Balochistan People’s Party

It was six years ago that Abdul Malik Reiki alias Mulla Malik, an Iranian Sunni Baloch, and 30 others joined hands and formed an organisation called Jundallah. Before declaring war against the Iranian state, he sent a delegation of tribal notables to the Iranian government demanding equal rights as enjoyed by the Shia majority of the country for the Sunnis and the Baloch. Once the government refused to consider these demands, the Jundallah members took to the mountains and declared war to secure rights of the Sunnis and the Baloch living in Iran. Reiki now tops the Iranian government’s most wanted list.

Reiki says hundreds are willing to join Jundallah, whose current membership stands at 600. But, he says, the organisation cannot admit them all because it is run on small donations from the Iranian people and, therefore, it is not economically viable for it to have too many members.

Reiki’s parents have also fled their home for fear of persecution and now live in the mountains along with other members of the militant leader’s extended family. Reiki lives on the Iranian border with Pakistan but he and his men constantly carry out attacks inside Iranian territory. These attacks involve raids on the posts of border-security forces, killing or injuring security personnel, looting their arms and ammunitions and holding the officers hostage.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pakistan has dispatched its top finance officials on a mission to raise billions of dollars from its closest allies in a last ditch bid to stave off bankruptcy.

By Isambard Wilkinson in Karachi and Damien McElroy in Dubai
10 Oct 2008 ; telegraph.co.uk/

Shaukat Tareen, the prime minister's finance adviser, and Shamshad Akhtar, the governor of the central bank, have travelled to Washington to secure a £6 billion American and British-backed lifeline.

Oil-rich Gulf states have been lined up to match Western funds with extra billions to ensure that the country, which until recently touted itself as the next Asian Tiger, avoids a balance of payments crisis.

Mr Tareen, a suave former banker, was appointed this week to spearhead the last ditch bid to after it was revealed that state reserves had halved since democratic elections earlier this year. He has given himself four weeks to salvage the economy. High oil prices have combined with endemic corruption and mismanagement to push Pakistan to the brink of bankruptcy.

The country's middle class shifted massive amounts of capital overseas as a crisis of confidence in Pakistan's long term future took hold following the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto last December.

A leading Pakistani private banker in Dubai, who has acted as handmaiden to the exodus, said the collapse and replacement of former President Pervez Musharraf's regime had amounted to a devastating double blow. "Capital flight has got be stopped if the country is to be turned around," he said. "But people take their cues from the leaders. The looters are back in charge and if they won't repatriate their money from Swiss bank accounts why should we keep our money in Pakistan?"

While Pakistan's economy has repeatedly been on the brink since independence in 1947. the stakes have never been higher. The nuclear armed state has failed to contain an Islamic insurgency despite mobilising its army.

The new President Asif Ali Zardari, Miss Bhutto's widower, had hoped to raise a cash infusion at a 'friendly states' summit in the United Arab Emirates next month. But the economy has unravelled too quickly to wait.

"We have been here in the past but now Pakistan urgently needs balance of payments support," said the treasurer of a leading international bank in Karachi. "We need some action this month."

Saudi Arabia and the conservative Arab monarchs have signalled their willingness to divert part of their sovereign wealth funds to shore up Pakistan. Gulf support will come at a price with the Emirates determined ensure its own food security by buying up huge tracts of Sindh and Punjab provinces.

Islamabad will be expected to grant blanket exemptions on exports from its farms to the Gulf in return – an unpopular move when 25 per cent inflation has forced the poor to assemble in huge crowds for government subsidised wheat.

Pakistan has fallen a long way from the golden years of the Musharraf government, which appeared to have found a formula for success. His regime provided six years of currency stability as the economy grew six per cent a year, doubling the gross domestic product.

Wholesale bank privatisation boosted the spending power of the middle class but the money poured into a property and stock market boom that has now evaporated.

Karachi, the country's economic capital, has borne the brunt of the collapse. From its highs last year when it attracted almost $1 billion of foreign investment, the stock market has been practically shuttered.

Its youthful mayor, Mustafa Kamal has had to scrap grand plans for large scale projects that would improve the infrastructure for its 18 million people. "First it was inflation, then Musharraf's political problems, then Zardari's election and now security," he said. "People are looking for things to settle down."

