poll process. A huge swathe of south-western Balochistan, comprising 14 predominantly Baloch districts of the province, don’t even get television coverage of the polling exercise going on elsewhere in the country. A cable operator in Gwadar city, who does not want to make his identity public due to security concerns, tells the Herald how, in early March, separatists sent written messages to all cable operators in the area instructing them to stop relaying Pakistani news channels. Some who ignored the directive saw their houses attacked, he says.

Sardar Akhtar Mengal, the cheif of the Balochistan National Party - Mengal, faces pressure from Baloch separatists to boycott the 2013 election

Sardar Akhtar Mengal, the cheif of the Balochistan National Party – Mengal, faces pressure from Baloch separatists to boycott the 2013 election

A week after the operators had blocked Pakistani news channels, the members of a hitherto unknown group, Gwadar Youth Force, approached them and demanded that they also block all Indian entertainment channels and stop airing Indian films on cable networks. Again, those who did not heed the demands of the group faced attacks on their houses, the cable operator says. Everyone knows that the security and intelligence agencies are behind organisations such as Gwadar Youth Force, he adds. In some areas, journalists associated with television channels, and even those working for local and national newspapers, have been told both by security agencies and separatists not to report negatively about their activities. Many news correspondents in Makran, who until recently would happily discuss the political and security situation in Balochistan with visiting reporters from Karachi or Islamabad, now avoid even seeing reporters.

Yet, the Baloch nationalist parties are determined to contest the upcoming election, unlike in 2008, when they decided to sit out the election process in protest of the military operation being carried out in parts of Balochistan. On March 26, two days after returning from self-exile in Dubai, Akhtar Mengal, the BNPM president, headed a long meeting of his party’s main leadership in Karachi. Mengal told the media, after the meeting, that his party had decided to contest the coming polls. He said BNPM will use the election as a means to highlight “apprehensions about the rights of the Baloch people”.

Ghafoor Baloch, a senior nationalist leader, says that nationalist parties have held lenghty sessions to weigh the pros and cons of both participating in the election and boycotting it. During these discussions, he says, the parties analysed threats from militants who call themselves the “Sarmachars” – a Balochi word for freedom fighters – and who have particularly targeted Makran division and its nearby districts of Khuzdar and Awaran. The participants of these meetings have also discussed why violence against political activities and security forces is low in districts where the sardari or tribal system is very strong. According to him, both separatist militants and the security forces are targeting political workers of left-leaning, liberal political forces. Other political parties have also announced that they are contesting in the election and running their election campaigns but their workers are neither being targeted by militants nor by security and intelligence apparatuses, Baloch claims. In such a situation, he says, poll boycott is a relatively easy and safe option for the nationalist parties. But he raises a question: “Will poll participation make the situation worse for liberal Baloch nationalist parties than what they have faced during the last five years?” If the answer is no, he says, then why not contest the election and at least make an effort to change the situation without bothering much about the results and the future?”

A senior BNPM leader confirms this when he tells the Herald that his party has decided to participate in the election despite having reservations about the establishment’s meddling in the political affairs of the province, as well as opposition from Baloch militant groups. The leaders of both BNPM and NP also say that they are holding talks with each other as well as with other political parties for possible election alliances and seat adjustment. But they also point out that fear of violence is holding them back from launching their mass contact activities in the run-up to the election to convince the electorate that parliamentary democracy is the best way to promote the Baloch cause.

Muhammad Yousuf, a senior journalist and the president of Gwadar Press Club, believes that threats of violence will force electioneering in the province to remain a low key affair, keeping public participation and voter turnout poor. In urban areas, he says, candidates may bring the voters out but it will be extremely difficult in rural areas where distance between the villages and polling stations is normally 20 to 30 kilometres. In the presence of the clear and imminent danger of militant attacks, there is little chance that voters will be willing to risk their lives to reach polling stations, covering such long distances. This, Yousuf says, may leave a serious question mark over the legitimacy of the next election which will then be seen as unreflective of the will of the people.

Away from Baloch nationalist hub in Makran division, Pakhtunkhwa Milli Awami Party (PkMAP), is all set to launch its election campaign, in contrast to its decision in 2008 to boycott the polls. Based in the north of Balochistan and popular among the mainly Pashtun residents of the province, the party is wasting no time in debating the costs and benefits of its decision against participation in the previous election and is, instead, focusing its energies on the coming election, says its provincial president, Usman Kakar. Expecting that the Baloch nationalist parties will also participate fully in the May election, he says: “We are looking forward to making seat adjustments with liberal and progressive forces in both provincial and national elections.” Without naming any parties or groups that PkMAP would like to ally itself with before or after the election, Kakar says that during the formation of the next government his party will prefer joining hands with progressive and liberal forces “instead of those who support the armed forces’ role in politics in one way or the other”.

