BALOCHISTAN: THE NEGLECTED PROVINCE

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ISLAMABAD 001573



SIPDIS



SIPDIS



E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/15/2018

TAGS: PGOV, PHUM, PK, PREL, PTER, EAID

SUBJECT: BALOCHISTAN: THE NEGLECTED PROVINCE



REF: ISLAMABAD 1420



Classified By: Ambassador Anne Patterson, reasons 1.4 b, d



1. (C) Summary: In a March 31 - April 2 visit to Quetta,

capital of Pakistan's Balochistan province, Embassy political

officer met with local politicians, businessmen, and

students. While their views widely varied, whether they were

male or female, new to politics or wizened, they uniformly

complained that the province has been neglected economically

and politically since Pakistan's inception. Most also voiced

a stunning pride in their ethnicity--Pashtoon or

Baloch--which in its most extreme form still results in calls

for an independent state of Balochistan. Along with this

pride comes a feeling of exclusion; every Baloch or Pashtun

we spoke to in Quetta admitted to feeling "not quite

accepted" by the rest of Pakistan. The power of the tribal

Sardars and Nawabs (Chiefs) remains strong among many Baloch,

and many tribal leaders still use this to resist the control

of the central government, a pattern that dates from

Balochistan's absorption into Pakistan in 1947 and 1948.

Balochistan's history since Pakistan's inception is riddled

with uprisings and insurrections followed by brutal

repression from the center, with pockets of Baloch

"liberation forces" carrying on the fight to this day in the

province's mountains.



2.(C) Summary continued: All lament the backward state of the

province, where some areas are yet to be electrified, and

where some villages remain a day's walk from water in the dry

season. Balochistan's small population (10 million) and huge

area (134,000 square miles, 48 per cent of Pakistan, half the

size of France) makes it a very difficult province to

develop, an argument the central government indirectly makes:

investment in a road in heavily populated Punjab reaches far

more people than in sparsely populated Balochistan. This is

cold comfort to the people of this desert province, however,

only feeding their sense of aggrieved neglect. Private

businessmen we met and foreign-funded NGOS are building

schools and health centers which receive enormous local

support. Several Baloch politicians were eager to share their

creative ideas for development in the province. Following

the February 18 elections, newly elected members of the

Provincial Assembly have formed their own coalition--echoing

that of the center--and elected a Baloch Sardar as Chief

Minister on April 7. Their hope is cooperation with the

National Assembly will be strong enough to bring new

attention--and development funds--to the province. End

summary.



Balochistan: The Neglected Province



3. (SBU) On Eighteenth Century French maps, this part of the

world is marked "Terre des Balodges, feroces et guerrieres,"

land of the Baloch, fierce and warlike. Not much has changed.

In the sixty years since it was incorporated into Pakistan,

Balochistan has generated countless independence movements

and uprisings, peaking in 1971 - 74 when then-Prime Minister

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sent in helicopter gunships and thousands

of Baloch rebels died. While a self-styled Baloch Liberation

Army still exists in the mountains, its threat to the

stability of the province is small, causing (or at least

claiming) occasional assassinations of police and Frontier

Corps troops, including two in Quetta during PolOff's visit.

(The killings are real; whether they or other groups are in

fact the culprits is unclear.)



4.(C) Although the fighting for independence has died down,

the spirit lives on, at least in the hearts of ardent

students, members of the Baloch Students Organization at the

University of Balochistan. PolOff met with six such students

at the Serena Hotel in Quetta (where, for security reasons,

all meetings took place but for a call on the city's Nazim,

or Mayor). All introduced themselves with the last name

Baloch, were articulate and uniformly polite, and all had

memorized the wrongs done to Balochistan by Pakistan,

starting when the Khan of Kalat was forced to sign the

Instrument of Accession by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in 1948.

(Kalat, a princely state in India, formed the largest part of

today's Balochistan province.) They assured PolOff the

majority of their fellow Baloch students shared their passion

for independence.



5. (C) More senior interlocutors we met have mellowed on this



ISLAMABAD 00001573 002.2 OF 003





issue and assured us such feelings are held only by students

from a limited number of tribes, and they, too, mellow with

maturity. But no one we met, businessman, NGO worker or

politician, denied the province has been badly neglected by

the central government since independence. All stressed that

Balochistan's mineral wealth--particularly natural gas,

produced there since the 1950s--has contributed greatly to

Pakistan's treasury, with the province receiving little in

return. As Ms. Rubina Erfan, a political activist and past

and present member of the provincial assembly for the

Pakistan Muslim League (PML) noted, a sign of the center's

neglect was that PML leader Chaudhry Shujaat Hussein never

once visited the province, despite the fact its Chief

Minister came from his party.



6. (C) Another factor holding the province back is local

tribal practices, especially among the Baloch. Many of those

we met readily acknowledge that the more traditional tribal

leaders still resist development in their areas lest it

reduce the reliance of tribal people on their leaders. Former

provincial governor Lt.Gen.(ret.) Abdul Qadir Baloch noted

that the northern third or so of the province, dominated by

Pashtuns, is far more educated and developed than the rest of

the predominantly Baloch areas and in turn reflects a

lessening of Pashtun tribal ties over the years. Baloch, the

first of his ethnic group to become a general in the Pakistan

Army, is not a Sardar and clearly has little time for them.

