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Balochistan - An
epicentre to crown, future world power
27-0602007
Compared with Pashtuns, Balochs never
won a war but their blind fightings lead to crown different groups to rise
as world power. Be it Persians, Afghans,Arabs, Mangols or Englishmen. Even
in the recent history, battle of Balochistan, under the shadow of
Afghanistan, resulted to the down-fall of Soviet Union.
The geographical situation of both east and west Balochistan including
Khorasan, bordering with Turkemanistan, plays a vital global economic and
political zone. Any power, which controls this region, not only increase his
sphere of influence over middle-east and Central Asian States, but also
shall be a dominant world power.
After the fall of "Berlin Wall" the world politics was transfered to free
economic era, with the idea of Globalization to ease the Multi-national
companies to seek their fortune freely, without any border hinder. This
resulted compitation between different countries to find new markets to sell
their commodities and a marathon to satisfy the hunger of energy...Oil &
Gas.
The past cold-war entered into a slow-motion half-warm wars, in which
western countries lined-up behind United States of America, with the
ideology of Democracy and Human Rights (?) and the other block China and
Russia are using the Islamic ideology to bring-down their opponents.
The Multi-national companies deprived Balochistan from his due rights of
Mineral and hydrocarban resources as Pakistani Military needs more funds &
resources not only to keep Balochistan in captivity but also to establish an
"Universal Islamic rule" as promised in the holy books. (but in reality to
keep their own power, exploiting religion Islam)
Using the past experiences to bring down Soviet Union, Pakistan is again on
his cruisade to defeat the non-beleivers i.e. the Western capital countries,
now, in the shadow/Umbrella of China.
The retarded Pakistani General`s main agenda is to guide, help, instigate
Chinese, to defeat United States and his allies in the field of economy,
politics and military.
As the whole world is aware, Chinese have helped Pakistan to build Gwader
Port. Through Gwader-port, china propose to transmit Oil and other
commodities to china. They are jointly building roads and raiway facilities
in Qura-qarem to connect China with Gwader-port. Through this links, China
shall increase his sphere of influence in Iran, in Middle-east and Africa.
In future, China shall not only control the Oil fields of middle-east and
Africa, but shall control the whole markets with their cheap commodities,
produced by slave labours in China and in the factories of slave Chinese
labours in Gwader.China shall control not only Persian Gulf but also Indian
Occean.
The brutal Chines system shall prevail all over the world. Nations shall be
slaughtered and oppressed. As the western civilisation shall collapse,
no-body can get any help against the neo-Changez Khans. The poor citizens of
the west shall roam all over the world to get jobs as to earn their bread.
Pakistani Generals, for their own benefits, are honestly working under
Chinese Agenda and are deceiving the western democratic countries. Pakistan
has support of many Islamic countries. Pakistan is the leader of whole
Islami World as it is equiped with an "Islami Atom-bomb".
To wipe-out NATO forces from this region, Pakistan is drifting to-wards
talbanisation with the consent and help of....China as they think that
Pakistan and Iran with the same fundamentalist Governments, can easily force
ISAF/NATO force to leave Afghanistan which shall clear their way for China
to full the gap. The retarded Generals of Pakistan, think to cope with and
wipe-out China, afterwards, the last strike to conquer the whole world!!!!!!
Pakistan is marching blindly to-wards his selected agenda. An Agenda to rule
Pakistan under Talibans, with or without..... Musharaf. The Red Mosque of
Islamabad is a clear signal in this respect. Pakistan is following their
agenda to fight and defeat and expell infidels (NATO forces) in Afghanistan.
An agenda to establish a Mullah Government in Pakistan just like Iran, with
full consent & under the umbrella of China.
Balochistan is the battle-field and Gwader-port is the epicentre as any one
who controlls this part of the world, shall be the master of the whole globe
in the coming thousand years.... and Balochistan can't be controlled by
force. The only way to tame Balochs is to respect their right of
self-determination. An English General had said, "If you wish to tame a
Baloch, you must salute him first".