Vote versus veto

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Scores of women, wrapped in big chadors and holding photos of young men, shout at the top of their voices in the main bazaar of Balochistan’s Turbat city on a hot March afternoon. They want Baloch nationalist parties to boycott the upcoming general election, and instead support the separatists waging a bloody war against security forces. The women include mothers, sisters and wives of the young Baloch men who have either been found dead or have gone missing over the last few years.

Besides public agitation, separatist militants sometimes also use violent means to stop the nationalist parties from taking part in the polls. Similarly, security forces and intelligence agencies want to restrict the activities of the nationalist parties. When it comes to dealing with Baloch nationalist parties, both the intelligence and security apparatuses and the separatists appear to be on the same wavelength, although for different reasons, a political analyst tells the Herald in Turbat. Both want the nationalists to stay away from the election, he says without wanting to be named due to security reasons.

State of intelligence

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Illustration by Sabir Nazar.

Illustration by Sabir Nazar.

Graffiti in urban centres of Balochistan’s Makran Division has completely changed in two years. “Long live independent Balochistan” and “Down with pro-parliament parties” have replaced pronouncements about separatist leaders being traitors.

Until recently, the locals were told through what they call “fine art” by security agencies that Baloch separatists were responsible for killing innocent people and attacking the Frontier Corps (FC) as well as other state institutions. The separatists, on the other hand, were too weak to make their presence known, let alone propagate their views in public. Even when a separatist activist was killed, members of his group would never come out to protest and instead would rely on political parties for raising a voice against the killing.

All that has changed; the separatists are no longer in hiding. They are, in fact, so visible and strong that now they can force any town to close down whenever they want. When a separatist activist was killed on September 4 in an encounter with Levies in Tump area, his comrades forced a complete strike in Turbat. All government and private banks were still shut in the city when this scribe visited it, about a week after the encounter.

In far-flung rural parts of Makran Division, the separatists are virtually running a parallel government. Many traders and businessmen in the cities say rural areas of Gwadar, Kech, Awaran and Panjgur districts are under the control of the separatist militants. Naseer Jan, a shopkeeper in Turbat, tells the Herald how he left his ancestral village, Balicha, and settled in Turbat city to avoid constant threats to himself and his family from the militants.

Another indication of the increased power of the militants in the area is that many local leaders of political parties which believe in parliamentary politics have left their rural homes for Karachi and Quetta because they do not feel safe in the militant-dominated areas. In the words of a local political activist, it is revealing to see how “those who claim themselves to be the leaders of the masses are leaving.” Dr Abdul Malik, the head of the National Party, is always surrounded by government-provided armed guards and cannot move freely even in his hometown; Akhtar Mengal, who heads the Balochistan National Party–Mengal (BNPM), was living outside Pakistan until recently, for fear of his life.

The rise in the separatists’ power has forced political activists to concede that they no longer have the people’s ears. “Yes, the masses listen to the separatists,” says advocate Abdul Hameed, a former vice-chairman of the Balochistan Bar Council who is also a local leader of the Balochistan National Party in Turbat.

But the reason for the change, he argues, is not that the separatists have become popular; rather it is because the government is conspicuous by its absence. “There is a complete breakdown of law and order and the civil administration cannot be seen anywhere in the troubled areas,” says Hameed. The only government staff which attends its duties regularly are the ones who work at the offices of the commissioner and the deputy commissioner, the offices of the education and health departments have been non-functional for months, he adds.

Sardar Akhtar Mengal

Sardar Akhtar Mengal

 

Hameed says the loss of the government’s writ is so complete that even the conviction of a criminal can take entire towns hostage in order to press for his release. A few months ago when a sessions court in Turbat convicted a local resident for drug peddling his clansmen forced the whole city to shut down, he says. Tribal feuds have also resulted in civic life coming to a halt in Turbat many times over the last few months, he adds.

Political leaders, however, do not entirely exonerate Baloch militant organisations. Dr Jahanzeb Jamaldini, a central leader of the BNPM, says that tit-for-tat attacks between the separatists and the security forces continue, but he points out that the separatist groups never shy away from claiming responsibility if and when they hit a target. He hastens to add that nationalist parties always condemn separatist attacks which result in the deaths of innocent people.

But Jamaldini and other political leaders like him argue that the main responsibility for the deteriorating situation lies with the security and intelligence agencies. They claim the agencies have caused the breakdown of law and order by creating and sponsoring criminal gangs and drug peddlers in every Baloch district, mainly to counter the militants but also to kidnap and kill activists of political parties and to gun down non-Baloch settlers.

The first such incident, for which the groups backed by the intelligence agencies are blamed, is the murder of Maula Bukhsh Dashti in July 2010. He was a former Kech district nazim and a central leader of the National Party. A previously unknown group, Peoples Liberation Army, accepted the responsibility for his murder. Since then, local and central leaders of Baloch political parties claim that these groups have killed many of their members. The BNPM claims that 30 of its members and leaders have been killed over the last two years. The National Party says 10 of its members have been killed in Kech district alone.