The flaws in substituting a consumer-led boom for broad-based growth are summed up in the lamentable state of Karachi's electricity network. It was privatised in 2005 in a widely-criticised auction that failed to secure pledges of extra investment.

Despite needs of 3,000 megawatts a day, Karachi receives 2,200. The sweltering port city endures daily blackouts that last between four and six hours, leading to grim comparisons with post-war Baghdad.

Meanwhile, two separate bombings targeting police killed 10 people in Pakistan on Thursday.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have always thought how someone can think and feel when he is ready to sacrifice his life for you, me and the rest of us to live a descent and honorable life. I am the kind of person who has invested all my life for making the world a better place. I have given thousands of my books and CDs free to those people who needed them. I also have trained hundreds of people free of charge or for very low fees just to make a difference; just to make other people empowered enough to make a living that they dream about. Yet my dedication is not in any way close to those that I knew were prepared to give their lives so that I can have a better life, so that you can have an honorable life. I never understood their psychology and feelings and thoughts.

When I was in high school I had a friend who joined a guerrilla organization. When we talked together, I found out that his outcome was not to succeed in bringing some fundamental changes as he knew he could not do that, but he was still prepared to give his life so that the rest of us would have a prosperous life long after he has gone. He was executed in 1970. He was sure that his sacrifice of his life would make life for us much easier but the group that he belonged to was disintegrated later, and nearly was demolished after the Islamic Revolution. His ideas were abandoned and the Islamic Republic of Iran took over the power and executed those of his friends that had survived his death. He gave his life to create a better life for us. That was his great goal but the new system that was established in Iran made life more painful for all of us than ever before. This regime is not the last one and therefore I would not think that his death was in vain. The good days will come and this regime like many others will end in disgrace. At that time in the future, when the people will have a better life, they would know that what they have is the product of endeavors of a lot of people who did not have the chance of having a great life.

These days I hear the death of a lot of people from my own community, from Baluch community. Of the young generation that was born in eighties but think and feel like those who lived in Sixties and Seventies in Iran. They are idealists and they want to die for the hope that their children and the children of others will live in dignity, in freedom from fear and live as equals with the rest of humanity. They can see some kind of glory in fighting with the criminals that oppress those people who would not and cannot defend themselves. The absolute majority of our people have surrendered themselves to fear and intimidation. They have given themselves to the security forces of a regime that has no mercy even to those who have surrendered themselves and accepted that they have been defeated.

The most horrible conquerors have manifested mercy to those who have submitted themselves to their wills. But it is beyond comprehension that why the Islamic Republic of Iran is embarrassing those who have already accepted defeat and the supremacy of this regime? The innocent people of the big cities of Iran have already given up any idea of fighting this regime. They have surrendered themselves, their lives, their properties and even their honour and pride to this government. What more they want? The government has everything that the people once had. The people even have accepted how to behave in their own homes and in their own beds. These people who have lost any hope for a dignified future have accepted that the clerics have the right to do to them what ever they like. What else they want?

Among the Iranians, however, there are some groups of people that just can’t quit. They just can’t live and give in to oppression. They just can't accept discrimination. They do not submit to those who have forced the absolute majority of the population to submission. They cannot understand why they have to live according to the will and instructions of a group of clerics who have no any kind of legitimacy and moral authority. They just can't do that because of their own belief in their own dignity and respect for the dignity of all human beings. They have unshakable belief in respect for other human beings and therefore, they are prepared to fight injustice and discrimination wherever they see it. They are a unique people with a unique mindset that doesn't accept wrongdoings from whoever they may come. They have an obstinate head and they go to change what seems impossible to change. They go to defeat a regime that has already proved its invincibility in the eyes and minds of many people. They believe they can do that. They believe that they can change a regime that many people think is unchangeable.

I have talked to several of these people who believe they can achieve what the rest believe could not be achieved. When I talked to them I felt they have a resolve of infinite magnitude. But it was not the resolve only that made me think of their chance of success. It was their skills and intelligence that surprised me. They were so intelligent that they could have been in the greatest universities anywhere in the world and yet, they have chosen to have a very simple life in the deserts and mountains where the fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran is going on. When I saw the pictures of their life style, I thought that I cannot to do even for one day what they have been doing for at least four years now, although I have been in similar circumstances. I have been forced sometimes ago to go to the mountains and live like a guerrilla fighter. But when I think of the way I lived there and the way they are living now, the difference is not thinkable even for myself.