"Look who gets elected here," he told us; "not Sardars," and

with few exceptions he is right (as exceptions see the

current Assembly in para 9 below). A current popular leader,

in jail in Karachi for political agitation, is Sardar Akhtar

Mingal. "He is important not because he is a Sardar, but

because he is a party leader," the General stressed.



Some Good Work Gets Done



7. (SBU) Despite all this apparent gloom, we encountered some

genuine enthusiasm for change in Quetta. NGOs, businessmen

and politicians are all making their mark. PolOff met with

workers from NGOs Strengthening Participation Organization

(SPO) and South Asia Partnership/Pakistan (SAPP),both funded

by foreign aid, whose organizations teach political rights to

political party workers, low-level bureaucrats and ordinary

citizens. Ms. Yasmin Lehri of SPO, a previous USAID grantee

to the East-West Center, has established 10 village girls'

schools and mother-child health centers in District Bolan. In

all of them, the villagers build the facilities and

participate in their management. SPO, SAPP and Kamal

Siddiqui, a successful businessman and philanthropist, who

has built some 100 schools under a similar program, all

confirm that the villagers' support for these programs is so

strong that other villagers are calling for similar schools

and health centers to be built in their areas.



8. (SBU) PML Assembly member Ms. Rubina Erfan ("call me

Rubina"),who married into the still-powerful family of the

Khan of Kalat, is tireless in her efforts to bring

development to her district. Recently, President Musharraf

granted Balochistan legislators several million dollars each

for special development funds. Rubina confronted him, said,

to his apparent amazement, that her villages had yet to see

electricity, and she needed much more if she was to make any

real progress in her district. She is a forceful woman, if

our meeting was any guide, and Musharraf acquiesced.

Electricity is reaching her villages in Kalat for the first

time now and with it tube wells and a reliable source of

water, an incalculable boon in an area where in the dry

season water was a day's camel's ride away.



A New Provincial Assembly



9. (SBU) Almost two months after the February 18 general

elections, the Balochistan Assembly met for the first time on

April 7. Endless shifting party allegiances resulted in a

People's Party of Pakistan (PPP)-dominated Assembly with the

virtual unanimous election of PPP member Nawab Muhammad Aslam

Raisani as Chief Minister and another Baloch Nawab, Zulfiqar

Magsi, as Governor. The PML, which won 20 seats in the 62

seat Assembly, versus the PPP's four, gradually dissolved to

favor a coalition mirroring the one in the center. This,

PML, Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N),and PPP politicians

told us, should strengthen Balochistan's efforts to get

attention--and aid--from the center. It seems to have already

helped. PPP co-chairman Asif Zardari recently reached out to



ISLAMABAD 00001573 003 OF 003





the people of the province, calling for an inquiry into the

thousands of Baloch and Pashtoons who have "disappeared" in

police and intelligence roundups there over the past few

years.



10. (SBU) On April 6, the new Governor announced that Chief

Minister Raisani has just initiated contacts with Baloch

insurgents in an effort to end the long-simmering insurgency.

"No one has tried to talk to Baloch fighters in the past,"

Magsi is quoted in the press as saying, noting that the GOP

has always engaged in force in dealing with them. (Comment:

Former Governor Lt.Gen Abdul Qadir Baloch told us the

President fired him as Governor several years ago for

proposing talking to rather than fighting the insurgents. End

comment.) The Baloch insurgents have long demanded more

autonomy and more control of the province's resources, and to

bring attention to their cause have generated a number of

murders and other law and order problems, the extent of which

our interlocutors could not gauge. What is their "work" in

the province, particularly in Quetta, and that which is

generated by the Taliban (and less likely, al Qaeda) is

apparently conflated by local law enforcement, complicated by

claims (and blames) that usually go to the "Balochistan

Liberation Army."



Energy in the Air



11. (C) Comment: PolOff's brief visit revealed a surprising

number of bright, energetic Baloch and Pashtoon men and women

who are fighting the many obstacles they face to bring

progress to their far away province, despite all its

problems. One grandmother, Ghazala Gola, PPP member of the

Provincial Assembly, is still ready to fight for

Balochistan's needs as she did when she started working for

her party 30 years ago. The dynamic Rubina Erfan, mentioned

above, heads the girls' soccer leagues for all of Pakistan,

and sends teams from Balochistan to national competition in

Islamabad (and proudly announced "we beat the Afghans!").

Former governor Baloch is in a major Islamabad thinktank,

Pildat, with some of Pakistan's best minds. The huge port of

Gwadar (see reftel),on Balochistan's border with Iran may,

just may, become a gateway for trade with central Asia, and

as a major deep water port, a transshipment point for smaller

ships going to Gulf ports. But land access to the port is

still only by rough road, and the province's poor road and

limited rail system will continue to hinder Balochistan's

economic prospects for some time to come. The province's use

by the nastiest elements in Afghanistan will likely continue

unabated for the near future. But with more attention from

Islamabad, the small cadre of energetic people we met will

grab every opportunity they have to improve their home

province. End comment.

PATTERSON