Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [208]
What is more, to tribal traditions of violence the Baloch Sardars seem to add a more aristocratic sense of touchy personal honour which makes them even more trigger-happy – quite apart from their feudal (as opposed to tribal) sense of personal entitlement, including the right to kill anyone who offends them. Indeed, if I were to make a distinction within the terms of Baloch culture between a good Sardar and a bad one, it would be that a good Sardar doesn’t kill anyone without what he thinks is a good reason.
Thus the late Nawab Akbar Bugti once declared:
You must remember that I killed my first man when I was twelve ... The man annoyed me. I’ve forgotten what it was about now, but I shot him dead. I’ve rather a hasty temper you know, but under tribal law of course it wasn’t a capital offence, and in any case as the eldest son of the Chieftain I was perfectly entitled to do as I pleased in our own territory. We enjoy absolute sovereignty over our people and they accept this as part of their tradition.6
The Nawab in fact seems to have been exaggerating somewhat for the sake of the effect on his British interviewer. A Sardar who repeatedly shot his own followers without serious provocation would soon enough find himself without followers, or would be shot in the back himself. Nonetheless, as Paul Titus writes, ‘The Bugtis remain entrenched in a world in which honour, expressed through the forceful and uncompromising response to challenges to oneself, remains a pre-eminent value. Specific acts of assertion and vengeance follow from and constitute Bugti cultural logic and history.’7
In recent decades, the Bugtis have been involved in several feuds, which have helped to define the politics of Balochistan as a whole. There is a longstanding feud between the Sardars and the Kalpur sub-tribe, whose lands cover much of the gas field. The Kalpurs want to keep more of the benefits for themselves and out of the hands of the Bugtis. In the 1980s, Hamza Khan Kalpur was killed during an election campaign, allegedly by the Bugtis. In the early 1990s, the Kalpurs in revenge allegedly killed Akbar Bugti’s youngest son Salar, which in 2003 led Akbar Bugti to kill the Kalpur candidate in the elections of that year. One of the reasons for the Chief Minister (as of 2010), Nawab Mohammed Aslam Khan Raisani, to have stayed loyal to Pakistan and joined the government is that he also has a feud with the Bugtis, and accuses Akbar Bugti of having arranged the murder of his father by members of his party from the Rind tribe.
The Bugtis are also involved in a bloody feud with the family of the hereditary Sardar of the Marri tribe, Khair Baksh Marri – afeud which has helped split the Baloch radical nationalists into different tribal camps, since Khair Baksh Marri is another radical nationalist who led the revolt against Pakistan in the 1970s. His family also has a feud with one of the Marri sub-tribes, the Bijranis, which has helped lead that tribe to join the present government and reject the insurgency. And so on, and on, and on.
Chief Minister Nawab Mohammed Aslam Khan Raisani has a notoriously hot temper, and is accused of responsibility for at least half a dozen murders. The only living member of the Provincial Assembly not to hold a position in government cannot do so because he cannot set foot in Quetta – for Raisani has publicly sworn to kill him if he does. The aggressively bristling beards and upturned moustaches of the men of Sardari families would have a comically theatrical effect were it not for the fact that they say something very real about the men who sport them.
If you want to live in Balochistan – and indeed Pakistan as a whole – without going crazy, it is probably a good idea to try to cultivate an anthropologist’s approach to the issue of Sardari feuding, as Sylvia Matheson did when researching her remarkable book The Tigers of Balochistan. After all, murder by mutual cultural consent is in a certain sense a kind of blood sport.