Meeting Pakistan’s Other Insurgents

October 02, 2009

By Karlos Zurutuza

Lightning and Hope

Despite most of them not being able to read, these Baloch guerrillas are fluent in both Baloch and Urdu, and many of them also count Pashtun and Brahui as part of their linguistic repertoire. One of these polyglots is Girok (Lightning), though his command of four languages has so far proved of little help to him. After his village was destroyed by the Pakistani army, he and his family were forced to exchange the loneliness of the Baloch desert plain for the garbage heaps of the outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan´s largest city with a population of over 20 million. Around 80,000 Baloch families have suffered the same fate over the past three years.

‘I've spent my life on the run, cursing my bad luck,’ says Girok as he strokes the scar on his right forearm. Ironically, it wasn’t caused by a stray bullet in the heat of battle – it was inflicted by a territorial crow he came across in the dump where he was forced to live. After leaving the dump, Girok moved to Lyari, the predominantly Baloch neighbourhood in Karachi. The only time the feverish activity of day-to-day life stops in this district is when Brahamdagh Bugti is interviewed by a foreign TV channel, usually from neighbouring India. Lyari was Girok´s last stop before he arrived in this inhospitable landscape.

Umit (‘Hope’), another guerrilla, is relieved from guard duty so he can spend some time with us. The others maintain their vigil, constantly scanning the horizon from the peaks of the towering rocks – they are well aware that, with 600,000 troops, the Pakistani army is one of the largest in the world – and now one of the best equipped, with US weapons. But Umit doubts a large-scale ground operation will ever take place in this area.

‘This is very rugged terrain, and there are no roads to transport the troops. The only option here is from the air’, he says, highlighting the threat posed by Cobra helicopters and F16 fighter jets. ‘In this case, we can only hope that this granite bastion is as hard as it seems’.

‘Islamabad is using against us the weapons Washington gave them to fight the Taliban,’ he says, holding the Kalashnikov rifle once wielded by his father. He is the last of a family whose members have participated in the five armed uprisings since Pakistan took over Balochistan in 1948, though most of his predecessors did not have to face the Cobras that fly overhead. Some of these were supplied by Iran before the Islamic revolution in 1978, with Shah Reza Pahlevi being said to have handed the US-made arms to Pakistan to quell a Baloch insurgency that threatened to spread to Iranian controlled Balochistan.

‘Why should we sacrifice our right to freedom in a state dominated by a single nation?’ asks Umit, breaking a silence interrupted only by the sound of the hot desert winds.

It is a familiar question that has echoed in the ears of the Baloch for the past 60 years. And one, apparently, with no easy answer.