Opinion is divided on whether these criminal groups are operating on their own or are still being backed by the agencies. Senator Hasil Bizenjo, a central leader of the National Party, says they are working independently and have become a problem for their own creators. On the other hand, Jamaldini believes that the agencies still control and support those groups.

For outsiders, it is almost impossible to find out and verify who is doing what and on whose behest but discussions about the role of the intelligence agencies are widespread across Makran Division. And almost everyone that the Herald spoke to in the area is convinced that agencies would do better if they adopted a hands-off approach. Once the agencies withdraw their support for criminal groups, there would be no threat to the resumption of political and electoral activities in the region, says Jamaldini. And that could also signal the return of peace.

 

Dialogue of the deaf

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Let us move towards some solutions, says Quetta-based historian and writer Dr Shah Muhammad Marri, pointing out that there has already been enough storytelling on Balochistan’s bloodshed. The question now is where to look for a solution. One thing that everyone keeps highlighting as key to finding a solution is the need to bring Baloch separatists back to the negotiating table. How easy or difficult will that be — given that, over the last few years, 400 mutilated bodies of mainly Baloch young men have been retrieved from different parts of the province following their disappearance from their hometowns? Is it possible for separatists to see any meaning in offers for negotiations while young Baloch men continue to disappear after mysterious encounters with security and intelligence agencies?

And then there is history. That may be one reason why the military establishment continues to treat Balochistan the way it does and always has, says Marri. Balochistan’s inclusion in Pakistan, despite the fact that the Kalat state assembly had voted against accession, set the tone for the future — even in the initial years after Independence, there was an anti-state armed rebellion in the province. Since then there has been a feeling within the establishment that Balochistan did not join Pakistan by choice; there has been a constant fear that the province would secede from Pakistan if and when it could, says Marri. This fear has compelled the military to adopt a perpetually repressive policy towards Balochistan, he adds.

Sleuths on the prowl

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“Even the Nazis would not have kept their enemy soldiers during the Second World War in such inhumane conditions as the captors of my son, Babar Jamali, have done,” says Ghulam Hussain Jamali, a 60-year-old farmer in Badin. “Have you ever heard of a man being kept blindfolded, even while he uses the toilet, with no exposure to daylight for five months?” he adds that this is how his son was treated in captivity. This could happen only in our ‘dear homeland’, Ghulam Hussain Jamali says with anger.

Babar Jamali returned home in May 2012. He was detained at an unknown location. But while his family ran from the pillar to post, trying to work towards his recovery, his younger brother Ayaz also went missing in April 2012, and was released three months later. Jamali says that  although he knew the names of the police officials who had taken Babar into custody, he was unable to register a case against them — let alone ensure that they were arrested or tried.

The struggle for his son’s release is as harrowing as it is revealing of how intelligence agencies are creating enemies of the state when it comes to ordinary citizens. “ On December 8, 2011, I was returning to Badin in a car, with my family, after visiting a relative in Hyderabad. Babar was driving. As we left a gas station in Hyderabad, a police mobile van forced us to stop. About a dozen men, some in civilian clothes with their faces covered, came out of the official vehicle, then they ordered Babar out of our car, bundled him into their van and sped away,” is how Jamali narrates the details. Without wasting any time, he rushed to a nearby police station, along with his lawyer, to lodge a report. But the police refused to register the case.

The next five months were very trying. “I would visit the police offices every week. They would make me sit in their air-conditioned rooms, offering me tea and refreshments, but would not register the kidnapping case,” says Jamali. During a visit, he learnt that one of the officials, Zulfiqar Araeen, who was responsible for arresting and detaining his son, was the head of a police station in Kotri. He wrote an application for a First Information Report (FIR) nominating Araeen and two other police officials in the case and followed it up with a constitutional petition at the Sindh High Court’s Hyderabad circuit bench, requesting to information on the whereabouts of his son.

Before there was any progress on this case, Jamali’s other son Ayaz was taken away on April 17, 2012. Ayaz was visiting a lawyer in Hyderabad when two men in civilian clothes asked him to accompany them to a nearby police office. They told him that his father was waiting for him at the police station. “It was only when they pushed me onto a side street that I became suspicious. But before I could put up any resistance, they bundled me into the backseat of a car and blindfolded me,”Ayaz says. “With my sons gone, I almost lost my senses and created a huge scene at the high court, narrowly escaping conviction for contempt of court,” Jamali says.

When he had lost all hopes of recovering both sons, the unexpected happened. On May 17, 2012 at about 3 am he received a call on his cell phone from an unknown number. “On the other side was Babar: he was calling from a phone he had borrowed from someone at a roadside tea stall near Hyderabad. He had been left blindfolded in a deserted location,” says Jamali. Babar had a beard several inches long – apparently his captors never allowed him to shave. Less than a month later, Ayaz too came back home.

