“ALL the package has given us is corpses,” said an eloquent Sehrish Baloch when asked if her province had seen any tangible benefit in the federal government’s special package for Balochistan.

The woman, who had lost her brother, was equally clear about the legitimacy of his struggle for “an independent homeland. How can we live in a country where our dignity, our freedoms and our lives amount to nothing?” Some months ago, her brother Zubair Baloch took a bus to Karachi for medical treatment. He was dragged out of the vehicle by plainclothes men who had blocked the road on a lonely stretch. His body bearing marks of torture and bullet wounds was found a little later.

The conversation was part of BBC Urdu’s videotaped interviews in Quetta towards the end of last month with family members of mostly those Baloch men who first ‘disappeared’ and whose bodies were later found dumped in areas where they would certainly be found.

There was method to this madness. A chilling message was being sent. This isn’t surprising at all, given how authorities in Pindi-Islamabad have dealt with the often independent-minded and occasionally rebellious province.

The democratically elected prime minister Z. A. Bhutto’s response to headstrong elected Baloch leaders such as Sardar Ataullah Mengal and Mir Ghous Bux Bizenjo was perhaps no different than that of the military ruler Gen Pervez Musharraf to the challenge posed by Nawab Akbar Bugti. Both relied on brute, naked force.

Gen Ziaul Haq is rightly blamed for each of our ills today but, in my view, perhaps the only thing he got right was extending amnesty to all the Baloch who had taken to the mountains to offer resistance to the Bhutto government. Even if Zia’s decision was meant to show Bhutto in a poor light, it defused the situation.

I remember visiting parts of Balochistan in the early 1980s with a friend who showed me signs and marks where the army had camped during its cam paign in the valleys and pointed out the mountain tops which the resistance used to mount their guerrilla, hit-andrun raids.

Although numerically inferior (I promised my Baloch host never to divulge the number not least because he had warned me nobody would believe me anyway), the rebels offset this disadvantage by their superior knowledge of the terrain, of obscure caves and escape paths.

How effective was this resistance? I recall the atmosphere in Quetta in 1975. Just having finished my Year 10 exams I went to visit my brother-in-law then a young and handsome major attending the Command and Staff College. We were to lose him to heart disease in 1986.

Almost every few days he’d come home, shaking his head in a mix of despair, grief and anger. In the four weeks I spent with him and my sister, I started to recognise what this meant: another soldier’s body had been brought to Quetta from the troubled areas.

Fast forward 30 years and where are we? This is the reign of Gen Pervez Musharraf, a vain military leader. If vanity and power didn’t make a lethal enough mix, what made it explosive was the general’s fierce loyalty to the institution that brought him the ultimate prize, the seat of power in Pakistan.

Where Nawab Akbar Bugti’s demand for more royalties from Sui gas fields may have irritated the general, the Baloch tribal chief’s taking sides with a rape survivor, a doctor working at the gas fields, against the alleged perpetrator, an army captain, ignited Gen Musharraf.

It isn’t clear why he didn’t assign the mother of all agencies to deal with Balochistan, but Musharraf tasked the Military Intelligence headed by one his relatives Major-Gen Nadeem Ijaz Mian with “sorting out the troublemakers”. And how the agency went about the task becomes apparent from what a Baloch politician who unashamedly calls himself and his politics pro-establishment told me a few years ago. “We are elected politicians and they send us messages through captains and majors on how to vote and what to do.” This politician also narrated an incident involving a friend of his who decided to exercise his vote in defiance of the MI directives in the Senate elections. Suddenly, NAB started to investigate every development scheme in his constituency.

“We are patriotic, compliant Muslim League types who have long recognised that the army will have a role to play in our province and the country for years to come. And this is what happens to us. Imagine what happens to the independent-minded Baloch.” One doesn’t have wait long to find out. For every few days, there is a headline on the back or inside pages of newspapers that reads ‘Two (or three or four or even five) bodies found’ where the dateline is so often Quetta or some other city in Balochistan.

And then there are the missing, the disappeared.

There is no denying that Baloch nationalism has also manifest itself in tragic, ugly ways with the killing of innocent non-Baloch teachers/other settlers. But can the state use this as a justification to carry out torture and summary executions without trial?

What my Baloch friends tell me fills me with doom. The government may have approved a special package for the province but there is little room for it to deal politically with the situation.

For, once the spectre of the foreign hand is raised, the security establishment devolves all decision-making to itself. I have no doubt that a foreign power may actually be exploiting the mess we have created.

The spiral into violence and more mind-numbing violence continues. We have tried brutal force and failed. Apart from wanted terrorists hiding in our country, the other major threat to our sovereignty comes from instability as it invites foreign intervention.

Do we recognise this? And if we do, do we have what it takes to change the game plan?

Source: A land without hope