The April 2025 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out

The April 2025 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out. Link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com

Contents:

1. Mehrzaad Baluch: Jaffar Express Hijacking Exposes Pakistan’s Failing Strategy in Balochistan.
2. Saulat Nagi: History of Invaders and Gladiators.
3. Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar: Palestine-Israel Primer.
4. One Hundred Plus Years of the Communist Movement in India.
5. Chris Harman: The return of the National Question – IV: Social crises and nationalism today.
6. W B Bland: The Pakistani Revolution – IX: The Agartala Conspiracy Case and after.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column for March 25, 2025 not carried by the paper

Happy March 23

 

Rashed Rahman

 

March 23 rolled round this year in relatively muted fashion. This was not surprising, given the plethora of troubles afflicting the country. The day saw the usual fare on the media of commemorations of Pakistan Day, but the public mood seemed unenthusiastic.

Events in Balochistan cast a pall of gloom over the day. In the aftermath of the Balochistan Liberation Army’s (BLA’s) attack on the Jaffer Express and the events that followed, this was not unexpected. The BLA operation was of a scale and effectiveness that indicated the growing capability of the nationalist insurgency in the province. One consequence of the incident was the conflict over the dead bodies of BLA militants allegedly killed in the last stages of the counter-operation by the security forces against BLA ‘stragglers’ holding hostages taken from the train. It did seem strange that guerrillas would simply be sitting around with hostages, waiting for the security forces’ riposte, when the normal expectation would have been that they would have retreated along with their other colleagues once their day was done, as guerrillas normally are expected to do. Therefore this claim of slain guerrillas seemed suspicious to the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) that has been agitating since long on the issue of ‘missing’ persons. The BYC demanded access to the bodies of alleged BLA guerrillas killed by the security forces to determine whether any of them were ‘missing’ persons. Ostensibly an unobjectionable desire, the state’s response was the usual rebuff. No account was taken, nor leeway permitted, on an issue that is highly emotive for the families of the ‘missing’ seeking news of their loved ones since years. The result was a natural outburst of indignation by the BYC, which intruded into the hospital’s morgue where the dead bodies were kept and succeeded in retrieving five of them. Then all hell was let loose by the police and security forces on the BYC protestors, in which three people were reportedly killed by police firing on unarmed, peaceful people. The administration of course spun this incident the other way as the BYC protestors having attacked the police and injured some of their personnel, but no clear explanation was on offer how the three people were killed. Dr Mahrang Baloch, the leader of BYC, along with about 150 of her colleagues were arrested and charged with terrorism and such like offences. In response, the Balochistan National Party-Mengal (BNP-M) has announced a conference in Quetta to address the issue, while Baloch students in Lahore have taken out a protest rally against such over-the-top actions.

This has been the recurring pattern of how the state has reacted time and again to the peaceful sit-ins and protests, in Balochistan and even in Islamabad, by the BYC on the issue of their ‘missing’ loved ones. This response has deepened, if anything, the alienation and anger of the affected families of the ‘missing’, not to mention Baloch society as a whole. Moderate nationalist political parties such as the BNP-M and the National Party, entities wedded to parliamentary politics, were cut to size through manipulation of the February 2024 elections. Akhtar Mengal, despairing of being heard, let alone listened to, has quit the National Assembly. Dr Malik Baloch bravely continues to raise voice in the Balochistan Assembly, all to no avail. Emasculating the moderate, parliamentary political forces and dealing with peaceful protestors demanding answers to the vexed question of the fate of their ‘missing’ loved ones with by far excessive force (as even the Human Rights Commission has found) is guaranteed like nothing else to push more and more young Baloch into the arms of the nationalist insurgency when no other recourse seems to suggest itself or, in practice, be available. In this regard, the state and its security apparatus is proving the best recruiting agent for the Baloch guerrillas.