Babar told his father that his captors would interrogate him about those involved in bomb blasts, urging him to confess that he was also involved. Jamali tells the Herald that his son was a member of the Jeay Sindh Students Federation during his years at college but he never joined any political party. “Babar’s crime appears to be his active participation in protests, which were held to demand the release of his friend, Bashir Arisar, who was kidnapped by intelligence agencies from Hyderabad,” says Jamali. Babar is said to have joined the Pakistan Muslim League-Functional (PMLF) to avoid further persecution.

While Babar returned home without any injuries, Arisar came home broken and bruised. When he was released after months in detention, he was in a critical condition: he could have easily been seen as dead. His upper and lower jaw were dislocated and his nose was broken. While in custody, he was subjected to severe torture, and was reportedly admitted to a military hospital in Karachi for treatment before his release. He was abducted from a road near Kotri while he was travelling towards Jamshoro on a motorcycle.

Mohammad Khan, Arisar’s father, does not want a journalist to talk to his son about his ordeal. “He is still being chased by people from the security agencies, therefore I cannot allow you to see him,” is how he responded to the Herald’s request to talk to Arisar. After having undergone multiple surgeries, he can hardly talk.

Afzal Panhwar, a student of biochemistry at Sindh University in Jamshoro, spent an entire year in detention. Belonging to a remote village, Khalid Panhwar, in district Dadu, he was in Hyderabad for an internship interview when he was picked up from a bus stand on June 26, 2011. After his release, Panhwar told the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) that he was interrogated by agency personnel in uniform as well as civilian clothes about bomb blasts that had taken place on railway tracks and at electricity pylons as well as about alleged death threats to the vice chancellor of Sindh University. During his detention, Panhwar developed tuberculosis and kidney problems because his captors would not provide him anything to eat or drink for two to three consecutive days.

Zakir Hussain Bozdar, a college student in Ghotki and the district general secretary of the Jeay Sindh Muttahida Mahaz (JSMM), was picked up while he was taking his examination on April 9, 2012. He remains missing even though his family, friends and party colleagues are running a vociferous campaign for his release.

Ali Nawaz Leghari, a primary school teacher in Badin was picked up by the police and other security agency officials while he was traveling. “My father and I were going to Hyderabad from Tando Muhammad Khan on a bus on June 24, 2012 when four official vans blocked the road, singled out my father and took him away,” says his son, Ayaz Hussain. When he went to a local police station to lodge a complaint about his father’s kidnapping, the police abused him and kicked him out refusing to register his case. Leghari was arrested in 2001 on charges of involvement in a bomb blast and an anti-terrorism court awarded him death sentence but the Sindh High Court later acquitted him. Also in 2006, the police charged him with involvement in eight bomb blast cases but again the courts acquitted him.

Similar tales of horror are common across much of Sindh. According to figures compiled by the HRCP, 67 people were reported missing in Sindh between January and June 20 this year. While 37 of them have either been traced or released, the whereabouts of another 30 are still unknown.

Sleuths on the prowl

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“Even the Nazis would not have kept their enemy soldiers during the Second World War in such inhumane conditions as the captors of my son, Babar Jamali, have done,” says Ghulam Hussain Jamali, a 60-year-old farmer in Badin. “Have you ever heard of a man being kept blindfolded, even while he uses the toilet, with no exposure to daylight for five months?” he adds that this is how his son was treated in captivity. This could happen only in our ‘dear homeland’, Ghulam Hussain Jamali says with anger.

Missing in action

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Gulzar Dars, a low-ranking official in the Pakistan Army deployed at Chhor Garrison in Sindh’s Umerkot district, has not returned home since late 2008. When his brother, Isa Dars, visited the garrison in the summer of 2009 to find out what happened, an army colonel told him that Gulzar had been arrested on December 2, 2008. The officer did not explain further. “When I asked him why Gulzar was arrested and what happened after his arrest, the colonel said he did not know,” Isa tells the Herald in his village Tardos, in Chhachhro region of Tharparkar district, right next to Pakistan’s border with India across the Thar desert.

Since then, their family has suffered one tragedy after the other: First Gulzar’s only child, a daughter, died and then his father, Arbab Dars, passed away. But more than three years have gone by since Isa last heard from Gulzar. “We do not know why he was arrested, what happened to him after arrest or if he is even alive.”

Gulzar’s maternal uncle, Mohammad Waris Dars, who retired from the Pakistan Army as havaldar in 1987, has been missing too since February 2, 2009. He was working as a security guard in Karachi when he disappeared and his employer told his family that he never returned to rejoin his duty after having left his workplace a day earlier. When his eldest son, Mohammad Asif, went to the police, they refused to register a case because of his father’s military background.

Many other families in the same area have similar stories. For instance, 80-year-old Ajeemat in the nearby village of Samrar has been waiting for the return of her two sons for the last three years. One of them, Inayat Ali, was still in the army when he went missing in December 2008 and is known to be in the army’s custody, and the other, Wahid Bukhsh, a retired soldier, has disappeared without a trace since early 2009 (see Three Women, Three Stories).

