حزب مردم بلوچستان Balochistan People’s Party بلوچستانءِ اُستمانءِ گــَل
Balochistan' s prisoner of conscience
NELSON Mandela who was arrested in 1964 was convicted of sabotage and
treason and sentenced to life imprisonment by the Apartheid regime of South
Africa. But the world's most respected and admired statesman ? who later won
the Nobel Peace Prize ? was fortunate that his trial was not held inside the
prison. No anti-terrorism court tried him nor was he thrown into an iron
cage.
Mandela and his companions were tried in a proper court room. His wife,
mother, friends, journalists and supporters were allowed to witness the
court proceedings.
Though the Apartheid regime employed the worst form of racial discrimination
against native South Africans, no political activist of the ANC went missing
or 'disappeared' during the struggle against the racist regime. But Akhtar
Mengal, a well-known and respected Baloch nationalist, has not been so lucky.
For some people in Balochistan he has the status that Mandela had in South
Africa.
He has been kept in solitary confinement in Karachi since December 2006.
Akhtar Mengal has not been tried in an open court. His trial is conducted
inside the prison. No one except one person from his family is allowed to
witness the court proceedings. Mr Iqbal Haider, secretary-general of the
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, witnessed the first hearing of his
trial in Karachi prison on special request, and this is what he saw: "Mr
Mengal was brought into the courtroom and shoved into an iron cage with bars
all around that stood in a corner away from his counsel."
Akhtar Mengal is not the only political prisoner from a smaller province who
has been humiliated or treated as a second class citizen. A number of Baloch,
Sindhi and Pashtun leaders have been detained and humiliated repeatedly in
the last 60 years.
Veteran Baloch nationalist Sardar Attaullah Mengal, Nawab Khair Bux Khan
Marri, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, Mir Ghous Bux Bizenjo, Sher Mohammed Marri and
Mir Gul Khan Naseer have spent years in prison for being insubordinate to
the establishment. Akhtar Mengal, president of the Balochistan National
Party (BNP) and former chief minister of Balochistan, has been under
detention since Nov 2006, and has been denied justice through delaying
tactics. Mengal has not been arrested under corruption charges nor has he
been charged with misuse of power. He is not an industrialist who is a bank
defaulter. Neither has he been involved in any land scam like many other
pro-establishment politicians of the country. He is facing trial for the
brief 'abduction' of two undercover agents of security agencies.
Mengal's prolonged detention, mortification and the delay in the
dispensation of justice has exposed the inequality that characterises our
system. They also point to the inability of our courts to act independently
without being influenced by the powers that be.
The Constitution guarantees that "All citizens are equal before law and are
entitled to equal protection of law." The International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination also emphasises "the right
to equal treatment before the tribunals and all other organs administering
justice". However, the Baloch have not been treated according to national
and international laws. Constitutional guarantees and the courts have failed
to protect their fundamental rights.
Akhtar Mengal along with 500 BNP activists was arrested in Nov 2006, a day
before President Musharraf's visit to Balochistan. The mass arrests were
aimed at stopping the BNP from protesting peacefully against the military
operation, widespread arrests of activists and their enforced 'disappearance'
.
According to Mr Mengal, his family had been receiving threatening phone
calls since the beginning of the military operation in the province. Due to
the gravity of the threats he would personally drop his children to school.
On April 5, 2006, some unknown persons followed his car presumably to kidnap
his school-going children. He stopped his car and asked them who they were.
They refused to give any satisfactory answer. Considering this a security
issue, Akhtar Mengal's security guards picked up the two riders of the
motorcycle and took them back to the Mengal residence intending to hand them
over to the police. At this stage, the two admitted to being army personnel.
Almost immediately, a large party of law-enforcement agency men arrived on
the spot and took away their two colleagues who had been picked up, and laid
siege to the house and its occupants.