Source: BalochUnity Yahoogroups
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Never Mind The
Baluch
Ben Hayes
Red Pepper, June 2007
http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?act_id=17032&username=guest@tni.org&password=9999&publish=Y
While Pakistan and Iran terrorise their Baluchi minorities, the British
government has designated the Baluchistan Liberation Army as ‘terrorist’.
Ben Hayes reports
Barely an eyebrow was raised last summer when the Baluchistan Liberation
Army (BLA) became the 41st group to be proscribed as an ‘international
terrorist organisation’ under the UK Terrorism Act 2000. The decision was
not debated in parliament. Had it been, we might have heard more on the
spiralling conflict in Baluchistan and the accusations that Pakistan is
committing ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and a ‘slow motion
genocide’ against the Baluchi people. We might also have questioned the UK’s
motives for proscribing the BLA.
Baluchistan is split across western Pakistan, eastern Iran and southern
Afghanistan. Much like the Kurds, the Baluchis are victims of empire, with
their resource-rich territory conquered and divided by successive regional
powers, from the Persians to the British. It was British colonial rule that
determined the modern political geography of Baluchistan, in the 1947
agreement with India that created Pakistan.
The Baluchis resisted their forced assimilation into Pakistan and by the
time Bangladesh had gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, they too were
demanding greater autonomy from the political elite in
Punjab. President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s refusal to grant any meaningful
powers to Baluchistan’s first elected body in 1972 resulted in a bloody
five-year war in which 3,000 Pakistani soldiers, 5,000 Baluchi fighters and
many more civilians were killed.
The Pakistan air force carried out strikes throughout rural Baluchistan and
napalm was used as part of a ‘scorched earth’ policy. Iran, concerned about
the future aspirations of its own Baluchi minority, also joined the military
action. The war ended in 1978 when General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had
ousted Bhutto in a military coup, offered an amnesty to Baluchi fighters.
Almost 30 years on, despite producing more than one third of Pakistan’s
natural gas and accounting for only six per cent of the population,
Baluchistan remains the country’s most impoverished region. In recent years,
acts of violence against the continued presence of Pakistan’s military have
increased. These include attacks by the BLA on power facilities, railway
lines and military checkpoints. Alleged financial assistance to Baluchi
fighters from India and countries in the west, renewed designs on the
exploitation of Baluchistan’s natural resources and
the presence of Taliban fighters have all fuelled tension in the region.
Following the alleged rape of a Sihndi doctor by a soldier at a hospital in
Sui, in January 2005, Baluchi guerrillas launched a crippling attack on the
Sui natural gas production facility, Pakistan’s largest. President Pervez
Musharraf’s retaliation was swift and merciless. Warning that ‘this is not
the 1970s’ and promising that ‘they will not know what’s hit them’, he
dispatched Pakistan’s F- 16s and helicopter gunships (newly supplied by the
US) into the mountains and deserts of Baluchistan to deliver the kind of
collective punishment now all too familiar in occupied lands.
In the past year six Pakistani army brigades and a 25,000- strong
paramilitary force have been deployed.
Local groups claim that 450 Baluchi politicians and activists have been
‘disappeared’ and that more than
4,000 Baluchis are in detention, many in secret locations without charge or
trial. As winter approached, Unicef called for immediate UN food and medical
aid to 84,000 Baluchis displaced by the troubles, including 33,000 children,
but the federal Pakistani government repeatedly blocked or ignored requests
from aid agencies for permission to operate in Baluchistan.
Last August, 79-year-old Nawab Akbar Bugti, a tribal chief, former governor
of Baluchistan and leader of its largest political party (the JWP), was
assassinated in targeted Pakistani air-strikes. In December, two more
prominent nationalist leaders were arrested. Iran has also stepped up its
repression of Baluchi activists, arresting hundreds and sentencing many to
death; public executions are commonplace. Last week it emerged that the
extradition of Rashif Rauf, he of the alleged plot to bring down airliners
using liquid explosives fame, could be dependent on Britain returning
several prominent Baluchi activists to Pakistan.