Dost Ali, a resident of Baliari village, also does not know why the intelligence agencies arrested his son Lance Naik Rab Dino from Pannu Aaqil Garrison in December 2009, where they have detained him and whether he is still alive.

The intelligence agencies also arrested Suleman Arisar in December 2009 on espionage charges from Umerkot town where he was running a tea stall after deserting the army. But it was only in February 2011 that his family knew who had taken him away and why and that too after his mother, Jama, filed a petition in the Sindh High Court for the recovery of her son.

Going by such harrowing tales of forced disappearances and clueless families of the disappeared people trying to catch at straws to know about their dear ones, Abdul Razzaq of Samrar can count himself lucky to have returned home alive after he was arrested in February 2009 from Hyderabad garrison where he was working as a naik in the army. “I do not remember the exact day [when] some people barged into my room in the barracks; [they] overpowered and blindfolded me and drove me away,” he tells the Herald.

When monthly money orders stopped arriving from him and he also did not visit his home for months, his family got worried. His brother contacted his regiment but did not get any reply. The family also wrote several letters to the topmost officials of the Sindh Police as well as the chief justices of the Sindh High Court and the Supreme Court of Pakistan but none of them responded. An application that his wife, Jaan Bai, sent to the Chief Justice of Pakistan on October 20, 2009 mentions that even Razzaq’s immediate bosses in his military unit did not disclose his whereabouts when contacted by the family. Then his brother filed a petition at the Sindh High Court and it was in response to this petition that the defence ministry, through its director Lieutenant-Colonel Sarfaraz Khan, informed the court in February 2010 that Razzaq, along with some other soldiers from his native area, were being held under espionage charges.

His months in captivity were tough, to say the least. “The inhuman torture that I underwent during 14 months of my detention not only left me with brutal injuries but also maimed my soul,” he narrates his ordeal to the Herald. He says he had to confess to the crime that he did not even commit to avoid torture but was later able to prove his innocence through documentary evidence (see Manufacturing Confessions).

After his interrogators cleared him of the charges he was facing, Razzaq reported back to his army unit in the Baloch Regiment. His unit head, a colonel whose name he cannot recall, congratulated him on facing the charges with courage and getting a clean chit. But, feeling demeaned and disillusioned by his superiors, he was already thinking of something else. “How could I work for those who suspect my loyalty to my country?” he asks. Wounded and shattered, he quit his job in the Pakistan Army as soon as he returned to his village.

Razzaq, who joined the army in 1996 and served as part of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Sierra Leone in 2002-2003, no longer sees his stint with the Pakistan Army as a badge of honour. He has confined himself to his village and does not like to use naik, his military rank, as a prefix with his name as most former men in the uniform would.
Dost Ali, Lance Naik Rab Dino’s father, is aghast that his son and other soldiers from the area are being arrested and interrogated for espionage. “Charges of espionage are ridiculous,” he says. It is the third generation of villagers from his area that has been working in the Pakistan Army and there were never such charges in the past. “How is it that all of a sudden they have turned into spies?” he asks.

About 20 in-service and retired soldiers from the area disappeared between 2008 and 2010. While the military authorities never informed their families about their arrests or reasons thereof, documents seen by the Herald suggest that the entire process of investigating and trying them is cloaked in secrecy. When Arisar’s family moved the court for his recovery, for example, the then chief justice of the Sindh High Court Sarmad Jalal Osmany ordered his trial through the Field General Court Martial as early as possible (see General Justice). He also ordered the military authorities to notify the court about progress in his trial. But nobody knows whether he is being tried and if so what stage his trial has proceeded to. During a hearing in February 2011, Deputy Attorney General Mian Khan Malik told the court that the military authorities did not reply to any of the several reminders his department had sent to them regarding compliance with the court orders in Arisar’s case.

Dr Ghulam Haider Samejo, a member of the National Assembly from the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party in whose constituency the families of the disappeared villagers reside, says he often hears about such arrests and disappearances but cannot verify them. “The army has its own procedures and if a serving soldier is arrested what can I do about him?” he tells the Herald when asked whether he had raised the issue in the Parliament.

The Herald sent repeated messages through email and cellphone to the director general of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) to know the army’s side of the story but his reply never came.

Everything around here is mine

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Map of Balochistan

Source: Small & Medium Enterprise Development Association

It’s official: nearly 80 per cent of all minerals produced in Pakistan come from Balochistan, according to the latest data compiled by the Geological Survey of Pakistan. What is less known is that the province’s mineral potential is much bigger than the current production statistics suggest. While this gap between the potential and actual production is generally blamed on the absence of security, insiders say successive governments have done nothing to build the technical capacity of the mining sector and political meddling has checked the development of mining as a possible engine of growth for the provincial economy.