On the intervention of the Sindh chief minister, it was agreed that no case
would be filed if Mr Mengal's guards who were involved in the case were
handed over to the police for questioning. At a later stage, it was
discovered that a havaldar of the Pakistan army had filed an FIR against
Akhtar Mengal and his four guards, who were voluntarily handed over to the
police. Yet Akhtar Mengal remained free till Nov 28, 2006, when the
Balochistan police arrested him, along with senior members of his party.
Since then, all proceedings are being conducted in camera. Repeated
humiliation of the Baloch and their political representatives will intensify
the animosity felt by the troubled Baloch population. The judiciary's tilted
role and the unproductive hearings of the ATC have already shattered the
credibility of the bench.
Akhtar Mengal, as a senior leader of a political party, is entitled to all
basic rights and facilities. But he has been denied basic legal and human
rights because of his political affiliations. The large number of political
activists in Balochistan, who have been detained and denied legal and prison
rights, are entitled to just treatment in accordance with UN conventions.
The government of Pakistan must abide by the laws of the country and
international law and respect the rights of the Baloch. There should be an
end to the injustice, intimidation and harassment being meted out to them.
US civil rights leader Martin Luther King had stated in a letter from
Birmingham jail to his friends, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere."
http://dawn.com/2008/02/14/op.htm#3
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Israel faces 'certain death': Iran leader adviser
22-02-2008
TEHRAN
(AFP) — The assassination of a top commander of the Lebanese Shiite
militant group Hezbollah has hastened the "certain death" of Israel, the top
military adviser to Iran's supreme leader said on Thursday.
General Yahya Rahim Safavi, in the latest of a spate of anti-Israel verbal
attacks by Iran, said the murder of Imad Mughnieh in a Damascus car bombing
last week had enraged thousands of young members of Hezbollah.
"With this anger, the certain death of the Zionist regime had been brought
forward," he said, according to the state-run IRNA news agency.
Safavi, who was for a decade top commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards,
again accused Israel of carrying out the attack that killed Mughnieh but
also said that "security terrorists" from the United States and "one Arab
nation" had cooperated.
He did not name the Arab country.
Iran has stepped up its rhetoric against Israel in the last days after the
murder of Mughnieh, which it blamed on the Jewish state. Israel has denied
any involvement.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday called Israel a "dirty microbe"
and "savage animal".
The current head of the Revolutionary Guards, Iran's ideological army,
Mohammad Ali Jafari, weighed in with a prediction that Hezbollah would
destroy the Jewish state.
Israel said it had protested to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon after
Ahmadinejad's latest tirade.
"I have told the secretary general of the United Nations that these are
demented remarks that are reminiscent of Nazi propaganda," ambassador to the
United Nations Dan Gillerman told Israeli public radio.
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Poverty, blind violence in Iran’s Baluchestan
The Baluch minority feel
neglected by the government
Unemployment rate in Iran’s undeveloped Baluchestan province is five times
national average.
23-02-2008 ; This article
originally appeared in Mianeh.net
By Amir Hossein Asayesh – ZAHEDAN, Iran
Blighted by poverty, Iran’s sparsely populated and undeveloped southeastern
province of Sistan and Baluchestan has seen an upsurge in violence led by
Jundullah, an armed insurgent group that has claimed responsibility for
armed attacks on Iranian security forces in the last couple of years.
Iranian officials say the group has links abroad, but there is little doubt
the insurgency is also fuelled by a sense of frustration among the Baluch
minority, who feel economically deprived and excluded from the institutions
of power.
According to the Iranian government’s own statistics, Sistan and Baluchestan
is the least developed province in the country. In the last two decades, it
has seen the lowest level of investment of any part of Iran.
The unemployment rate here is five times the national average, and literacy
is also lower than anywhere else in Iran. Nine out of ten people here count
as vulnerable, and 45 per cent live below the poverty line.
Located on trade routes with Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sistan and
Baluchestan has one thriving industry – smuggling, which involves a wide
range of goods and of course Afghan opium and heroin. As a result, Iran’s
State Welfare Organisation estimates that drug addiction here is the highest
in the country.
News reports in the domestic media only serve to underline that this is
Iran’s least stable province. Violence and the drug trade mean that this is
also the region that has seen most executions in recent years.
