QUETTA: Thirty-year old tailor Nasrullah Bangalzai has a very personal reason for wanting Pakistan’s new government to reinstate judges who President Pervez Musharraf removed.

One night in October 2001, Bangalzai’s uncle Ali Asghar never came back from work at the family tailoring shop in Shaki Shahwani village on the outskirts of Quetta, the capital of the southwest province of Baluchistan.

It was a month after Al Qaeda’s September 11 attacks on the US, and Pakistani intelligence agencies were under pressure to show they had turned against the Taliban movement protecting Osama bin Laden in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Asghar wasn’t a Talib, he wasn’t even Pashtun, the ethnic group that makes up the bulk of the Taliban’s ranks.  Asghar harboured federalist sentiments regarded as dangerous by a Pakistani army more comfortable with a centralised state.

“His crime was that he was Baluch. He felt the pain of his people and expressed them publicly,” Bangalzai explained sombrely, as Asghar’s 8-year-old son sat silently alongside him cross-legged on the floor of their single storey brick house.

Asghar’s case had been taken up by Iftikhar Chaudhry, the maverick Supreme Court Chief Justice who was first suspended and later removed by President Pervez Musharraf in 2007.

Chaudhry had ordered the intelligence agencies to account for missing people and critics believe that it was one of the causes of strained ties with the military-backed president.

Musharraf dismissed Chaudhry and other judges seen hostile to him after imposing a six-week emergency rule in Pakistan in November.
But the defeat of pro-Musharraf parties in an election for the national and provincial assemblies in February, has raised the prospect of Chaudhry’s reinstatement.

Chaudhry was freed in late March after five months under house arrest, and the new government made restoration of the old judiciary a priority.

“We have very high hopes from chief justice because of the way he took action in our case,” Bangalzai said during Chaudhry’s triumphant return to his hometown, Quetta, last week.

Pakistan’s army has always feared the country, only founded in 1947, could be ripped apart by regional separatists, starting with mineral rich Baluchistan, an arid, thinly-populated region bordering Afghanistan and Iran.

There have long been suspicions that the Pakistani military used the US-led war on terrorism to crackdown on Baluch nationalist sympathisers, while Western military officials say the Taliban moves with virtual impunity in Quetta.

Baluch nationalist groups and political parties say 4,000 people have gone missing since military operations began in 2001, according to Asian Human Rights Commission.

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) said in its latest report that more than 400 missing persons’ reports had been filed with the court, while many more have gone unreported as a result of intimidation.

Bangalzai’s eyes remained downcast as he recounted years of seeking answers from the authorities and security agencies.

“They take our applications and give assurances, but these assurances get us nowhere,” Bangalzai said.

Disappearances multiplied in 2006, when the army moved to crush a revolt led by tribal chieftain Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti.

Shakar Bibi, a lawyer fighting dozen cases of missing Baluch, said Quetta’s lower courts refuse to take a stand.

“They delay cases, avoid issuing orders and if they do, nobody cares,” Bibi said.

Baluch nationalists demand a larger share of the income from gas fields, and their militant wings have targetted security forces, government installations, railway tracks, gas pipelines and power pylons.

Yet the military’s iron-fisted response has earned the Baluch sympathy.

The killing of Bugti created shockwaves nationwide.

Another Baluch leader, Balaach Marri, was killed in Afghanistan, according to official versions, but his supporters say he was actually killed in Pakistan. Yet another nationalist leader, Sardar Akhtar Mengal, was detained and tried in an anti-terrorist court.

The new Baluch provincial assembly was sworn in on April 7, and its first action was to pass a resolution demanding an end to military operations in the province and judicial investigations into the killings of Bugti and Marri.

“We’re creating enemies everyday. Military action or torturing Baluch isn’t the answer,” a senior Baluchistan government official, who declined to be identified, said.  - Reuters 

9 April 2008
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