OSLO – The world remembers 1948 as the year of Israel’s birth and the year
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took on its present proportions. But it was
also the year another decades-long conflict first erupted, one that has claimed
tens of thousands of lives but attracts far less attention: the Baloch
independence movement.
Like the Kurds, the Baloch are Sunni Muslims, and like them are spread across
national borders. Historical Balochistan is today located in (or as Baloch
nationalists insist, occupied by) Pakistan and Iran, with a smaller portion in
Afghanistan. And like the Kurds, the Baloch are eager to cultivate any regional
allies who will have them – including Israel.
“It’s in both our interests to join forces,” says His Royal Highness
Khan Suleman Daud, the exiled Khan of Kalat.
“The world has interests – yours is that Iran shouldn’t be nuclear, and also
that Pakistan be weak. I have my interests – independence.”
Kalat is just one of the historic districts of Pakistani Balochistan, but the
Khan, who
fled Pakistan for Wales six years ago, is
now determined to lead all Baloch territories – including those in Iran – to
independence under his leadership.
“We are not racial or religious enemies,” he told
The Tower on the
sidelines of the Oslo Freedom Forum human rights conference. “Whomever is the
enemy of our enemy is our friend and we’ll take help wherever we can get it. I’d
love to come to Tel Aviv someday – hopefully soon.”
The Baloch, the Khan insists, are the region’s
only secular people and disgusted by the
Shiite extremism of Iran and the Sunni variety practiced in neighboring Pakistan
(the country’s official name is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan).
But there is one issue on which he is not willing to compromise: The provinces
of both countries that are Balochi-inhabited will and must revert to their
natural owners.
“It’s not Iran or Pakistan or Afghanistan; it’s Baloch land. We existed
centuries before Pakistan, which is just the illegitimate child of the British,”
he says. The Khan reserves special scorn for the Punjabis, inhabitants of
Pakistan’s richest and most populous province, whom he blames for stealing half
of Balochistan in what he describes as a forced marriage.
The British made Balochistan part of their Indian Empire, but allowed it to
retain its khanate and relative autonomy, even while ceding its western part to
Persia as a buffer against czarist Russia. When India was partitioned, the
Baloch were promised independence, while sharing a currency and foreign and
defense policy with the new Muslim state of Pakistan. After six months Pakistan
invaded and forcibly annexed the area.
Since then some 17,000 people are believed to have been killed over six
decades of Baloch opposition to Pakistani and Iranian rule.
As Britain’s
Independent newspaper wrote in a 2009
profile of the khan: “Forgotten by the West,
Baloch separatists have since fought five insurgencies to try to claw back their
independence from Pakistan’s central government, which has responded with
massacres, large scale disappearances and torture.”
Islamabad continues to fight what
The Guardian has called a
“
secret dirty war,” one that fails to garner
the media attention remotely close to the attention paid to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Syrian civil war, or even the Kurdish independence
movement.
And yet as dire as is their situation in Pakistan – where half of their total
world population live – the Baloch in Iran have arguably fared worse still. Like
Pakistani Balochistan, Iran’s Balochistan province is its country’s largest. And
like its Pakistani counterpart, it is also poor, neglected, and
underdeveloped.
Amnesty International reports that in Iran,
where Baloch make up just 1.5 million of the country’s 80 million people, they
account for 55 percent of
hanging victims.
Mehrab Sarjov, an assistant to the Khan, hails from Iranian Balochistan. Like
the monarch, he sees his land becoming a model, moderate secular Muslim polity
at peace with all the region’s states. That means all of them:
“We believe no state is granted by God – it’s people who make states,” he
told
The Tower in Oslo. “We believe Israel has a right to exist and to
full security. We don’t live in the age of empire or religious supremacism but
that of the nation-state. If the Greeks can form a country from their part of
the crumbling Ottoman Empire, then what’s wrong with the Jews doing the same?
The whole world order is based on nation-states, and history shows the Jews need
protection.”
And yet Baloch nationalists know that the same great-power politics that
denied them a country will be essential if they hope to secure one. At the
initiative of California Republican
Congressman Dana Rohrbacher, the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee last year
held its first-ever
hearing on Pakistani human-rights abuses in
Balochistan.
Baloch nationalists are convinced that Israeli and Western opposition to
Iran’s nuclear program can help win them support. The CIA
estimates that Shiite non-Persian Azeris
make up 16 percent of Iran’s population, with the Sunni Kurds another 10
percent, and the Baloch 2 percent.
“If Azeris, Kurds and Baloch revolt against Iran, the country is finished,”
Sarjov says. “We believe Baloch, Kurds, Azeris and Jews are natural allies.”
Sarjov’s hitherto jovial expression turns flat when asked whether Iran has
him in its sights.
“They want to kill me,” he says, deadly serious, and recalls a recent
invitation he received for a “business meeting” in Dubai by people he believes
were Iranian agents.
“The business they wanted to discuss,” he says, his smile returning, “was
that of securing my head on a plate.”
For his part, the Khan is convinced the most effective way to deal with a
nuclear-determined Iran – and a Pakistan that is already there – is not through
sanctions but fomenting unrest among disaffected minorities.
“Baloch independence will not just weaken, but break, both Iran and
Pakistan,” he says. “You Jews are just not even 15 million, and only half live
in Israel, but every time the Israelis do anything the whole Arab world screams
but does nothing.”
“I’ll tell you something: We Baloch are 30 million,” he says, inflating the
actual number by as much as half. “One Baloch can handle one hundred Punjabis,
and the same goes for those Persians.”
[Photo: Theworldvideos1 / YouTube]
http://www.thetower.org/baloch-nationalists-take-on-iran-and-pakistan-vow-close-ties-with-israel/