Sistan and Baluchestan is Iran’s largest province by area, but is home to
just three per cent of its population.
The social system is based around the distinctive customary structures of
the Baluch – a traditionally nomadic community who also live in adjoining
parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. They profess Sunni Islam, in contrast to
Iran’s Shia majority. Baluch tribal and subtribal groupings like the Rigi,
Narui, Shahnavazi, Marri, Kahrazahi, Mobaraki, Sardarzahi, Shirani and
Lashari, and the related Brahui people, run day-to-day life, although they
are excluded from the highest levels of local government.
Poverty is a longstanding problem in this arid province, but it has been
accentuated by a severe drought in recent years. To take one indicator, 30
per cent of girls did not attend primary schools in 2006, a far higher
figure than the national average in a country where primary school
attendance is compulsory. One reason is the shortage of schools, but another
stems from cultural prejudices against educating girls.
Young men, meanwhile, have few opportunities. Unemployment is high, and many
work in marginal jobs such as peddling, or simple go elsewhere to work as
labour migrants.
Often, though, Baluch men get involved in smuggling, either as small-time
traders running Iranian-produced fuel over the border and bringing in
contraband goods, or becoming part of bigger international organised crime
rings.
This brings them into conflict with Iranian police and border forces
patrolling an extended and porous frontier. Smugglers intercepted by the
security forces while carrying a few gallons of petrol or sacks of flour by
border guards are on occasion shot dead when they try to escape.
Into this mix of poverty, discontent and lawlessness comes a relatively new
and dangerous element – Jundollah, the “Army of God”
The group, led by Abdolmalek Rigi, combines Sunni extremism, al-Qaeda
tactics, ethnic prejudices and ambitious political slogans.
It recently renamed itself the Peoples Resistance Movement of Iran, perhaps
to avoid being identified too closely with the Pakistan-based Jundollah, an
Islamist group with which it is reportedly linked.
The phenomenon of Jundullah and Abdolmalek Rigi has to be seen as a product
of pre-existing conditions in Sistan and Baluchestan, and the group feeds
off discontentment rooted in a sense of victimhood based on discrimination,
humiliation and poverty.
In public statements, the 24-year-old Rigi, who has recently assumed the
name Abdolmalek Baluch, has claimed that he is fighting to end
discrimination, injustice, corruption and what he regards as social
engineering designed to tip the ethnic balance in the province against the
Baluch.
Rigi says Jundullah is a “defensive organisation” that seeks only to
“protect the national and religious rights of Baluchis and Sunnis”.
Yet he has proudly claimed responsibility for attacks such as a string of
violent acts in the town of Tasuki which left 23 people dead in March 2006.
More recently, his group said it carried out a bombing which killed 11
Revolutionary Guards on a bus in the provincial capital Zahedan in February
2007.
Jundullah has copied the tactics used by al-Qaeda in Iraq, such as the
brutal murder of captives.
In his most recent statement, issued on December 12, Rigi announced a new
operation dubbed “Revenge-3”, and has promised that the current Iranian year
(which ends this March) will be the bloodiest yet.
In spite of the horrifying violence employed by his group, Rigi has found
supporters, even devotees in Sistan and Baluchestan. A cursory look at
certain Baluch private weblogs shows the reverence accorded to him. One
blogger called Ahmad Baluch has composed a poem in praise of the Jundullah
leader, in which he describes him as the “commander of freedom”, “the symbol
of sanctity and manliness”, “the angel of salvation”, and “the bravest of
freedom-seekers”.
Iranian officials have consistently accused Pakistan and the United States
of covertly backing Rigi, a view shared by some western media outlets which
believe Washington is seeking to destabilise Iran in retaliation for
Tehran’s interference in Iraq.
Whatever the truth of such allegations of external support, the roots of
Jundullah’s popularity among some Iranian Baluchis must be sought inside the
country, in a number of festering concerns that affect this community.