The Home Office website provides the following explanation for designating
the BLA as ‘terrorist’: ‘BLA are comprised of tribal groups based in the
Baluchistan area of Eastern Pakistan [sic], which aims to establish an
idependant [sic] nation encompassing the Baluch dominated areas of Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Iran.’
The failure even to describe the geography of Baluchistan correctly reflects
an ignorant quid pro quo with General Musharaf: we need his help with our
‘war on terrorism’, so we support his. This position is at best
counterproductive, and at worst reckless. Pakistan’s crackdown on moderate
and anti-Taliban Baluch and Pashtun nationalists is strengthening the
Islamist forces that coalition forces are fighting in Afghanistan, while the
ISI (Pakistan’s internal security agency) is widely believed to provide
extensive support to the Taliban. With crude geopolitics like this, who
needs enemies?
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Iran tightens
screws on internal dissent
First, the fashion police stopped 150,000.
Then the press was warned. Now banks, students and unions are targeted.
By Borzou Daragahi, Times Staff Writer
June 10, 2007
www.latimes.com
CAIRO — The government of Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of one of the most intensive crackdowns
on domestic dissent in the last two decades, targeting groups as diverse as
banks and labor unions, students and civic organizations.
In the United States, attention has focused on the detention of four Iranian
American dual nationals, three of whom have been charged by the government
in Tehran with endangering Iran's national security. But according to human
rights activists and ordinary Iranians who described the events, the effect
of the crackdown has been far more widespread at home.
The first extensive detentions came in April aimed at people wearing clothes
deemed not to comply with Islamic strictures. Security forces swarmed
streets in Tehran and grabbed people wearing skimpy head scarves, short
overcoats or tight shirts. By the end of the month, about 150,000 had been
stopped or detained, the chief of the national police said. Most were held
only briefly.
Since then, the campaign has widened. Student and union leaders have been
arrested, and scholars have been harassed for refusing to sign statements
denouncing Israel, human rights groups say. Private banks have come under
attack for their interest rates.
The government moves have been met with resistance in Tehran and other parts
of the country. But government officials have taken a tough line. "Those who
damage the system under any guise will be punished," Intelligence Minister
Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei declared in April, shortly after the campaign
began. He accused women and student groups of attempting to overthrow the
government under the guise of civil society movements.
The U.S. Congress appropriated $66.1 million this year to support Iranian
opposition groups, and Bush administration officials have talked openly of
seeking "regime change." Iranian leaders say they believe the U.S. is trying
to manipulate domestic groups to overthrow their rule the way Western-backed
civil society organizations helped unseat the Ukrainian government in that
country's Orange Revolution 2 1/2 years ago. The U.S. government has refused
to say which groups in Iran received its money.
Although the internal crackdown has been widespread, it has attracted
relatively little attention outside Iran, in part because the government has
also clamped down on the news media.
Iranian news outlets have been issued a three-page letter from the Supreme
National Security Council listing forbidden topics. Barred subjects include
the enforcement of Islamic restrictions on dress, the effect of United
Nations sanctions on everyday life, international sanctions on Iranian banks
and travel bans on Iranian nuclear and military officials. Also on the
do-not-publish list are stories about tensions between Iran's Shiites and
Sunnis, ethnic clashes in the provinces, and strained relations between Iran
and other Muslim countries worried about Tehran's regional ambitions.
Western news organizations have also felt intimidated. The bureau chief of
one in Tehran likened present-day Iran to the former Soviet Union, where
foreign journalists writing about human rights abuses would have their visas
revoked and local staffers were regularly summoned to interviews with
intelligence officials.
"There are many things that I would like to write about, but can't," the
journalist said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They would shut down
our office and kick us out."