Only 22 people, out of Balochistan Mines and Mineral Development Department’s total strength of 560, work with its directorate general for mines and minerals — the section that deals with the technical aspects of exploration and licensing. Requesting not to be named, a former director general of the department revealed that such capacity deficiency coupled with political interference is the most important factor in the minimal development of the mineral sector in the province. The myopic provincial political leaders see the sector merely as an avenue for employing their favourites and issuing mining leases to relatives and cronies, he alleges. The other short-sighted provincial policy is to keep mining royalties to the minimum, which is to the disadvantage of the provincial exchequer, he explains. “The department [which should have ensured] mining’s growth is [indeed] severely hampered by such political interference,” he says.

The former official’s disclosures cannot be dismissed as the raving and ranting of a possibly disgruntled retired bureaucrat. A review of the National Mineral Policy 2002, jointly done by the World Bank and the federal Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, confirms what he says. The review report discovered that the development of Pakistan’s mineral resources in 2003 was limited to quarries (open pits), producing only precious stones, limestone, rock salt gypsum and modest amount of coal, mostly from Balochistan. Since then, there has been hardly any change. For instance, the report pointed out thatPakistanexported gems worth 2.2 million US dollars in 2001; this registered a meagre increase of 1.4 US million dollars to reach 3.63 million US dollars in 2010. During the same period,India’s gem export earnings shot up from 4.9 billion US dollars in 2001 to a whopping 33.5 billion US dollars in 2010.

In what can be seen as evidences of inefficient work culture and overweening political interference, the workers of the Balochistan Mines and Mineral Development Department were waging daily protests in the second week of the last month against the appointment of a pharmacist and a primary teacher on technical posts that they were not qualified for. An inside source tells the Herald that political interference has crippled the department’s working. To quote an example of such interference, he alleges that successive ministers for mines and minerals have been interfering in the issuing of licences for prospecting, exploration and mining even when they do not have the authority to do so. The ministers do this, the source says, by blocking elevation of eligible senior officers as members of the department’s mines committee which, under the rules, is the sole authority to grant or refuse licences and leases.

One of these officers, Dr Saeed Baloch, has been eligible for promotion for the last six years to the post of the department’s director general, a position that will automatically make him the head of the mines committee. The other officer is Zarbat Khan who could have become a director of the department two years ago, and thereby a member of the committee, but has not. Taking advantage of the undefined rules to govern the working of the department, the ministers appoint their favourites but theoretically ineligible and junior officers to these posts and thereby influence the process of issuing licences and leases, the source adds.

Siddiq Raisani, the owner of several mining companies, goes a step further in blaming the politicians. It is not just the minister for mines and minerals who is involved in subverting the rules for issuing licences, he alleges, and adds that half of Balochistan’s cabinet is doing the same thing because many provincial ministers either have shares in mining companies or own them fully.

In Balochistan’s provincial capital Quetta, stories about ministers and senior government officials owning mining companies through their frontmen are rife even when it is almost impossible to find the paper trail linking a particular minister or official to a particular company. As of now, nearly 400 individuals and companies hold prospecting licenses for 32 minerals in the province and cabinet ministers and government functionaries have stakes in many of these companies through proxies, says the government source.

The provincial government officials that were willing to speak on the matter say there is no way to stop people from forming and running mining companies on the allegation that they enjoy political backing. The law does not bar even ministers and serving government officials from owning mining companies, they add.

But the Herald’s source in the mining department claims that the politically connected companies always get a better deal. “The ministers not only manage to get new prospecting licences and fresh mining leases for thousands of acres of lands [for the companies they support and sponsor], they also have their men sitting in the mines committee who transfer existing leases, without informing the original lease holders, to the [ministers’ favoured firms],” he says.

A December 2010 ruling of the Balochistan High Court verifies this. In 2007, Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) received a prospecting licence for iron ore for 2,006.12 acres of land in Pachin Koh, in Chagai district’s Nokundi area. Subsequently, the mines committee issued a mining lease to PPL that came into effect from January 2007 and was valid for the next 20 years. OnJune 7, 2010, the mines committee issued a show-cause notice to PPL, telling it that its lease area could be reduced because it had kept the site underutilised for a long time. Though the committee gave the PPL 30 days to file a reply, it allotted 929.75 acres of the land under the company’s lease to another firm, M/s Shahnawaz Pumice, before the expiry of that period. The PPL lodged an appeal against this before the secretary of the Mines and Minerals Development Department. When he did not take any decision, PPL filed a petition at the Balochistan High Court which set aside the orders of the mines committee and observed: “It was expected that [the secretary], with whom the petitioner (PPL) had filed the appeal along with a stay application, would have acted in this case of blatant violation of the rules … but instead [the secretary] virtually sat on the appeal.”

A source claims that it is only on paper that M/s Shahnawaz Pumice is owned by one Shahnawaz, a poor man from Chagai. He was made the owner of the company because the Balochistan Mineral Rules 2002 require that a company applying for and getting a prospecting licence in a district must have a local person as a shareholder. The firm is actually formed and run by one Shabbir Mengal who is publicly known in Quetta as a frontman for several ministers of the Balochistan cabinet, the source says.

