Allah Nazar Baloch, the chief of banned militant outfit Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF), has been killed in an operation by security forces, provincial Home Minister Mir Sarfaraz Bugti said on Tuesday quoting unconfirmed reports.”According to unconfirmed reports, the head of the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) Allah Nazar Baloch has been killed in one of our operations. There has been no evidence of him being alive ever since Frontier Corps carried out some operations,” Bugti told a press conference. Speaking at the press conference, the provincial home minister said that seven terrorists with links to Indian intelligence agency intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) were also arrested when Frontier Corps (FC) personnel with the help of intelligence agencies carried out an operation in Dalbandin district. Bugti said that weapons were also recovered from the arrested militants, who were currently being interrogated for further information. Regarding the purported death of Dr Allah Nazar, the home minister, after sounding confident of his claim, contradicted himself in the next breath by saying he could not confirm the news, but since there had been no sign of Dr Allah Nazar since the operation one day before Eid, he must be dead. The droll absurdity did not end there. The communication centre, Mir Bugti asserted, was being used by Baloch nationalist militants, extremist jihadi terrorists, agents of Afghan and Indian intelligence services and drug smugglers. The only name he inadvertently perhaps left out was Charlie’s aunt. The linkage sought to be created by Mir Bugti stretched credulity to the breaking point when he juxtaposed ideologically and politically opposed nationalist guerrillas with fanatical religious terrorists and criminal drug smugglers, and then attempted, as usual, to drop the whole lot into the convenient catch-all basket of India’s and Afghanistan’s intelligence agencies. While this may bring the home minister the satisfaction of neatly tying up all these disparate forces and lumping them under one umbrella, in fact it does his case little good. In fact the phantasmagorical nature of his claims in this regard cast severe doubts on his claims about Dr Allah Nazar too, even if we ignore his own ‘qualifications’ to the news of the BLF leader’s death. Rumours of Dr Allah Nazar being killed in an air strike on the purported BLF headquarters in Awaran had been doing the rounds in July but were categorically rejected by the BLF, which said he was very much alive and leading the group. There has been no reaction or response from the BLF so far to Mir Bugti’s claims now. Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept that Dr Allah Nazar has been killed, will that mean the end of the Baloch problem? Not if history is any guide. Each generation of the Baloch people has risen in revolt against the repression, injustices and deprivations that are the lot the state has reserved for them. We are witnessing the fifth insurgency in the province since independence. An essentially political issue that is Balochistan cannot be resolved by military might and repression. You can kill a man (or many men) but you cannot as easily kill an idea. It is the idea of the self-respect, dignity and rights of the people of Balochistan that cannot be crushed by force. For each insurgent killed, hundreds, if not thousands, now and in the future, will come forward to pick up the gun of their fallen comrade and intone new funeral dirges punctuated by the crackle of bullets. Political problems require, nay demand, political solutions. But how to persuade the security establishment of this self-evident truth? Therein lies both the dilemma and the answer to the Balochistan conundrum.
pk.shafaqna.com