'Security paranoia'
Why the regime has cracked down now remains unclear, and analysts offered
several overlapping theories.
Ahmadinejad has always been strongly conservative on Islamic issues, but he
downplayed those views during his 2005 presidential campaign. "Is hijab the
real problem of our people?" he said during a campaign speech, referring to
the Islamic head covering. "Don't we have much more important things to deal
with?" The speech is now played frequently on satellite channels and
websites run by Iranians abroad.
Now, some view the government's strict enforcement of dress codes and moves
against opposition groups as an attempt by a hard-line faction close to
Ahmadinejad to sabotage any possible rapprochement with the West by
disrupting groups that advocate closer ties.
Others see the repression as an attempt to establish firm control over the
domestic situation as the country girds for possible war, international
isolation or economic sanctions. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
senior cleric who carries ultimate authority over political and security
matters in Iran, urged Iranians in March to resist the West's "psychological
warfare." Many in the country view his speech as having been the first sign
of the campaign against dissenters.
Iranian leaders cite Washington's backing for opposition groups as a
justification. "Currently, some factions in the government view all
dissidents and critics as parts of America's secret plan for a nonviolent
'velvet revolution,' " Ahmad Zeidabadi, a leading Iranian dissident, wrote
in a May 30 article that appeared in Roozonline, an Internet journal.
"Unfortunately, a significant part of the security and intelligence
apparatus shares this view."
Iran's government may also be particularly frightened lately. The U.S. has
flooded the Persian Gulf with military hardware, including two aircraft
carrier groups and a Marine expeditionary group. Washington also reportedly
has embarked on covert efforts to stir unrest among Iran's many minority
groups.
Kaveh Afrasiabi, a former Tehran University political science professor who
lives in the United States, described a "national security paranoia
connected to the U.S. military buildup in Iran's vicinity, reports of the
White House's authorization of espionage activities inside Iran, and the
various acts of terrorism by fringe minority groups … reportedly supported
by the CIA."
Ahmadinejad also has managed over the last two years to purge Iran's
institutions of officials chosen by his more moderate predecessor, President
Mohammad Khatami. In their place, he has put hard-liners in key posts
overseeing banks and universities as well as prisons and security agencies.
"The new administration is a sort of military kind," said Ebrahim Yazdi,
leader of an outlawed but tolerated opposition group called the Freedom
Movement of Iran. "The mentality and the management style of military men is
blind obedience, no questions and no criticism."
Satellite dishes gone
The first move came in early April with mass collections of satellite
dishes, which are illegal but had been widely tolerated. From there, the
campaign quickly grew.
Militiamen posted checkpoints along many streets, including the popular
downtown Seventh of Tir Square, where women shop for coats, and began
arresting and questioning women. Barbers were fined for giving Western
haircuts or trimming men's eyebrows. In mid-April, an appeals court released
six religious militiamen who allegedly had killed a young couple deemed
immoral. The release contributed to an atmosphere of impunity for security
forces, New York-based Human Rights Watch said.
On the streets, young men wearing tight T-shirts or clothes decorated with
Western brand names were paraded in humiliation, with water cans used in
toileting strung around their necks. "When we see people being beaten, hit,
arrested — no one wants to go to prison," said one Tehran resident, an
engineer, who asked that his name not be published for fear of retribution.
Footage of the campaign was broadcast on state television. In one scene, a
woman in an all-covering black chador, backed by two members of the security
forces, approached a fashionably dressed woman and sternly reproached her
for not dressing appropriately for an "Iranian woman."
But more violent footage, often taken by cellphone video cameras, surfaced
on the Internet and on satellite channels beamed from abroad, including the
U.S.-funded Voice of America.
Those videos are one sign of resistance to the crackdown. Others include
reports of melees that erupted in some Tehran neighborhoods as young people
fought back against the morality enforcers.
