The last time Akhtar Mengal tried to protest against the military clampdown on Baluchistan, he was arrested on dubious terrorism charges, held in solitary confinement and stood trial while locked in an iron cage.Almost a year after Pakistan’s civilian leadership secured his release from prison, the leader of the Baluchistan National Party is again trying to put on mass rallies in his native province.Mr Mengal, a prominent politician who served in the late 1990s as chief minister of Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest but least developed province, intends to hold rallies at cities across the province with party loyalists in April to bring attention to their conflict.“My aim, and my party’s aim, is the same as when we tried to organise our protest in 2006, which is to show the world that this injustice against the Baluch people is still taking place, and yet the whole world is silent,” said Mr Mengal, 46, who has spent much of the past year receiving medical treatment abroad for a rare lung disorder.Europe and the United States “bother about injustice in other parts of the world,” he said, “but why are they silent about the Baluch?”While Taliban and al Qa’eda militants in Pakistan grab headlines fighting near the Afghan border, Baluch nationalists and local tribes have for years clashed with Pakistani military and intelligence services. Culturally and linguistically distinct from their Pakistani compatriots, Baluchs have long agitated for more autonomy. Among their grievances are a heavy-handed military presence in the area and a too-small share of the spoils extracted from their resource-rich land.Mr Mengal, leader of the largest political organisation in the province, said he hopes he can mend differences among nationalist and tribal leaders.Some analysts think the timing of his arrival could help bring much-needed political authority to the area, fractured after years of hostilities with the military and intelligence agencies.“The Baluch nationalists have a serious leadership vacuum,” said Shahzada Zulfiqar, an independent analyst in Pakistan who has studied the issue. “Akhtar Mengal is capable of bringing together the disparate groups, and can quickly rally public support for a campaign that focuses on human rights issues, particularly the recovery of missing activists and withdrawal of criminal cases against the falsely imprisoned.”But when he returns this week, Mr Mengal faces a different Baluchistan since his arrest in 2006, when the province was paralysed by a near-war situation with Pakistani forces. After killing off prominent insurgent leaders, the military and intelligence agencies, which effectively control the province, have scaled back their presence. The ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) has apologised for the government-sponsored military operations during the rule of the former president, Gen Pervez Musharraf. PPP officials in the province say they are working to persuade military and intelligence officials to release thousands of people who are either believed to be in custody or “missing” since the peak of fighting. In some cases, they say, Baluch tribal chieftains have refused to co-operate.Some human rights groups credit reconciliation efforts of the Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, with helping to pacify militants. “There has been a substantial improvement with the current civilian government’s policies, as opposed to the previous military government,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, a senior researcher for South Asia at Human Rights Watch. “The insurgency has virtually ended over the last year; it’s picked up a bit, but not much.”But Mr Mengal says there is simmering resentment because Mr Zardari’s policies have yielded marginal, if any, improvements. “Every ruler who comes to power announces publicly that they’re sorry for whatever happened in the past, like Zardari did,” he said. “But when Musharraf came to power, he said the same thing, and look what happened.“Simply releasing me and other people who were jailed isn’t the solution to 60 years of Baluch problems. My great-grandfather was arrested, then released. My father was arrested, then he was released. The same process goes on and on with other political activists, and this shows it’s not a solution to the problem.”For one thing, he said, intelligence services such as the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, have continued to kidnap, intimidate and sexually abuse people deemed part of the Baluch insurgency.Some Pakistani authorities have also warned against abuses in Baluchistan. In February, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan issued a statement urging the creation of an independent commission to help find people who had gone missing in Baluchistan. “In this situation the government cannot sit with folded hands. Every effort must be made to assuage the Baluch people’s feeling of outrage,” the commission’s statement said. At the same time, the Baluch political leadership has frayed. A growing number of splinter nationalist groups have formed, including an organisation that has claimed responsibility for kidnapping in February the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to the province, John Solecki. There are also indications that Taliban and al Qa’eda elements, displaced from fighting US and Pakistani forces on the Afghan border, are settling in Baluchistan. US officials are considering expanding attacks with unmanned aerial drones to counter the Taliban arrivals, The New York Times reported this month.Mr Mengal says he is sceptical of how useful dialogue with Islamabad can be. Efforts to talk with civilian authorities have proved futile after being throttled by hardliners in the military and intelligence establishment, who have accused Baluch fighters of being funded by Iran and arch-enemy India. “Baluchistan is 100 per cent run by the military and the intelligence,” he said. “Every time you try to shake hands with them as a brother and friend, they chop them off. I’m sorry to say that we don’t have any hands left to shake with them.”Asked if Baluch nationalists would take funding from such foreign forces as India or Iran, he responded: “If the devil from hell wants to offer us help, we won’t say no, because Pakistan has turned our soil into hell.”
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