Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [207]
To avenge blood.
To fight to the death for a person who has taken refuge with them.
To be hospitable.
To refrain from killing a woman, a Hindu, a servant or a boy not yet in trousers.
To cease fighting on the intervention of a woman, Sayyid or mullah bearing the Koran on her or his head.
Not to kill a man who takes refuge in a shrine.
To punish an adulterer with death.3
This last provision – extended to illicit sexual relations in general or the mere suspicion of them – has been responsible for the ghastly and continual stream of ‘honour killings’ among the Baloch tribesmen, who have an obsession with the purity of their female kinsfolk which is extreme even by the pathological standards of their Pathan neighbours.
In one respect, however, Baloch tribalism is very different from that of the Pathans: its leadership is hereditary, hierarchical and even monarchical, whereas the Pathan tradition is meritocratic and even in a sense democratic. In the Baloch tradition (and that of the Pathan tribes of northern Balochistan which are influenced by the Baloch), the position of Sardar – in principle at least – always passes from eldest son to eldest son. The ceremony of ‘turbanning’ the new Sardar resembles a coronation. Beneath the Sardar, a hierarchy of subordinate chieftains called waderos (the same word as for a ‘feudal’ landowner in Sindh, illustrating the close links between the provinces) and mirs rule over sub-sections of the tribe. Sardars can be savagely tyrannical in a way that Pathan chieftains are not; yet in one way both are alike. Over them stands a greater tyrant, which is tribal custom.
That said, the Baloch system in practice seems to have been more flexible than its formal appearance would suggest. Historical records suggest that, before the arrival of the British, tribes repeatedly either split into smaller tribes or grew by assimilating other tribes or bits of tribes. Leaders of sub-tribes revolted against their Sardars and founded separate tribes of their own. This was partly the result of migration from place to place, which British rule prevented. The British Gazetteer of 1906 describes the situation among some of the tribes near the Afghan border:
The local tribe is nominally subject to Sardar Rustam Khan of Jebri, but he has no real influence over any Mamasani clan north of Kharan. The Mamasani tumandar or headman who appears to exercise most power over these wild tribes is Shah Khan Gul, Siahezai Mamasani, but even he has little influence except over his immediate followers.4
In fact, it has been suggested that the whole structure of single autocratic Sardars ruling over clearly marked tribes was in part at least a creation of the British, who found this convenient from the point of view of bribing and controlling the tribes. If this is so, then the process one can see today in Balochistan (and which is being encouraged by the army), of rival Sardars breaking up tribes into smaller feuding elements, is not really new, but a return to the pre-British norm.
One central feature of Baloch tribalism, however, was certainly not created by the British: the blood feud. As the Gazetteer has it:
A Baloch tribe is not a homogeneous group, but has attained its growth by the gradual assimilation of a number of alien elements, the process being admission to participation in common blood-feuds, then admission to participation in the tribal land, and lastly admission to kinship with the tribe ... In other words, common blood-feud is the underlying principle uniting a tribe, but the conception merges into that of common blood, i.e. connection by kinship.5
The tradition of the feud is alive and well in Balochistan today. The process of becoming Pakistani politicians and ministers does not seem to have reduced one bit the enthusiasm for this tradition among the Baloch Sardars, whose penchant for murdering fellow politicians makes Baloch politics in some respects closer to those of the Sicilian mafia than the