People in the media and generally of good intentions have been railing for a ‘balanced’ approach and a democratic strategy, not force alone, to tackle the situation in Balochistan that appears to be growing graver by the minute. But all these good intentions appear only to be the paving for the road to hell since their authors seem to be whistling in the wind. Meanwhile the Baloch insurgency has acquired increasingly enhanced capability and, in the process, reflects more and more the changes that have been taking place quietly in Baloch society since the last nationalist insurgency in the 1970s. A new middle class has arisen in this interregnum that is providing a very different, educated recruit to the guerrillas. Not only that, since this newly emerging middle class is drawn from virtually all over Balochistan, it has managed to expand the sweep of the guerrilla war to almost every nook and cranny of the vast, rugged province. Along with enhanced military and political capacity, the Baloch nationalist insurgency has now expanded the old demand for provincial autonomy, redressal of historic grievances and rights for its people to an unequivocal demand for independence on the basis of the right to self-determination. An added, tragic dimension is the tactic increasingly in use to kill outsiders, whether travellers or working in Balochistan, on the plea that this influx threatens to change the demographic of Balochistan against its native inhabitants. Such is the fruit of more than seven decades of oppression of the Baloch and exploitation and extraction of their resources without even a glance at the poverty and deprivation of their people. Such persistent injustice engenders nothing but growing hatred.

Is this how we wish to remember the pious hopes once associated with the memory of March 23?

 

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

The way forward

We need a core group of intellectuals, politically aware progressive thinkers to formulate a critical history of the socialist struggle internationally and at home. Only coming to terms with this track record in theory and practice can point the way forward and inspire new generations of revolutionaries. Simply repeating formulae from the past does not provide convincing answers to the defeat and retreat since 1989, nor does it provide clarity in a globalised world for Pakistan’s entrapment in external neocolonialism and internal colonialism. We also need a fresh analysis of our own state and society rather than relying blindly on other revolutionary experiences.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column March 11, 2025

No lessons learnt

 

Rashed Rahman

 

Pakistan is a unique country in which the authorities seem incapable of learning from past experience. Here we are in the middle of trying to unravel the Independent Power Producers’ (IPP’s) ‘Take or Pay’ conundrum, the wisdom having dawned three decades after this idea was mooted that it does not take cognizance of market fluctuations, thereby landing the country in impossible financial trouble. The initial 1994 induction of IPPs taught us nothing, and was duly followed by another round in the 2010s, landing us with further burdens of paying for electricity whether taken or not. Some sceptics allude to murkier reasons than simply an inability to learn from the track record, corrupt practices being top of the list. Someone, somewhere, they allege, made a lot of money out of this (repeated) skullduggery.

Now we are confronted with the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority’s (OGRA’s) brilliant suggestion that the Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) adopt a ‘Take or Pay’ model in their fresh Sale and Purchase Agreements (SPAs) to either lift their allocated petroleum product quotas from local refineries or pay penalties for failing to do so. This is ostensibly meant to support local refineries by ensuring them a guaranteed offtake, thereby reducing excessive fuel imports that were undermining domestic production, causing reduced capacity utilisation and financial losses. An added grey area is the accusation by some OMCs and refineries that a specific OMC was being favoured by OGRA through approving petrol and diesel imports despite sufficient local stock availability. As the criticism of OGRA mounted, it proposed the new brilliant ‘Take or Pay’ arrangement. The Oil Marketing Association of Pakistan (OMAP) has expressed grave concerns regarding this suggestion, pointing to the significant risks posed to the OMCs’ financial sustainability and arguing that such an arrangement will only serve (at best) the interests of refineries and large OMCs at the expense of smaller players, perhaps driving the latter to closure and consolidating further the monopolistic control of the big fish in the oil sector, which would end up severely hampering competition, discourage new entrants and ultimately harm the overall efficiency (if not existence) of the petroleum supply chain. OMAP pointed to the refineries’ opportunistic behaviour in routinely withholding their product when price increases are anticipated, thereby forcing the OMCs to resort to costly imports. Conversely, when prices are expected to decline, refineries attempt to offload maximum stocks to the OMCs, resulting in financial losses for the latter. (This is a tenuous claim since the timeframe of domestic price fluctuations and imports do not come even close to matching.) In essence this controversy shows our inability (i.e. in this instance OGRA’s) to learn the appropriate lessons from the past (the IPPs experience) and arguably militates against the current ‘consensus’ (in official circles at least) on free markets being allowed to work their ‘magic’ unhindered.

