Pakistan: A Hard Country (62 page)
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 wel 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 fel ow politicians makes Baloch politics in some respects closer to those of the Sicilian mafia than the ‘social democratic’ politics official y espoused by the political parties over which they rule.
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 kil 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 kil anyone without what he thinks is a good reason.
Thus the late Nawab Akbar Bugti once declared: You must remember that I kil ed 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 fol owers without serious provocation would soon enough find himself without fol owers, 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 chal enges to oneself, remains a pre-eminent value. Specific acts of assertion and vengeance fol ow 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 kil ed during an election campaign, al egedly by the Bugtis. In the early 1990s, the Kalpurs in revenge al egedly kil ed Akbar Bugti’s youngest son Salar, which in 2003 led Akbar Bugti to kil 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 kil him if he does.
The aggressively bristling beards and upturned moustaches of the men of Sardari families would have a comical y 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 al , murder by mutual cultural consent is in a certain sense a kind of blood sport. Those Sardars who don’t want to participate can always leave their traditional power and their traditional territories and go to live in London or wherever (Karachi isn’t far enough, as the Minister for Excise, Sardar Rustam Jamali, discovered when he was gunned down there in August 2009).
When it comes to Baloch tribal tradition, cultural broadmindedness has however two limits, as far as I am concerned. The first is Baloch independence. It seems al too probable that Baloch tribalism would soon reduce this to a Somali-style nightmare, in which a range of tribal parties – al cal ing themselves ‘democratic’ and ‘national’ – under rival warlords would fight for power and wealth. The task of the Pakistani Frontier Corps on the ‘national day’ proclaimed by existing pro-independence parties was made easier by the fact that the nationalist parties could not even agree what flag to fly, let alone who should lead them.
In these circumstances, independent Balochistan would revert to its pre-British condition of unrestrained tribal warfare, but this time the wars would be fought not with swords and single-shot muskets, but with AK-47s, machineguns, rocket-propel ed grenades, and whatever heavier weaponry could be acquired with the proceeds of the heroin trade. Claims on the territory of al Balochistan’s neighbours would lead to economic blockade and make dependence on heroin and smuggling even more complete. Ethnic chauvinism would kil or chase out the ethnic minorities which provide whatever there is of a modern economy. Quetta would be wrecked in fighting with the Pathans and Hazara. As in Somalia, Al Qaeda and its al ies would fish happily amid the ruins: a version of Somalia on the Persian Gulf.
At the end of Sylvia Matheson’s book, after recounting the kil ing of yet another lesser Bugti chief by his enemies, she asks: And how and where can it end? Can these traditional y lawless tribes, so cussedly and il ogical y proud that they consider it more praiseworthy to steal cattle and grain than to demean themselves by working and earning money – can such men as these ever fit into the pattern of modern, democratic civilization as we know it, or must this dream be left for the coming generation?8
Her book was researched in the 1950s and published in 1967. Almost two generations have passed since then, but there is stil very little sign of this ‘dream’ coming true among the Baloch tribes.
THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN
The second area where anthropological tolerance should have its limits is in the treatment of women. This is not universal y bad, and it may have been better in the past. According to Sylvia Matheson: In the early days of tribal society, women enjoyed a tremendous amount of liberty ... The women folk of the leading Khans of Kalat were noted for their activities in politics and warfare; segregation of the sexes is in fact fairly recent, probably introduced since the gradual opening up of the country to strangers.9
I did indeed meet one formidable aristocratic lady politician from the Kalat royal family, Mrs Rubina Irfan, a deputy from the formerly pro-Musharraf PML(Q) Party (in a sign of the irrelevance of national party labels in Balochistan, her husband, Agha Irfan Karim, is a deputy from the PPP). Unusual y, her development fund has been responsible for some successful projects in Kalat. Even more unusual y, she is the leading force in promoting women’s footbal in Pakistan. This has to be played by single-sex teams, indoors, and only in the presence of women and family members – stil , a step forward.