These are young people who have been told by everybody that they did have neither the skills nor the resources to fight a regime that has been challenging the USA and other great powers for years. They have been told that this regime has frightened all Islamic countries and rulers and therefore, if there was any chance for changing it, they would have already changed it. But these people believed that what they can do is much more than what the public think. The public always feel uncomfortable when the exceptions get up and do what the public could not do or thought that nobody could do. The comfortable public and rulers cannot imagine facing the severity of hardest lives in places where everything is against you. But what other people think that are not surmountable, these young men see as their friends. They see the deserts as their friend. They see the harsh and cutting wind as their friends. They see the harsh winters and unbearable summers as their saviours. They see the uncertainty as an opportunity to attack the government and keep them in a state of uncertainty for the rest of their lives.

All the qualities and conditions of unbearable times that the Iranians and specifically Baluch people have experienced during the last 30 years now are going to be transferred to the government that has created them. The government that created violence now is the subject of the violence it created. The fear that the regime created to force the people into submission, now has been transferred to the government's side. They fear the public more than the public fear for them. Now these are the government officials who cannot sleep well because of the fear that the public may rise against them at any moment. They fear more the Iranian people than the people fear them.

The psychology of the Baluch people that has been shaped in the hardest times of history is manifesting itself now to deal with one of the hardest times that they have ever experienced. None of the government officials or the secret agents has gone through the hardest times that the Baluch have gone. Therefore even the hardest and roughest times cannot force them into submission. They know that the hardest time will go away and they will stand firm and tall, unshakable after the dust has settled down with more resolve than any other time. Now they are fighting a war that the spirit of Baluch culture has been nurtured in it. It was this spirit that retained the Baluch people while all their opponents through the long history of the region have disappeared. Now they have a chance of standing tall at the peak of an honorable war to repel the onslaught of a government whose legitimacy has already disappeared.

The four young Baluch who were killed on 12 of October in an equal war fought like lions and killed forty-eight members of the security forces. They did not die in direct conflict with the security forces. They were killed by the helicopters that were bombing them from high-altitude. They shot down one of the helicopters. All the crew of the helicopters were killed. The Iranian government mobilised its security forces from four provinces of Iran and surrounded them. Yet, they were able to break the siege and get out of the trap that the arm has planned for them.

This is the way they died

The people of Iran and the world should know that if a group of four people can fight for several days, destroy one helicopter, eliminate 47 security forces, then what a large number of these highly skilled and highly motivated guerrilla fighters cannot not do? What the public always thought that cannot be done, someone somehow appeared and got it done and this is how the history is made and history is changed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tehran's leaders are intensifying their repression of the Sunni Baloch people, in a bid to create a Shia-dominated nation

By Peter Tatchell

News is filtering out of Iran of mass arrests of Sunni Muslims living in the south-east of the country, in the annexed and occupied region of Balochistan. It signifies a coordinated crackdown against religious and ethnic dissidents who oppose Tehran's clerical sectarianism and its neo-colonial subjugation of the Baloch people.

Iran's repression, which has intensified since August, is targeting expressions of Baloch identity and culture; in particular expressions of religious freedom and national self-determination.

The Baloch people are a separate ethnic group within Persian-dominated Iran, and have long suffered racist persecution. In contrast to the Shia Muslim regime in Tehran, the Baloch are predominantly Sunni Muslims. This combination of ethnic and religious dissidence has led to them being harshly victimised by successive Iranian leaders, from the Shah to President Ahmadinejad.

Tehran's repression of the Baloch is well documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. It has also been reported by Radio Balochi FM and the Baloch People website. The recent crackdown is confirmed by officially-sanctioned Iranian news agencies.

In a March this year, Iranian parliament member Hossein Ali Shahryari stated that 700 people were awaiting execution in Sistan and Balochistan provinces, many of them Baloch political prisoners. This staggering number of death sentences is evidence of the intense, savage repression that is taking place.