Many observers believe widespread poverty and unemployment are significant
sources of discontent in Sistan and Baluchestan. According to Maulavi
Abdolhamid, the Friday prayer leader and senior cleric in Zahedan,
“pressures on the livelihood of the people of Sistan and Baluchestan are so
great that they have created public distress”.
Another factor that feeds popular discontent is the ethnic policy pursued by
the government in Tehran.
Ever since the Islamic Republic was formed, senior officials in provinces
that have a significant minority have been selected from outsiders. This
unwritten rule applies to local government, police and other security forces
in particular, and has been enforced so rigorously in Sistan and Baluchestan
that the number of Baluchis and/or Sunnis appointed to “senior director”
level over the past couple of decades can be counted on the fingers of one
hand.
This situation has led Baluchis to feel that they have no stake in political
power. Hossein Ali Shahriari, who represents Zahedan in the Iranian
parliament, puts it like this: “In the course of Mohammad Khatami’s second
presidential term [2001-05], Sistan and Baluchestan province has had only
one Baluch as a county governor, and there hasn’t been a single Baluch or
Sunni in the post of provincial governor-general”.
At the same time, Shahriari notes that since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected
president in 2005, Sistan and Baluchestan has had one Baluchi deputy
governor-general, five county governors and five director-generals – the
provincial equivalent to a minister at national level.
However, this positive shift towards a more inclusive appointments policy
has yet to alter the deep-rooted sense of marginalisation in the province.
One of the factors that aggravates the situation is that non-Baluchi
officials and the local population have found it difficult to reach a common
understanding, with the latter perceiving the former as high-handed.
Maulavi Abdolhamid emphasises that the governor-general of Sistan and
Baluchestan does not necessarily have to be a Sunni Muslim, but he must be
able at least to understand the situation, sensitivities, and concerns of
local people.
The Baluchis themselves have psychological blocks about dealing with
outsiders. Habibollah, who is a trader based in the town of Saravan, says
ordinary people are petrified of any confrontation with the law-enforcement
forces, particularly conscripts and junior officers.
A few months ago, Baluchi youths from the city of Iranshahr wrote an open
letter to President Ahmadinejad setting out some of their concerns.
“What annoys the Baluch more than anything else is that they are defenceless,
they do not have a psychological sense of security, and they do not enjoy
the backing either of the law or of those who enforce it,” said the letter,
which was published by official Iranian news agencies. “Major academic,
cultural and social figures among the Baluch figures have been insulted by
non-Baluch conscripts [in the security forces], and not only are these men
not reprimanded, they actually receive support and encouragement.”
This sense of insecurity appears to have grown stronger since the March 2006
violence in Tasuki, which led the authorities to impose tighter security
arrangements in Sistan and Baluchestan province. These armed attacks had the
direct result of provoking a tougher response from government, stark proof
of which has been provided by the dramatic rise in the number of executions
carried out in the province since that time.
For the average resident, this has made the environment more intimidating
than ever. “The current oppressive atmosphere has got to a point where it’s
easy to accuse a Sunni Baluch of wrongdoing, of smuggling or involvement in
armed groups,” said Abdolaziz, another resident of Saravan.
Religion is another bone of contention, in a country where Shia Islam is
dominant and its adherents control all levels of political power.
Iranian officials are well aware of the dangers posed by sectarianism and
have sought to dampen down divisions between Sunni and Shia. In recent
years, the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has repeatedly
stressed the “brotherhood of Shia and Sunni” and argued that western
intelligence services are seeking to exploit and widen the divide.
Despite this, many Baluchis feel that parts of the Iranian establishment
have acted contrary to the spirit of such remarks.
One Sunni cleric from Zahedan who did not want to be named told Mianeh that
he believed it was official policy to change the population structure of
this province so as to engineer an increase in the number of Shia adherents.
He added, “Sunnis are in the majority in Sistan and Baluchestan province,
yet we are unable to build a new mosque for ourselves, and even refurbishing
old ones creates obstacles.”
Amir Hossein Asayesh is a journalist writing on social affairs.