As though the above were not enough to prove our learning deficit, we are confronted by a conflict on the Torkham border between us and our Afghan neighbours, whom we once lauded as ‘freedom fighters’ and supported over many decades in our Afghan adventures. Now that our Afghan ‘friends’ are in power, they have returned our generosity by continuously violating agreed protocols on the Torkham border (the main trade route between the two countries and further with Central Asia and beyond). These violations, consisting of constructing posts at the border on the Afghan side, have led in recent days to severe clashes between the militaries on both sides. Now a joint tribal jirgacomposed of elders from both sides is bending its back to restore peace and confidence on the border to relieve the millions of rupees trade losses. Not just this ‘aggressive’ stance on the Torkham border, the Afghan military has been trading fire with its ‘brother’ Pakistan Army at various points along the mutual border, sometimes to support their other ‘brothers’, the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in its campaign to overthrow the state in Pakistan and impose a Taliban-type regime. Remonstrations to Kabul to cease such ingratitude has met with diplomatic fobbing off (at best) or downright rejection of the charge of supporting the TTP operating from Afghan soil (at worst). And how did the TTP land up in Afghanistan? This occurred courtesy our brilliant military strategists when they failed (allowed?) to prevent the TTP from retreating across the border to escape our military offensive against them following the Peshawar Army Public School massacre in 2014. Clearly, there is room to argue that we have misconstrued the real nature of the ‘friendship’ with the Afghan Taliban (‘transactional’ to use the current Trumpian phrase) as well as badly failed to prevent the Pashtun tribes on our frontier from transmogrifying over time from logistical supporters of the Afghan religiously inspired fighters to their ‘comrades’. No lessons learnt?

If there was any room left to mourn our mental density, it is more than filled by the report of an international human rights platform, Civicus Monitor (CM), that ‘elevates’ Pakistan into the company of countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Serbia, Italy and the US, a list describing countries in 2025 that are experiencing rapid declines in civic freedoms. Pakistan’s status on CM’s website is listed as “repressed”. According to CM’s report, Pakistan has been awarded this honour due to narrowing civil space, human rights activists being arbitrarily targeted by the authorities, and the media being clamped down on through draconian laws. The report adds: “Pakistan’s recent criminalisation of activists, stifling of opposition and minority protests, and digital space restrictions have resulted in the country being added to Civicus Monitor’s watchlist.” It goes on to point to the government’s “trumped up charges” against Dr Mahrang Baloch, the leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee, and human rights lawyer Imaan Zainab Mazari-Hazir. Mahrang, the report says, “faces multiple criminal charges, including under the Anti-Terrorism Act, for organising sit-ins (peaceful, one might add) across the country and attending gatherings” (!). Mazari-Hazir was “targeted on terrorism chargesfor actively supporting legal redress for victims of violence and persecution and advocating for the rights of persecuted religious and ethnic communities.” CM comes to the logical conclusion that the charges against both ladies are a political witch-hunt and attempts at silencing dissent. CM also underlines the government’s tender treatment of opposition, Sindhi and Baloch protests.

Standing up peacefully for the ‘disappeared’, fighting legal battles for the oppressed, and agitating peacefully for rights, it seems, are not allowed in Pakistan. Why does all this sound so drearily familiar? Lessons not learnt perhaps?

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

The March 2025 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out

The March 2025 issue of Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) is out. Link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com

Contents:

1. Navid Shahzad: The Elusive Self.
2. Chris Harman: The return of the National Question – III: Nationalism since the First World War.
3. W B Bland: The Pakistani Revolution – VIII: The ‘Six Points’.
4. Jamison Heinkel: Book Review: The genesis of Baloch nationalism: Politics and ethnicity in Pakistan, 1947-77.
5. From the PMR Archives: September 2019: From the Editor: Capitalism’s ‘gift’: climate change.

