It is always worrying when relatively peaceful protests incur a violent response of governments that claim to fight terrorism.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the Musharraf regime, in its useless search to be considered a decent partner in the so -called war on terror, adopted a strategy for which it began to demolish houses where it was suspected that a household member collaborated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda. As an inevitable consequence, more people went to the same forces as the Pakistani State sought to destroy.
More recently, the actions against the leadership of the Baloch Jakjehti (Byc) committee, along with the attitude towards the Pashtun Tahaffuz movement and its main paintings, which spent more time in prison than in Parliament, follow a similar career. Meanwhile, the forces that PTM Manzoor Pashteen leaders Ali Wazir and Mohsin Dawar have opposed continue to wreak havoc.
Last weekend, the same attitude was deployed for doctors Mahrang and Sabiha Baloch, and around 150 of his byc colleagues. They were arrested and were accused of a variety of crimes that extend from terrorism and incitement to rebellion and murder. This attitude may seem familiar to officials from other nations that tend to counteract fissiparous tendencies intensifying repression, which inevitably reinforces multiple forms of resistance. Atrocities against peaceful resistance are an obvious recipe for greater violence.
It may seem simplistic to affirm that taking energetic measures against organizations such as the Byc is a blessing for the tastes of the Baloch Banned Liberation Army, whose heinous train shirt earlier this month has officially attributed to Indian and Afghan influence or interference. That statement may not be completely absurd, but the long -term descent of Baluchistan to a status of stepdaughter can hardly blame New Delhi or Kabul.
The province that occupies almost half of the land of Pakistan was not an anxious accessory to the result of the theory of two nations in 1947, and has remained a partially unhappy component since he was forced to accept adhesion in 1948. Equality with other provinces, however, has never been on the agenda.
The follies of the State coincide with those of their adversaries.
Baluchistan throughout the centuries was never an easy territory to control, since the possible colonizers of the Greeks and Persians to the British recognized sooner or later. Religion was never likely to serve as a sufficient glue, as made by the independence of Bangladesh, facilitated 54 years ago today by the launch of Operation Searchlight. I display a similar strategy only a couple of years later, directed by the same general, in what was territorially the largest province of the group of groups, was possibly the most unpleasant madness of the Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime, undermining its status as a government the first government chosen by Pakistan.
The hopeful interregno in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (then known as NWFP) lasted less than a year, and Baloch leaders of the National Awami Party, as well as Pakhtun’s key components, ended in prison. The betrayal charges exceeded were the norm.
When I was a teenager, I had the pleasure of familiarizing myself with Baloch leaders briefly empowered who stayed in my parents’ house during the rare visits to Lahore. There was an occasion in which I completed my task at the dining room table, while Zab’s Interior Minister Qayyum Khan, the architect of the Babrra Massacre of Khudai Khidmatgars of Ghaffar Khan in 1948. Payment television. What are you saying? Bakhsh Bizenjo or Ataullah Mengal asked me, since they returned at night of some function. He is cursing you, I replied precisely. They smiled and retired to their rooms. The snoring of Mir Bizenjo soon shook the house.
But my favorite memory of him is when, confronted with a steak at dinner, he demanded a spati of our Bengali chef (a refugee of the Intercontinental, who was mainly a baker and delighted me with his delicious desserts before they were helped to return to his homeland), who was being fun and coupled by the request.
The last time I met Ataullah Mengal in London in 1982, again as a guest of my parents, shortly after a visit to the Pakistan embassy, where the so -called information minister had been rejecting the former Prime Minister of the Pakistani media while waiting for his attention.
I was not particularly impressed by his son Akhtar Mengal, either during his term as prime minister or for his appearance this Monday at Shehzad Ghias’ Pakistan’s experience podcast. The inability to rescue Baluchistan from its history, geography and political decline does not reside in the hard state with which we are all familiar, but in a reciprocal commitment that neither terrorist actions nor a terrorist response can facilitate.
mahir.down@gmail.com
Posted in Dawn, March 26, 2025
