Pakistan

‘Forced out of town by ethnic violence in Balochistan’

Ethnic violence shows no signs of abating in Balochistan.Peace loving minorities are being forced to make a choice between ‘our lives and homeland’ by the Wahabi elements ‘who have created so much terror’. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), has given a Quit Notice to the Hazaras in particular and set 2012 as the deadline. The police appear helpless as they too are under attack, and the government in Islamabad has no time to the plight of these people given its own struggle for survival, says the author.

IRIN, the humanitarian news and analysis service from a UN agency is not like the conventional media houses which focus on disaster only when headlines are in the making.  It is a sedate effort aimed at sensitising the local and global opinion alike to the plight of the oppressed and suffering classes.  IRIN does not sensationalise any story. It only presents facts and lets the reader draw his or her conclusion.

So even by IRIN standards, the story about inter-ethnic violence in Pakistan’s Balochistan province is disturbing. Certainly the headline, which reads: ‘Forced out of town by ethnic violence’ in Balochistan. The decision to leave, as one of the victims, Aly Khan of Quetta tells IRIN is because they were forced to make a choice between ‘our lives and homeland’ by the Wahabi elements ‘who have created so much terror’.

His family moved to Islamabad to start a new life ‘to save our lives’. None of them was a warmonger. They are professionals from the field of academics and medicine among other subjects. One of Khan’s cousins, who was a senior pathologist, was killed in 2009. Another cousin, a professor, was attacked twice in 2005 and 2010.

Balochistan has been caught up in a nationalist insurgency for decades, with militant Baloch nationalist groups seeking autonomy for the region, and in the process targeting minority groups they believe do not support their thinking. Balochs and Pathans, who follow the Sunni sect, are in the majority while Hazara are a minority; most of them are Shias.

Clashes have also occurred between militant Sunni Muslim groups and Shia Muslims over the interpretation of Islam. The Shia-Sunni conflict was exploited by Gen Zia ul Haq who was Pakistan’s ruler in the eighties, and later by the Taliban. While earlier they were victims of kidnappings and robberies, now religious extremists threaten them

On 6 May, six members of the Hazara Shia minority community were gunned down by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), an extremist sectarian Wahabi organization. Twelve days later on May 18, another seven were gunned down, and once again the LeJ claimed responsibility.

The LeJ has served a ‘Quit Notice’ on the ethnic Hazaras.

“The Lashkar has given us the deadline to leave the province by 2012 and have warned of further attacks”, an ethnic Hazra, who lost seven members of his family, last year, told IRIN service. He is moving his family to Karachi, the commercial capital of Pakistan, which is hit by targeted killings of a different kind.  The police are helpless as they too are under attack by the rogue elements. "The Hazara and the Shias are a peaceful community and generally well settled," he added.

Why the Hazaras are targeted? A spokesperson for the Hazara Democratic Party attributes the attacks to the fact that his community was relatively wealthy. It may not be wholly untrue. But the reality is that ethnic violence and separatist violence are rocking Balochistan for some time. A senior Hazara leader, Hussain Ali Yousafi, was killed in 2008.

Last year, in 2010, religious extremists killed 65 Shias in Quetta when a procession became the target of a bomb blast on 3 September. Two days earlier, a blast in Lahore killed 35 others. Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, a respected but unofficial watchdog, said 418 people were killed in various attacks on Muslim sects, including 211 in suicide bombings last year.

Over 200 Shia have been killed in Balochistan in the last three years, HRCP said in its report ‘State of Human Rights in 2010’.

Balochistan has historically had a tense relationship with Pakistan’s government, in large part due to issues of provincial autonomy, control of mineral resources and exploration, and a consequent sense of deprivation. Upsurge in violence is an off-shoot of the 2006 assassination of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a leading Baloch leader and 35 of his close associates. The Musharraf rule also saw the murders of three prominent Baloch politicians in April 2009 by assailants believed to be linked to the Pakistan military.


More than 4,000 people were arrested and then disappeared under President Pervez Musharraf.  In addition, the army continued to engage in unprovoked and indiscriminate firing of predominantly peaceful protestors demanding their rights. Military action is estimated to have killed over 3,000 Balochis while displacing more than 200,000 others.  

Sad part of the story is that the Government in Islamabad is yet to come to grips with the problem in Balochistan. It has been devising packages after packages, the latest being Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan, but has no will to implement its own schemes. There is also a tendency to address the problems in Balochistan as a law and order issue, which it is not primarily. It is a humanitarian problem that has its roots in historical neglect and political exploitation.

-M RAMA RAO

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