Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [201]
Together with the road from Karachi through Quetta to Afghanistan, Gwadar makes Balochistan of great strategic importance as a supply route to the Western forces fighting in Afghanistan. So far, however, the development of Gwadar has only led to bitter Baloch nationalist complaints that non-Baloch are being settled in Quetta and that ethnic Baloch are not benefiting from the port. Pakistani officials retort that the local tribesmen in fact sold their land for a great profit, and are living off the proceeds. As so often in Pakistan, objective truth on this seems impossible to determine.
The ethnic Baloch are certainly the least developed and least privileged of all Pakistan’s ethnic groups – or, at least, they are when they stay in Balochistan. Elsewhere, as noted, Baloch tribes which moved hundreds of years ago to Sindh and southern Punjab have provided a range of leading Pakistani politicians, including two presidents – Sardar Farooq Khan Leghari and the present incumbent (as of 2010), Asif Ali Zardari. This, however, has done almost nothing to benefit Balochistan itself.
Great dams (‘gabrbands’) from previous eras attest to the presence of civilizations long ago, but since the last round of climate change, Balochistan’s desert soil has not generated its own civilization. Instead, poverty has mixed with tribal tradition to keep the Baloch poorly educated and unable to participate fully in the economy, administration and development of their own province. This has been left to other ethnicities – who are then blamed by the Baloch for ‘exploiting’ them.
Radical Baloch nationalists see their nation almost as the Red Indians of the American West in the middle decades of the nineteenth century – their territory dotted with mining camps and patches of alien settlement guarded by the forts of the US cavalry, and in imminent danger of ethnic swamping and extinction. This is exaggerated, and for most of their problems the Baloch have their own culture and social structures to blame. It is true, however, that they have been dealt a rather poor hand by modern history, and that they have not generally been treated with vision or generosity by Pakistani governments.
Baloch legends say that they originally moved into their present territories from the Middle East. Modern nationalism by contrast has sought to claim that they have lived where they are now for thousands of years. One very curious feature suggests that some of them at least may in fact have been around for that long: the fact that the Baloch are divided between two different languages, the main one being of Indo-European origin like those of all the surrounding peoples, but the smaller, Brahui (or Brouhi), being largely Dravidian, which is the language-group of southern India, and – so it is presumed – of the Indus Valley civilization.
The Baloch, since records began, have been divided into several dozen tribes. At various times either outside empires or local princes exercised a loose hegemony over some of these tribes. In the late fifteenth century, the leader of one such short-lived tribal confederation, Mir Chakar, chieftain of the Rind tribe (1487 – 1511 CE), briefly conquered parts of Punjab and Sindh, laying the basis for large-scale Baloch migration into those lands.
However, the principality which Baloch nationalists regard as the historic Baloch national state was that of Kalat, founded in 1638 around another oasis like