In a clear acknowledgement of unwarranted interference in mining affairs, the World Bank review report recommended eliminating discretionary ministerial and official powers from the process of granting or refusing mining licences and leases. Instead, those powers appear to have become even stronger.

Another major consequence of the provincial ministers’ blatant involvement in mineral affairs is that Balochistan has registered hardly any increase in its royalty receipts from minerals over the last many years. Since most current cabinet members have also been a part of the provincial cabinets in successive previous governments, they are reported to have ensured that royalties remain low. For instance, in 2010, the provincial mines and mineral department suggested imposing a royalty of 170 rupees on every tonne of coal mined in the province but the provincial cabinet approved only 70 rupees a tonne as royalty, officials reveal.

Balochistan Chief Secretary Ahmed Bukhsh Lehri, however, denies that this is an issue. He says that until recently the provincial government was actually spending from its own kitty to encourage coal mining in Balochistan. “The coal miners were receiving subsidy rather than paying any royalty,” he explains. So, any money coming in as royalty, no matter how small, is an improvement.

Everything around here is mine

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It’s official: nearly 80 per cent of all minerals produced inPakistancome from Balochistan, according to the latest data compiled by the Geological Survey of Pakistan. What is less known is that the province’s mineral potential is much bigger than the current production statistics suggest. While this gap between the potential and actual production is generally blamed on the absence of security, insiders say successive governments have done nothing to build the technical capacity of the mining sector.

Victims of neglect

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Flood victims take shelter from the rains and wind

