BLA terrorist listing

The United States on Tuesday took a step of massive significance to Pakistan by declaring the Balochistan Liberation Organisation (BLA) to be a terrorist group. It was a welcome change from the norm, where Pakistan usually has to scramble to ban organisations well after the world has declared them to be terrorists. The BLA has been a proscribed entity in Pakistan since 2006. The listing means that all of the BLA’s property and interests in property subject to US jurisdiction are blocked, and US individuals and entities are prohibited from engaging in any transactions with them. The US also declared Jaish al-Adl, which has been involved in deadly terrorist attacks against Iran, a global terrorist organisation. Jaish al-Adl is essentially the successor to the previously banned Jundallah group.

Pakistan has long claimed that the BLA is a proxy of India’s premier external intelligence agency, the innocuously-named Research and Analysis Wing (RAW). If true, the listing would also be a potentially massive embarrassment for New Delhi. But even if Pakistan cannot prove to the world that India is explicitly sponsoring the BLA, and thus terrorism in Pakistan, India has openly been hosting a number of BLA leaders and sympathisers, giving them a platform from which to spew their terrorist vitriol before the media in the ‘world’s biggest democracy’. It would be more-than-fair for Pakistan to push for the case that India is actively sympathising with terrorists by doing such things.

It will also be interesting to see what they do with the asylum application filed by alleged BLA leader Brahamdagh Bugti, and for that matter, what the Swiss do, since he is currently living it up in the picturesque and famously neutral European state. There is also the issue of another alleged BLA leader, Hyrbyair Marri, who has been granted asylum by the British. Will the British reinvestigate the terrorism charges Pakistan filed against him a decade ago, and will the US back Pakistan if it tries to prove that the British and Swiss are harbouring terrorists?

Published in The Express Tribune, July 4^th, 2019.

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