Mrs Irfan also stressed that in real y traditional Baloch tribal society women had more freedom than in partial y modernized society, where male anxiety has been stirred up to pathological levels. Another very impressive lady (though a Mohajir, not an ethnic Baloch), Surriya Al ahdin from the great Habibul ah industrial family, described to me her charity’s success in setting up two girls’ schools in rural Balochistan, and how in one area this had led to the average age of girls at marriage going up from twelve to fifteen in the course of thirteen years. ‘So give us another generation, and hopeful y we wil have helped bring the marriage age up to a civilized level, and as a result of this and education we wil also help to bring down the birth-rate, which is vital.’
Al the same, much of the treatment of women in the Baloch tribal society of today is nothing short of appal ing, even by Pakistani standards; and, what is more, some of the most atrocious actions against women in Sindh and southern Punjab are carried out by local tribes of Baloch origin. Quite apart from ‘honour kil ings’, as described in the first chapter of this book, the giving of minor girls in marriage as part of the settlement of feuds is stil commonplace.
I must confess that several times during my visit to Balochistan I found myself muttering the famous words of General Sir Charles Napier, then Commander-in-Chief in India, when informed that suttee (the burning of widows) was an ancient Rajput custom: You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very wel . We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters wil build a gal ows. You may fol ow your custom. And then we wil fol ow ours.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I do not have General Napier’s power, or at least three Baloch politicians would find themselves dangling from lamp-posts – if Quetta had lamp-posts, which of course it doesn’t outside the cantonment. No, make that four or five.
These particular thoughts were inspired by a particularly ghastly case of ‘honour kil ing’, which occurred on 13 July 2008 in Babokot vil age, Nasirabad District, near the borders of Sindh. Three teenage student girls of the Umrani tribe were shot by order of a tribal jirga for trying to marry men of their own choice rather than their family’s, and then buried while stil alive. Two female relatives who tried to save them were kil ed as wel . It is al eged that a chieftain of the tribe, Mir Abdul Sattar Umrani, chaired the jirga which ordered the kil ings.10
According to a police official with whom I spoke, his brother, Balochistan Minister of Communications Sadiq Umrani, put strong pressure on the police not to investigate. Amusingly – if your sense of humour runs that way – on 13 August 2009 a court in Sindh final y issued an arrest warrant for Sadiq Umrani and his brothers; not, however, for the case of the buried women, but for the al eged murder of five people of the Palal tribe of northern Sindh, including a woman and two children, in a dispute over land in 2008.
Sardar Israrul ah Zehri, a PPP senator of Pakistan’s upper house of parliament, defended the burial of the Umrani women, saying that ‘these are centuries-old traditions and I wil continue to defend them.
Only those who commit immoral acts should be afraid.’ The Zardari administration later made him Minister of Posts. The acting chairman of the Senate – another Baloch chieftain, Sardar Jan Mohammad Jamali – described the kil ings as having been blown out of proportion by the media.11 Al of these politicians belong to the PPP, a party dedicated, according to its programme, to women’s rights, social progress and the rule of law. None has been expel ed from the government or the party.
Another Baloch minister (for Sports and Culture) from a Sardari family, Mir Shahnawaz Khan Marri, told me: The burying of those girls alive was a conspiracy against Balochistan. There is no report on who kil ed them and why. The Supreme Court has not produced a report. It has not been proved yet that they were kil ed. These kinds of things are designed so as to create a scenario against Balochistan. The Afghans are here, they get mil ions of dol ars to create subversion here, al different international agencies are working here ...12
After this, the minister plunged into a rant lasting more than five minutes, during which a paranoid account of the conspiracies of the outside world against Balochistan somehow ended with the statement that ‘I don’t believe in nationalism. The world has become a global vil age and we should al love each other.’
Al of these politicians have claimed either that the girls were not kil ed at al , kil ed but not buried alive, or that they had engaged in ‘immoral acts’ and therefore deserved their punishment, or al of these together. None of this is true. I interviewed the police surgeon who dug up and examined the bodies of the three girls, Dr Shamim Gul. They had al been buried alive, and they were al virgins.
