By Shehar Bano Khan
DADO had lived happily with her seven siblings in Koho, Dera Bugti, until that fateful day which changed her life for the worse. Soon thereafter the 16-year-old found herself, along with her brothers and sisters, seeking refuge in different parts of Balochistan to escape the conflict that annihilated her home, her village and her school in Dera Bugti.
Two years later Dado has turned into an embittered, fiery 18-year-old whose understanding of the Balochistan conflict goes beyond political discourse rooted in debates on the concurrent list and provincial autonomy, or the need to strengthen the federation, remove inter-provincial strife and restore national cohesion. She has lost everything to the political jargon mouthed ad nauseam by politicians since Partition. Her province, in the meantime, has been pushed to the brink of implosion.Dado’s family members are among the 84,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Balochistan who lack access to health care, food, shelter and state protection. This huge mass of people has been shunted out of Balochistan — by the government, no less — since the military operation began in January 2005, purportedly to suppress tribal militias.
Though the government continues to deny the mass displacement of the Baloch people, hundreds of families can be seen living in decrepit, makeshift camps outside Quetta, Jaffarabad and Naseerabad.
Kachkol Ali, leader of the opposition in the outgoing Balochistan Assembly, claims that the number of displaced people has exceeded 100,000, with children suffering the most through a perplexing aid blockade foisted by the government. These ‘insignificant’ people have come to signify the state’s military strength. The drive to root out ‘terrorists’ from Balochistan is in actuality a game plan in which suppressing provincial autonomy is the primary motive.
Innocent victims like Dado cannot, quite understandably, link their displacement to state-sponsored definitions of terrorism. Their queries about the unfairness of a forced itinerant existence leave a huge unanswered gap between political necessity and humanitarian aid apathy.
Dado’s little brothers and sisters want to know why their home was destroyed, when they will be able to eat three meals a day, instead of one, and if they will ever live in one place for more than a month.
These people, displaced within their own country for reasons not answered through politics, constitute one of the biggest human catastrophes of South Asia. An official working for the UNHCR, who did not wish to be named, disclosed that after the story of the displaced Baloch was first printed in the western media two years ago, all roads leading to conflict zones in Balochistan were closed.
“Aid workers were not allowed to have direct contact with the people and were instructed to carry out aid service through local authorities. International aid agencies like Oxfam, Care and the International Committee of the Red Cross have been denied the right to provide relief to these people. That was two years ago, but if you visit the people who have been forced to move as far as Sindh you’ll see that nothing has changed and their condition is still the same,” said the UNHCR official.
A report compiled by Unicef was released shortly after news of the IDPs hit the media. It revealed that 28 per cent of children under the age of five were acutely undernourished, of which six per cent suffered from acute malnutrition. Children under the age of five account for 80 per cent of all recorded IDP deaths.
In the same year, a five-member provincial committee was formed to deal with the IDPs crisis. The committee members included Abdur Rehman Jamali, Abdul Ghafoor Lehri, Saleem Khosa, Juman Khan Bugti and Kachkol Ali, but their recommendations were not taken up by the government.
The term ‘Internally Displaced Persons’ applies to citizens of a sovereign state, people who are forced to flee as a consequence of military operations carried out not against foreign aggressors but citizens of a theoretically independent country. This is the defining paradox of our ‘independence’. The bleakness of this internecine conflict becomes ever more grim when people living outside the physical perimeters of Balochistan are made to believe trumped-up stories of rebels demanding secession and the omnipresence of terrorist organisations constructing ‘havens for global destruction’. These are lies.
Accepting the justification of the military operation, the denial of aid relief to the IDPs is inexplicable and not helped by the government’s persistent refutation of this man-made catastrophe. All Pakistanis need to realise the reality of the misery inflicted on Balochistan.
http://www.dawn.com/2008/04/06/op.htm#3 |