In recent days, street-level harassment has begun to wane, and young people
have turned up the volume of pop music playing on their car stereos and
allowed their head scarves to recede.
"I dress how I dress and wear my hair like this because I like it," said
Amir, the fashionably dressed and elaborately coiffed 22-year-old co-owner
of a video store in northern Tehran. "They bother me on the streets," he
said. "They've thrown me up against the wall. They've told me to change how
I look. The next day, I go out like this again."
Despite press restrictions, newspapers have again started criticizing
Ahmadinejad for his most recent anti-Israel remarks, and judiciary officials
allowed the reopening of two shuttered dailies in recent weeks.
But even as the government has eased some restrictions, it has moved
forcefully against new targets. Iran's Ministry of Intelligence issued a
statement warning university professors to avoid being recruited by Western
spying networks while attending "so-called scientific conferences" abroad.
And in late May, prosecutors charged three dual-nationals with espionage and
endangering Iranian national security. The three are Haleh Esfandiari,
director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars in Washington; Kian Tajbakhsh, with George Soros' Open
Society Institute; and Parnaz Azima, a journalist with U.S.-funded Radio
Farda who remains free on bail but is forbidden to leave the country.
Relatives and colleagues deny the charges.
A fourth detainee, Ali Shakeri, a founding board member of the Center for
Citizen Peacebuilding at UC Irvine, has been jailed, but not formally
charged.
Beyond the four Westerners, the government's actions appeared aimed at those
critical of or considered a threat to Ahmadinejad and his circle.
Among the most notable was Hossein Mousavian, an experienced Iranian
diplomat close to former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a rival to
Ahmadinejad. Mousavian was arrested and charged with espionage after meeting
with German diplomats.
Students at Amir Kabir University in Tehran were jailed on charges of
lampooning Khamenei in a campus newspaper. Members of student groups in the
capital and the northern province of Mazandaran were arrested, hauled away
by plainclothes security officials. Trade unionists reported the arrests of
labor leaders in the heavily Kurdish areas bordering Iraq and Turkey.
Banks under attack
The country's burgeoning private banking sector has also come under attack.
In late May, Ahmadinejad ordered banks to cut interest rates on loans, a
move consistent with his populist economic policies. "Those who misuse
people's money should know that the private sector is all of Iran's 70
million people," the president said on state television.
Many economists consider the interest-rate cuts inflationary and a
potentially damaging blow to the banks, powerful and growing institutions
that don't answer directly to the government.
The crackdown has had an extraordinary effect on the life of the country,
especially in the capital.
"Overall, it's a very scary time," said a business consultant in Tehran, who
spoke on the condition that his name not be published.
"It's a nerve-racking time. We're all worried, about ourselves and our
friends."
daragahi@latimes.com
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Kurds: U.S. a
'Positive Force' in Middle East
Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
PARIS -- As Democrats continue to seek ways to force a U.S. withdrawal from
Iraq, a group of influential Iranian Kurds are urging the Bush
administration to maintain military forces in the region and to stay engaged
in regional politics.
"People in the region are happy to have the American presence," said Hassan
Sharafi, deputy secretary general of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI).
In a wide-ranging interview with NewsMax in Paris, Sharafi said that Iranian
Kurds and others in the region see the American military presence in Iraq as
a "positive force."
"Before the U.S. liberation of Iraq, only the regimes were happy to have the
Americans in the region," Sharafi said.
When Saddam Hussein was still in power, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan,
and the smaller Gulf monarchies saw the Americans as the protectors of their
privileges. "Now it's the people in the region who support the American
presence," he explained.
The KDPI is the largest, oldest, and best organized party of the Iranian
democratic opposition. They maintain training camps and logistical bases in
northern Iraq, and have an underground army of peshmerga guerilla fighters
inside Iran, although they are not currently engaged in armed conflict
against the regime.
If the United States decides to begin working with Iranian opposition
groups, Sharafi had a word of advice. "Please pay better attention to who is
who, and who has what capabilities," he said. "The United States should
better discern which groups have real assets" than they did in Iraq.
