Anthropologists Should Shed Light on the Violence in Balochistan Province, Pakistan

Hafeez Jamali
U Texas at Austin

Over the past few decades, anthropologists and the AAA have striven to include as an integral part of their practice a respect for human rights and support of different ethnic and cultural groups’ desires to maintain their physical, personal and social wellbeing.

Certain ways of anthropologically observing and theorizing marginalized ethnic groups, however, have tended to ignore the power of ethnographic description in fashioning how the discipline and public think about particular ethnic groups. Thus, sometimes the plight of these ethnic groups at the hands of hegemonic state actors is obscured.

The Situation
The current apathy of the discipline and of anthropologists toward the appalling human rights situation in Balochistan Province, Pakistan, is a case-in-point. Balochistan is presently the scene of a bitter and violent struggle between the powerful Pakistani military and Baloch nationalist rebels, who are demanding greater autonomy and a fair share in the control and profits from the oil, natural gas and copper-gold of the region. The rebels’ demands also include a greater say in how Balochistan’s strategic coastline, especially the newly constructed deep-sea port at Gawadar, is used.

Instead of addressing the Baloch people’s grievances through political channels, the Pakistani government launched a military operation in the province in March 2005, in which, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and UNICEF, hundreds of ordinary Baloch died, some 84,000 civilians predominantly from Marri and Bugti tribes have been displaced and hundreds of political activists have been arrested and tortured. The government reportedly prevented local and international aid agencies from helping these displaced people leading to starvation, disease and deaths, especially among children. Similarly, the Iranian government is carrying out a violent campaign of oppression and denial of basic rights against Baloch people living in Sistan-Balochistan Province of Iran.

Yet we see very little effort, if any, by anthropologists who have worked amongst Baloch people to raise this issue in appropriate forums or to represent the political dimensions of the Baloch people’s struggle against oppressive state apparatuses in their ethnographic work. Indeed, barring some recent work by Paul Titus and Nina Swidler, much of the past and recent anthropological work on the Baloch people has tended to focus on pastoral-nomadic aspects of Baloch social organization by employing concepts of ecological adaptation and kinship networks.

These ethnographic works, notwithstanding their important contribution to the understanding of Baloch social organization, give the impression that the Baloch are pre-modern beings living in bounded cultural groups which are relatively unconcerned with larger geo-strategic and political developments in the region and the world. This approach is misleading because Baloch tribes’ resistance movements against colonial rule of the British Raj as well as against inequities of postcolonial states such as Iran and Pakistan were intrinsically linked to regional anti-colonial struggles. The present day struggle in Balochistan also draws inspiration from contemporary movements for self-governance in other parts of the world and in that sense is comparable to the struggles being waged by Palestinians, Kurds and other marginalized ethnic groups.

Ethnography of Neoliberalism
The current armed conflict in Balochistan is a direct outcome of neoliberalism—that is the intrusion of multinationals into Baloch land to exploit the region’s mineral resources and the Baloch nationalist movement’s opposition to the intrusion. The current insurgency in Balochistan was sparked in part by the Pakistan federal government’s efforts to intensify oil and gas exploration by giving a large number of oil and copper-gold concessions to multinational companies Premier-Shell and BHP of Australia, as well as the government’s plans of developing a deep-sea port at Gawadar without consulting the Baloch people.

In its haste to ease the entry of multinationals into Balochistan and thereby appropriate the resulting profits and jobs for Pakistan’s non-Baloch population, the federal government refused to follow political channels and negotiate with the tribal elders and Baloch nationalist leaders over the local people’s share of jobs and income in the proposed economic projects. Being cognizant of the alliance between the state and multinational capital, nationalist cadres, especially tribesmen from Marri and Bugti tribes, have engaged in a low intensity warfare that appears to be aimed not so much at driving out government forces as on creating enough instability in the region to thwart the federal government’s economic plans.

Pakistani policemen examine a repaired railway track after it was blown up by suspected insurgents in the Dasht area, some 13 miles south of provincial capital Quetta, February 25, 2007. Suspected insurgents bombed a main railway track early February 25 and fired a rocket at an electricity station in the restive southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan, but there were no casualties. Photo courtesy of Banaras Khan/AFP/Getty Images

Government forces’ failure to score a decisive victory against nationalist rebels has made them increasingly desperate and they have been running a campaign of collective punishment of entire populations of recalcitrant tribes and spreading terror in the ranks of political activists from nationalist political parties through the tactics of mass arrests, forced “disappearances” and widespread use of torture.
The families of Baloch tribesmen and Baloch political activists have been protesting and demanding that the government bring their loved ones before a court of law where they could contest the charges levelled against them. Their appeals have generally fallen on deaf ears.

Similarly, more than 84,000 internally displaced people from Marri and Bugti tribes live in appalling conditions in different parts of Balochistan and the neighboring province of Sindh. Considering that the combined population of Dera Bugti and Kohlu Districts is less than 300,000, this means that about one third of the population of these territories has been displaced.

In view of this situation, it is important that anthropologists who work in and study Balochistan take the influence of regional geo-strategic politics as well as the intrusion of neoliberal globalization in the Baloch people’s lives and the response of the Baloch to such intrusion more seriously in their work. Furthermore, anthropologists working in this area should attempt to highlight the plight of the Baloch at appropriate scholarly and non-scholarly forums.

Hafeez Jamali is a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.