Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [203]
Like the Mohajirs of Sindh, their uprooting from their ancestral territory in Afghanistan has helped turn the Hazaras of Quetta into a remarkably well-educated and dynamic community (possibly also with the help of aid from Iran, though they deny this fervently). They have by far the best hospitals and schools outside the cantonment, and their cemetery breathes a sort of Victorian municipal pride in their community’s heroes. They are especially proud of their prominence in the Pakistani military, and of the fact that a Hazara woman has become the first female fighter pilot in the Pakistani air force. Tragically, though, their cemetery also bears witness to the many Hazara killed in recent years in anti-Shia terrorist attacks by the Sunni sectarian extremists described in previous chapters.
Finally, there are the Punjabi and Mohajir ‘settlers’ (as they are known by the Baloch), who moved to the region under British and Pakistani rule. Put all these other ethnicities together, and the ethnic Baloch (i.e. the Baloch- and Brahui-speakers) are at best a small majority in Balochistan. In Quetta itself, Baloch may be as little as a quarter of the population, with Pathans the majority. But nobody really knows for sure. In 1901 British officials conducted a census which recorded down to the last child the population of all but the most remote tribes in Balochistan. More than a century later, in 2009, the Commissioner Quetta Division could not tell me within half a million people the population even of Quetta itself. This, however, was not mostly his fault. Apart from the general weakness of the Pakistani bureaucracy when it comes to gathering information, the main parties among the Pathans successfully urged their Pathan followers to boycott the last census in 1998, in the hope that this would help the Pathan Afghan refugees to merge with the local Pathan population, become Pakistani citizens, and boost Pathan political weight in Balochistan.
This boycott meant that the official figure of 6.5 million people for that year (4.9 per cent of Pakistan’s population) was almost certainly a serious underestimate. According to the 1998 census, ethnic Baloch formed 54.7 per cent and Pathans 29.6 per cent, with the rest divided between Punjabis, Hazaras and others. But the Pathans claim to be 35 – 40 per cent of the population, and they may well be right. Almost as many ethnic Baloch live outside Balochistan as within it, though the figures are very hard to determine because many no longer speak Baloch but, while retaining Baloch tribal customs, consider themselves Sindhi or Punjabi.
Fear of ethnic swamping has been one factor in repeated Baloch revolts in both Iran and Pakistan, and the development of Gwadar has only increased these fears. In Pakistan, until the Islamist revolts after 2001, the Baloch were the most persistently troublesome of all the ethnic groups. There was armed resistance in 1948 – 9, after Kalat’s accession (under considerable duress) to Pakistan; unrest again in the late 1950s, after Balochistan was merged into the ‘one unit’ of West Pakistan and the promises of full autonomy to Kalat state were broken; and a serious revolt between 1973 and 1977, after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dismissed the moderate nationalist government of Balochistan as part of his moves to centralize power in his own hands, and arrested its leading members.
In all of these cases, however, most of the unrest was concentrated chiefly in one tribal group, and only parts of that group – in the late 1940s and 1950s, parts of the Mengel and other tribes of the old Kalat state and, in the 1970s, parts of the Marri tribe with certain allies. This allowed