Rashed Rahman

Editor, Pakistan Monthly Review (PMR) (link: pakistanmonthlyreview.com)

Director, Research and Publication Centre (RPC) (on Facebook)

Business Recorder Column March 4, 2025

The Kurd struggle

 

Rashed Rahman

 

The Kurds are a people divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. This reflects the fact that state boundaries were drawn in many parts of the world depending on factors other than ethnic homogeneity, reflecting the relative reach and control of territory by states that included peoples of the same ethnic origin, in the process dividing them. Closer to home, we can refer to the similar case of divided ethnic groups and nationalities: the Baloch (Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan) and the Pashtuns (Pakistan and Afghanistan). In the case of the Kurds, despite the division, sentiments of solidarity and expressed desire for self-determination in the shape of a unified Kurd state have been part of their history. However, the divisions into different states have proved stronger than this aspiration, leading to struggles by the Kurds within the confines of the respective states they find themselves in.

The Iraqi Kurds fought a long guerrilla war against their state for independence, led by Mulla Mustafa Barzani and his Peshmerga fighters from 1961 to 1975, but were eventually defeated, leading to the exile of Barzani in the Soviet Union and Iran, where he eventually died in 1979. After the overthrow of Saddam by the US in 2003, the Iraqi Kurds, now led by Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani, gained autonomous control of their oil-rich territory in northern Iraq in a tenuous alliance with the new regime imposed on Baghdad through US arms. The Iranian Kurds took advantage of the Soviet Union’s control of northern Iran after WWII to declare an independent Kurdish Republic of Mahabad, but it was crushed after the Soviets withdrew. An attempt to resurrect the Mahabad Republic after the Iranian revolution of 1979 was also brutally crushed. Iraq, Iran and Turkey have long followed forced assimilationist policies against their respective Kurd populations.

In Turkey, recovering after WWI from the loss of the Ottoman empire, this forced assimilationist policy denied the Kurds’ very existence, dubbing them ‘Mountain Turks’ in the 1930s and 1940s. The words “Kurds”, “Kurdistan”, “Kurdish” were officially banned. After the military coup in 1980, the Kurdish language was officially prohibited in public and private life till 1991. Many who spoke, published, sang in Kurdish were arrested and imprisoned. It was initially against this assimilationist loss of identity and to gain cultural and political rights that the Kurdish Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (PKK) was formed in 1978 under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan with a programmatic demand for autonomy. However, it was the Turkish state’s continuing fierce repression, including systematic executions, imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, destruction of villages, the murder of Kurdish journalists, activists, politicians, the prosecution and sentencing of teachers providing, and students demanding education in Kurdish, and the entire panoply of the modern state’s oppressive capabilities that incrementally persuaded the PKK to pick up the gun and wage an armed guerrilla struggle for independence in 1984.

The trajectory of the PKK’s guerrilla war has constantly fluctuated between conflict and unilateral ceasefires by the PKK in an attempt to restore peace through negotiations. But successive Turkish regimes, including the present Erdogan government, have never abandoned the mailed fist even while paying lip service to a peaceful solution through negotiations. The Turkish military pressure over the years on the PKK resulted in retreats into Syria, Lebanon, and eventually northern Iraq, the Iraqi Kurd area, where the leadership of the PKK is currently based. Unfortunately, the prime leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, who was snatched in an operation in Nairobi allegedly with the help of the CIA and Israel, has been in solitary confinement in a prison in the Sea of Marmara since 1999. Even from that isolation, Ocalan has attempted again and again to negotiate a peaceful solution with successive Turkish governments but to no avail.

This time though, through the intermediary role of the pro-Kurdish DEM party, whose delegation met Ocalan in prison, his message announcing the “end of the armed struggle” of the PKK has been made public, adding the PKK should now dissolve itself. The message and its import have been accepted by the PKK leadership in Iraq. What remains to be seen is whether the Erdogan government will accede to the PKK’s demand for the release of Ocalan from his long and lonely incarceration, and whether that will be accompanied by negotiations that frame a new future for the Kurds in Turkey and, indeed, for Turkey as a whole.