Flood victims take shelter from the rains and wind. Photo Courtesy AFP


“Since early morning I have been observing the loading and unloading of hundreds of food packets from trucks but nobody has handed me even one of them,” complains 65-year-old Khurshidan sitting at the entrance of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Auditorium in Sindh’s Mirpurkhas district. The auditorium is provisionally being utilised to store relief supplies.
She is one of the millions of people displaced from their homes by extraordinarily heavy monsoon rains in the southern parts of Sindh. Many of them, like her, have received no assistance and those who have complain of delays and political and religious discrimination. Still others say that the landowners that they work for are forcing them to leave relief camps and resume their duties in half-submerged fields. Across the nine Sindh districts hit hard by the rains, stories of neglect, despair and destitution are everywhere.
The government, on the other hand, hides its inefficiency and inadequacy behind flood forecasts gone wrong and contingency plans turned upside down. “The [flooded districts of the province] have not had so much rain for over a century,” says the Pakistan Meteorological Department (Met Department). For the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA), rains were as unforeseen as they were for the meteorologists (see box on Sindh rainfall). “It was an unexpected disaster,” says a PDMA official. “In June, the Met Department had forecast 10 per cent below normal overall rainfall during July-September 2011 monsoon season,” he says.
A letter that Met Department Director-General Arif Mahmood wrote to the provincial authorities on June 13, 2011 verifies his claim. “Pakistan summer monsoon rainfall is invariably affected by the global, regional and local climatic conditions prevailing prior to the season. Analysis of the combined effect indicates that total amount of rainfall averaged over Pakistan during monsoon season (July-September) 2011 will remain 10 per cent below normal.” With the letter predicting that “there are chances of about 10 per cent above normal rainfall in northern half of Pakistan including Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Kashmir,” the PDMA had focused on riverine floods (caused by rains in the upper catchment areas of the Indus and other rivers) in its flood contingency plan for 2011. Since there were no prior predictions for severe rain or flash flooding in the lower parts of Sindh, the authority had made no preparations to cope with that.
The consequences of the unprecedented rainfall and the lack of preparedness have been devastating. An interim report by the Pakistan Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (Suparco) noted around 6,500 square kilometres, comprising mostly fertile farmland and thickly populated townships, were still under water on October 13 — more than four weeks after the last downpour. The stagnating water has not only damaged 80 per cent of cotton crop in the flooded areas but has also endangered the sowing of wheat, a major winter crop. Provisional figures compiled by the PDMA – a thorough assessment of damage and needs did not even begin by the end of the last month – show that around 10 million people have been affected.
The victims of rains and flooding have disturbing tales to share. In the first six weeks after the rains had started, victims say, most families displaced from their homes survived on officially supplied food barely enough for two weeks for an average family comprising six people. “For one week immediately after the rains the government provided us cooked rice twice daily but since then each family has received only two packs of provisions,” says Noor Khapri who is living in a makeshift hut on Kunari-Umerkot Road in Haji Aleem Khan Khapri Goth in subdivision Kunari. According to him, all 34 families living in the village had not received any assistance for the 15 days ending on October 11.
The PDMA, however, claims it had by October 19 distributed three million food packets (see box on ration packs) among the flood victims besides providing them 312,400 tents. The disparity between these official figures and on-the-ground situation across the rain-damaged districts, however, was glaring. The flood victims who managed to reach urban centres – district towns or subdivisional headquarters – might have received ample assistance but those who did not leave their villages – either because they did not want to or because they could not due to financial and logistical constraints – did not appear to have received anything after initial food assistance. No non-food items, such as tents, medicines, mosquito nets and water filter plants, reached them. “Only in the first 15 days [after the rains] did we get potable water through a tanker but now we have to bring water from a hand pump about two miles from here wading through stagnant rain water,” says Mithro Bheel, a peasant camped on a sand dune near his village in union council Bolari of subdivision Diplo bordering Badin and Tharparkar districts.
Many flood victims complain that the official response to their plight was slow. “The relief arrived quite late and is very little,” says Mohammad Bukhsh Khapri, the treasurer of the Rural Development Initiatives, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Mirpurkhas. Officials at the PDMA admit that there has been some delay but they blame it on rain that fell in two spells and the rules under which they get involved in relief activities.
The first rain spell started in early August and ended by the middle of that month while the second spell began in late August and ended in early September, says a PDMA official. “During the first spell, the disaster didn’t look threatening. There were estimates that a couple of hundred thousand people would be affected,” he tells the Herald. The rules say that district governments will handle a disaster of that magnitude, he adds. But when the second spell broke loose and devastation spread, only then did the provincial and federal governments get involved, asking the United Nations to launch an appeal for international assistance, he explains. This, according to his version, delayed the availability of relief goods to those displaced in the first rain spell.
Politics also seems to have resulted in selective distribution of relief goods. In almost all flood-devastated districts, I heard peasants say that they did not get any assistance from the government or from the NGOs. Instead, they said, they got their packs of provisions from the landowners that they worked for. How the official and non-official assistance ended up with these landowners is where politics comes in. “We have no role in distributing relief goods. Our job is to handover the goods to the DCO [district coordination officer] of the district concerned,” says a PDMA official. He explains that Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah has formed district relief committees to oversee relief work.
In the districts I visited in October, ministers, members of the National Assembly or the member of Sindh Assembly belonging to the ruling coalition were heading these committees. They were channeling relief goods through their local supporters who, in most rural areas, happened to be local landowners. In some cases, the heads of the committees were reported to have distributed relief goods purely on the basis of the political affiliation of the victims. Those belonging to their rival political camp would get nothing. “Food packets and other relief goods are provided to those whom [Munawar Ali] Talpur approves,” says Mohammad Bukhsh Khapri, referring to the federal legislator of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party from the area.
The landowners also used relief goods for their personal economic benefit to either keep the peasants in their villages or bring them back from the camps as soon as the floodwaters started to recede. They need the peasants to save whatever is left of their cotton and chilli crops (see box on losses to cotton and chilli crops). Roji Kohli, a peasant in Umerkot district explains how his landowner’s men brought 21 families – including his own – back to their village from a relief camp in order to collect the leftovers of the cotton crop. “Our landlord told us to go away when his cotton and chilli fields became fully inundated and the continuous rain completely destroyed our food stocks. He told us that he didn’t have anything to feed us nor could he give us a loan. So we did a 40 kilometre trek from Kunri [a subdivision of district Umerkot] to Thar,” says Kohli living in a tent city set up by a relief organisation on Umerkot-Chahchro Road. “Two weeks later when the water receded and access to flooded villages became possible, our landlord’s men came swiftly to our camp and took all the families back to the village to pick cotton bolls [green pods] from cotton plants not submerged in water,” he adds. In all the seven districts – from Badin to Sanghar – that I visited in the middle of October, peasants sitting in makeshift huts along roads, canals and embankments narrated the same wretched story over and over again.
With water still stagnant in the fields where the landowners were making the peasants work, safety clearly had taken a back seat. In Hussain Bukhsh Marri subdivision of Mirpurkhas district I saw young girls rushing out of a submerged cotton field crying that there was a snake in there. Belonging to the low-caste Bheel community of Hindus, they were picking cotton bolls that floodwaters had not destroyed, Krishan, the head of their family, tells me.
Dr Sono Khangarani, who heads Sindh-based NGO Thardeep Rural Development Programme, believes that many problems in relief and assistance are rooted in the political and bureaucratic bias towards lower Sindh, particularly its 35 per cent low-caste Hindu population. “Last year when the flood submerged upper Sindh, the powerful ruling class which holds important portfolios in both federal and provincial cabinets and which comes from the upper parts of the province worked day and night to provide relief, strengthened flood protection embankments and opened government warehouses of wheat and rice to ensure continuous supply of food to victims for months,” he says. “This time round no such thing has happened because the majority of affected people are low-caste Hindu peasants,” he claims.
While his allegations are open to debate, there can be no argument about the fact that the government needs to plug the political as well as administrative gaps in its disaster management. Another mishandled disaster may not even let people like Khurshidan and Krishan survive to complain about delays and discrimination.