The United States over-estimated the capabilities and influence of Iraqi
opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi, he said, while underestimating the power
and the danger of Iranian-backed Shiite groups led by Muqtada Sadr and by
Ayatollah Mohammad Bakr al-Hakim.
"Chalabi exaggerated his influence inside Iraq, and in particular within the
Iraqi army," Sharafi said. "He is not a hero. But neither is he an Iranian
spy."
Sharafi said that Iran's four million Kurds, who control the northern border
with Iraq, would support America in the event the United States takes more
aggressive steps against Iran.
"The current regime in Tehran is a threat to the region, a threat to the
world, and a threat to Iranians even without nuclear weapons. They will be
far more dangerous if they can produce them," he said. "Only democracy can
produce a peaceful tomorrow."
Since 2004, Sharafi's KDPI has expanded its horizons as other ethnic groups
in Iran have started to organize themselves politically. "Before, our goal
was autonomy" for the Kurdish region of northwestern Iran. "Now, we are in
favor of federalism, since this is the only system that provides an answer
for all of Iran's nationalities."
The identity of Iran's diverse ethnic groups is a hot-button topic among
Iranians. Persian nationalists fear that regional autonomy is the first step
toward the disintegration of Iran. But groups such as the KDPI argue that
Iran is a mosaic compromised of many different nationalities, each with
their own cultural identity and language. "Together, we make up the Iranian
people," Sharafi said.
Figures compiled by Ethnologue.com suggest that ethnic Persians are in fact
a minority in Iran, with other peoples making up 60% of the total population
of 70 million.
"We don't want to split up Iran, to destroy Iran," said Sharafi. "We want to
be part of the framework of Iran."
He compared the situation of Iran's Kurds to the Kurds in Iraq, who have
chosen to be part of a single, unified Iraqi state.
"The Iraqi Kurds have far less in common with the Arabs than we do with
other Iranians," said Sharafi. "Their language is completely different,
whereas Kurdish is very close to Persian. We are Iranian nationalists. We
want our rights within a federal Iran. Splitting apart Iran is to nobody's
benefit."
Ramin Parham, a prominent intellectual and supporter of Reza Pahlavi, the
son of the former shah, said the monarchist camp had to come to grips with
the realities inside today's Iran, including the demands of the Kurds and
other nationalities for regional autonomy.
"Persians are actually a minority. So we should be speaking of the ethnic
components of Iran," he told NewsMax in Paris.
Throughout history, Kurds and other Sunni minorities had formed a belt
around the high plateau, which was dominated by Persians. "For centuries,
they have protected us from invaders.," Parham said. "These people have not
been treated with respect or fairness."
Parham's understanding of Iran's ethnic minorities was not just
intellectual, but personal.
"The Kurds protected me for three months when I escaped from Iran. They
called me ‘Kak Ramin,' a term of respect. They protected all the Iranian
opposition. We need to recognize this and give them the respect they
deserve."
The Kurds are not the only minority to have suffered under the current
regime. Sistan and Balouchestan, on Iran's eastern border with Pakistan, is
Iran's biggest province – and the poorest. Arabs in Khouzestan, the oil-rich
area bordering Iraq to the south, are regularly brutalized and murdered by
regime thugs.
"Despite all the oil in Khouzestan, the regime has never rebuilt Ahwaz,"
Parham said. The city was destroyed during the Iraqi occupation in 1982.
Parham is confident that Iran's ethnic leaders understand the unity of Iran.
"We need to build trust with them, a shared vocabulary, confident that they
are mature enough not to go for disintegration," he said.
Should the United States get more involved in Iran, Parham believes the work
of rebuilding Iran after the fall of the Islamic Republic will be easier
than it has been elsewhere.
"You don't need to do nation building in Iran," he said. "You need to do
state building, to build the institutions of a modern democratic state."
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
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