Balochistan was forcibly incorporated into Iran by Reza Shah's army in 1928. The reign of the Pahlavi dynasty created a centralised, predominantly Persian state that enshrined ethnic suppression – a policy embraced and strengthened by Iran's current theocratic rulers, who see Sunni Baloch as a threat to their purist Shia revolution of 1979.

As Sunni Muslims, the Baloch people experience marginalisation and discrimination within a country where Shia Islam is the official state religion and holds political power. They seek self-rule, either within a federal Iran or as an independent nation of Balochistan (together with the Baloch regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan).

On both counts, religious and ethnic, they are deemed enemies of the neo-colonialists in Tehran; hence the current wave of repression.

Reports from the left-wing Balochistan People's Party and from Balochistan Human Rights Watch catalogue arrests, executions and widespread attacks on Sunni Muslim institutions.

Mulavi Ahmed Naroi, a high-ranking Sunni leader, was arrested on August 9 and is now incarcerated in a Tehran prison. He was member of the editorial board of Sunni Online, a religious website. Another member of the Sunni Online board, Mohammad Yousef Ismailzahi, was arrested on September 9.

The Abu Hanifa Mosque, a Sunni mosque and religious school in city of Zabol, was attacked and demolished, using bulldozers and tractors, on August 27. Many important, priceless editions of the Quran and historic Sunni religious books were destroyed. The mosque's students and staff were also arrested. They have now completely disappeared. No one knows where they have been taken or what has been done to them. There are fears that they are being tortured or perhaps have been executed in secret.

Soon after the August 27 raid, there were mass raids in which relatives and friends of the arrested people were also arrested by Iranian intelligence agents.

In a blatant attempt at censorship and cover-up, the vice-deputy head of political and social affairs in Sistan and Balochistan, Mohammad Zadeh Farahani, denounced the videos and photos of the mosque's destruction as false and fictitious. He warned that anyone who disseminates images of the destruction will be arrested and severely punished.

Last year, another mosque in the same district was ransacked and destroyed by associates of the Revolutionary Guards. The imam, Hafez Mohammad Ali Shahbkhsh, was arrested on October 27.

More recently, on 16 June this year, 33 military vehicles packed with Mersad agents (the special security force in Iran) attacked the village of Nasirabad. The aim of the attack was to arrest Moulavai Abed Bahramzahi, the local Sunni religious clerk. Armed officers assaulted protesting villagers; three of whom were seriously injured, hospitalised and later imprisoned.

Two Sunni religious workers were hanged in Zahedan jail in April after having confessed, under extreme torture, to resistance activities against the Iranian regime. Tehran accused them of supporting armed Baloch nationalist groups, but the evidence against them was purely circumstantial and the conduct of their trials was seriously flawed. They were humiliated in public and their confessions were broadcast on Iranian TV, in a deliberate attempt to intimidate all oppositionists. Three more Baloch rights campaigners were executed in Zahedan prison on August 24.

Early last month, four Baloch cultural workers, including a young poet, were arrested. Nothing has been heard them since, according to Balochistan Human Rights Watch.

Even young Baloch children are being targeted by the Iranian regime. Many have been arrested and jailed. Some have suffered severe beatings, which have left them with broken limbs. At least two youngsters have been murdered in violent assaults.

Much of this repression by Iranian government security agents has racist, anti-Baloch overtones, with the victims being insulted about their ethnicity and faith.

The democratic socialist Balochistan Peoples Party (BPP) is appealing to the international community to put pressure on the Iranian regime to "stop the arrest and killing of religious workers and activists; stop the destruction of Sunnis mosques, religious sites and Baloch people homes; release all political prisoners and religious workers; and stop the detention, torture and execution of innocent young Baloch men and women".

The BPP says the persecution of moderate Sunni clerics and religious students is an attempt by the Tehran regime to suppress non-fundamentalist believers and to strengthen the position of fanatical Shiism in the Baloch homeland. Since most Balochs are Sunni, attacks on the Sunni faith are also de facto attacks on the Baloch people and nation.

BPP leaders see Tehran's religious repression as part of a sinister plan to culturally dominate Balochistan and undermine indigenous faith and national sentiment. The aim is the forced assimilation of the Baloch people into a Persian-Shia dominated Iran and the crushing of Baloch national identity and aspirations.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------