Aghaaz-e-Huqooq: No talks opened with exiled Baloch leaders

Senator Mushahid wants govt to engage nationalist leaders.

Apolitical dialogue with major stakeholders in Balochistan was also promised in the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-Balochistan economic and political package, but it has not materialized due to the federal government’s attitude.

The chairman of the Senate Standing Committee on Defence and Defence Production, Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid headed a parliamentary sub-committee that examined the causes of the provincial conflict. It made recommendations in 2005 which were also incorporated in the package.

Expressing his dismay over the Pakistan Peoples Party-led government’s refusal to begin peace talks with exiled Baloch nationalist Harbiyar Marri, former chief minister Sardar Akhtar Mengal, Dr Allah Nazar, one of the best-known and revered Baloch resistance leaders and Baloch Republican Party leader Brahamdagh Bugti, Sayed said it should have started talks with them irrespective of where they were residing.

“The government must contact them for meaningful negotiations whether they are in exile in Dubai, London or Switzerland - or anywhere else,” the senator urged.

Referring to a meeting between the then foreign minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri and his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom in Turkey in 2005, Sayed said: “If we could hold discussions with India and Israel, why can we not talk to our own countrymen?”

Sayed criticised the government’s attitude towards the sensitive issue and demanded that the approach of ‘buy or bribe the people’ must be given up immediately. “There was no will on the part of Islamabad to implement the package,” he remarked, when asked why the federal government could not honour its own commitment.

The former deputy chairman of the Senate, Jan Mohammad Jamali, said that initially the package was worth praising, but that alleged corrupt practices of the chief minister and the provincial government cabinet jeopardised the entire plan.

“We expected that practical steps would be taken to heal the wounds of the people of the province but the people at the helm were not serious,” Jamali said. Consequently, he claimed, the Baloch youth has turned ultra-nationalist and they are out of their control as they were being constantly denied their economic and political rights.

Jamali asked the government to realise the gravity of the situation in the impoverished province and muster the courage to speak to the nationalist leaders in the interests of the country. “Bring them back to the national mainstream,” he concluded.

The judicial inquiry for Bugti that never was

The government is reluctant to honour its promise and hold judicial inquiries into the killing of Baloch nationalist leaders, including Jamhoori Wattan Party chief Nawab Akbar Bugti.

“The Aghaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan Package promised to look into the killings of 53 Baloch leaders, including Nawab Bugti, Baloch National Movement Chairman Ghulam Muhammad Baloch, Baloch National Front General Secretary Lala Munir Baloch and Baloch Republican Party Vice-Chairman Sher Muhammad Bugti,” says the vice-president of the Balochistan National Party-Mengal, Sajid Tareen. The government has failed to form a judicial commission to conduct an inquiry into the circumstances that led to Bugti’s killing.

Nawab Bugti was killed during an operation in Kohlu in 2006 and the government insists that since the case is pending before the high court, a judicial inquiry cannot be held.

Tareen is not willing to accept this argument. “Legally, there is no bar to holding a judicial inquiry into the killing of any person even if a trial for his murder is pending before a court,” he told The Express Tribune.  His argument is based on a precedent. The UN investigation into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto was conducted after the murder cases were registered with the police.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 13^th, 2013.