The Baloch people have a right to self-determination
Speech at the United Nations in Geneva on Thursday 11 March 2010.
Human Rights in Pakistan – a meeting held parallel to the 13th session
of the UN Human Rights Council, hosted by Interfaith International and
chaired by its President, Dr Charles Graves.
Footage of Mr Tatchell’s UN speech can be viewed on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNLm-oD4tok
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYiztiEKPgI&feature=related
Mr President, thank you for giving me an opportunity to address this session.
I am a London-based human rights campaigner who has been campaigning
for human rights for 43 years. For 20 of those years, I have monitored
and supported the Pakistani people’s struggle for democracy, human
rights and social justice, including more recently in Balochistan.
I am neither a Pakistani nor a Baloch. I have no personal or vested
interest in the conflict. I address the situation in Balochistan solely
as an independent, objective investigator who is committed to the
defense of human rights.
I would like to begin by endorsing the recommendations of the Human
Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), which urge the complete
demilitarisation of occupied Balochistan, as a precondition for a
negotiated political settlement to end six decades of economic neglect,
ethnic persecution and military repression by successive governments in
Islamabad.
Echoing the criticisms of Baloch national leaders, the HRCP says the
Pakistan government’s recent peace and reconciliation package is
undermined by on-going military operations and human rights
abuses.
It points out that 4,000 Baloch people have been arrested and then
disappeared. Only a handful have been released since the western-backed
military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, was replaced by a
democratically-elected civilian government in 2008.
The torture of Baloch rights campaigners also remains routine. Promises
of military de-escalation are contradicted by continued army incursions
and air strikes, which have resulted in many civilian casualties, and
by the shooting dead of peaceful Baloch protesters, most recently in
January this year.
Successive Pakistani attacks on Balochistan are estimated to have in
resulted in 3,000 people killed and up to 200,000 displaced.
Baloch human rights groups report that the kidnapping and torture of
peaceful, lawful Baloch activists continues unchecked. Indeed, the
Pakistani government has admitted that in 2009 over 1,000 Baloch people
were seized by its security forces and disappeared.
These crimes against humanity are still happening in Balochistan,
despite Pakistan’s ostensible transition to democratic government. They
are well documented by Pakistani and international human rights groups,
including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Human Rights Watch,
the Asian Human Rights Commission, the International Crisis Group and
Amnesty International.
In response to national and international criticism, the Prime Minister
of Pakistan has publicly apologised for the persecution of the Baloch
people and pledged to halt military assaults in Balochistan.
Despite the Prime Minister’s assurances, military attacks have
continued. The attacks have been aided and abetted by military supplies
from western countries, including my own country, the UK. The US is the
biggest weapons supplier. It has sold the Pakistani military $10
billion in arms, including F-16 attack aircraft, and Cobra attack
helicopters, which have been used to indiscriminately strafe and bomb
Balochistan, killing many civilians.
To cover up its human rights abuses, Islamabad restricts media access
to Balochistan and refuses to allow the UN and international aid
agencies to provide humanitarian assistance to most parts of the
region. If Islamabad has nothing to hide, why is it refusing open
access to Balochistan?
Despite Balochistan’s huge mineral wealth, Balochistan is the poorest
region of Pakistan. Much of the population is malnourished, illiterate
and semi-destitute; living in squalid housing with no electricity or
clean drinking water.
According to the Asian Human Rights Commission’s 2009 report:
“88% of the population of Balochistan is under the poverty line.
Balochistan has the lowest literacy rate, and the lowest school
enrolment ratio, educational attainment index and health index compared
to the other provinces. 78% of the population has no access to
electricity and 79% has no access to natural gas.”
The Pakistani military have remained in Balochistan continuously since
it invaded and annexed the region at gun-point in 1948. It has
blanketed the country with military garrisons to suppress the people.
In recent years, there has been a 62% increase in police stations and a
100% increase in paramilitary checkpoints.
If the Baloch people are happy and free, as Islamabad claims, why is
there a need for this pervasive, suffocating military presence? And why
has Pakistan always refused Balochistan a referendum on
independence?
Ever since its annexation in 1948, Balochistan has been subjected to a
quadruple whammy of military occupation, political domination, economic
exploitation and cultural hegemony. Pakistan is an oppressed nation
turned oppressor nation. It now adopts the imperialist tactics of its
former colonial overlords to subjugate and exploit the Baloch – and the
people of other victim provinces such as Sindh and North West Frontier.
Just like Israel’s settlement programme on the West Bank, Islamabad has
a settler scheme to colonise Balochistan. It is encouraging Punjabis,
the largest and dominant ethnic group in Pakistan, to move to the
region. The aim is to make the Baloch people a minority in their own
homeland, as happened to the Native Americans in the US and the
Aboriginal people in Australia. This goal has already been achieved in
major cities like Quetta, where colonist settlers now predominate.
Cultural imperialism is another weapon. Punjabi supremacists have
imposed an alien language, Urdu, on the Balochi-speaking people.
Borrowing from the tactics of the apartheid regime in South Africa,
which forced black children to be schooled in Afrikaans, Islamabad has
dictated that Urdu is the compulsory language of instruction in Baloch
educational institutions.
The cultural conquest of Balochistan also involves the radical
Islamification of the traditionally more secular Baloch nation. Large
numbers of religious schools have been funded by Islamabad, with a view
to imposing Pakistan’s harsher, more narrow-minded interpretation of
Islam. This is fuelling fundamentalism.
The West’s attitude towards the plight of the Baloch people is less
than honourable. Because Britain and the United States want Pakistan as
an ally in the so-called “war on terror,” they have armed Pakistan and
acquiesced with its suppression of the Baloch people.
Pakistan’s war against Balochistan is strengthening the position of the
Taliban, who have exploited the unstable, strife-ridden situation to
establish bases and influence in the region. From these bases, the
Taliban terrorise the often more liberal, secular Baloch people and
enforce the Talibanisation of Balochistan.
The Pakistani military often appears to tolerates the Taliban, on the
grounds that Taliban influence acts as a second force to crush the
Baloch people and weaken their struggle for independence. In other
words, the Taliban are being used as a proxy force by Islamabad in its
war against Balochistan.
The bases in Balochistan are also hide-outs from where Taliban fighters
mount military operations in Afghanistan. Despite recent
well-publicised military operations, the Pakistani security forces are
taking very little serious action to stop the Taliban using Balochistan
as a base for their Islamist war against democracy and human rights.
If the nations of the world want to strike a blow against the Taliban
and fundamentalism, they should seek an end Pakistan’s repression in
Balochistan and support the Baloch people’s right to
self-determination. Baloch secular nationalism could act as a powerful
bulwark against the Talibanisation of the country, which ultimately
threatens all the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan – and the wider
region.
As for the future status of Balochistan:
Whether self-determination means the restoration of independence, or
full regional autonomy within a federal Pakistan, is a matter for the
Baloch people to decide. The best way to resolve this issue would be
for the government of Pakistan to authorise a United Nations-supervised
and monitored referendum to allow the people of Balochistan to freely
and democratically determine their own future.
The Baloch people, like all people everywhere, have a right to
self-determination – and the right to democracy, human rights and
social justice.
If tiny East Timor can be an independent, self-governing nation, why not Balochistan?