The Kurd example, whether in Turkey, Iraq, Iran or Syria, points to the futility and risks involved in denying a minority nationality its cultural and political rights in an attempt to wipe out its very existence through forced assimilation. Let us hope wisdom prevails and Ankara finds a fresh path to apply salve on the deep wounds of its Kurd people and adopts a democratic attitude to the vexed Kurd problem.

We in Pakistan too should learn the lessons embedded in the Kurdish problem in the four states between whom the Kurdish people are divided. The flowering of diverse cultures is the best means of achieving genuine unity between the federating units of any state. Pakistan can only be enriched and strengthened by its open hearted embrace of its minority nationalities, allowing an organic coming together of our diverse peoples to forge a voluntary, respectful unity, not one maintained by the knout.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com

Business Recorder Column February 25, 2025

Russia-Ukraine War: Origins and Endgame

 

Rashed Rahman

 

Three years after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the advent of Donald Trump into power in the US has upset the applecart for Volodymyr Zelensky and hints at a changed geopolitical scenario in Europe and the wider world. Trump had exhibited a soft spot for Russian President Vladimir Putin even in his first term, and after leaving office, consistently opposed the war while expressing a tilt towards Russia. During his election campaign and on the eve of a return to the White House, Trump made no bones about wanting to, and being capable of, ending the Russia-Ukraine conflict “within 24 hours”. The timeline may have been the usual Trump hyperbole, but it did indicate the US President’s mindset vis-a-vis the war.

What is the Russia-Ukraine conflict? What are its origins and, in the light of the remarks above, its likely endgame? The problem with seeking an objective account of this conundrum is that the whole affair is shrouded in propaganda and partisan spin from both sides (not an unusual phenomenon in wars). First, some historical background.

Ukraine’s Donbas region, around which the current war has been waged, is considered in Russian historiography as the original home of the Russian people and culture after they migrated there from Scandinavia around the 8^th-11^thcenturies. Add to this nostalgia the fact that the Donbas, largely Russian to date, complained of discrimination and worse from Ukraine, particularly after the Maidan uprising in 2014. In the aftermath of that political cataclysm of regime change (one of the ‘colour’ revolutions in Eastern Europe orchestrated as it is widely believed they were, by the CIA), both the Russian denizens of Donbas and their Russian Orthodox Church (revived after the Soviet collapse in 1991) came under alleged attack by neo-Nazi elements in Ukraine. These neo-Nazis are considered the heirs of the WWII Ukrainian collaborators with the occupying Nazi war machine of Hitler.

Russian sensitivity regarding its diaspora scattered throughout the former Soviet Republics has informed Moscow’s actions in Abkhazia, Georgia (where a separatist Russian movement was indirectly supported by Russia) and Ukraine, the two most extreme examples of such intervention. Moscow has also kept an eye on the interests of Russians in the Central Asian Republics that broke away and became independent in 1991. Putin in particular appears to have made it his life’s mission to ensure his Russian compatriots in the former Soviet Republics are not maltreated.

On the other side of the divide is the perfidious role of the West which, not content with its ‘victory’ over the Soviet Union, has been needling post-Soviet Russia with NATO-creep (the inclusion of Eastern European countries in the military alliance, a development the West initially assured Moscow would not happen) and the doing down of Russia’s military might (which includes nuclear weapons). All this is intended to weaken Russia and ensure the US-led West’s unchallenged global hegemony. Sceptics are invited to cast a glance at how China, after being embraced when it opened its doors to capitalism under Deng Xiaoping, is today being considered an economic, political and military threat by the US-led West precisely because of the progress it has made. Thucydides is therefore alive and kicking.

Had the West remained content with the humbling of Russia post-Soviet collapse, things may not have reached this pretty pass. However, Trump is making one thing clear: the days of Zelensky are now numbered, along with those in Ukraine who still dream of recovering all the territory they have lost to Russia in this war. Trump seems uninterested in Ukraine’s refrain along these lines. His avid interest currently is in asking Zelensky for $ 500 billion in rare minerals to be found in Ukraine as payback for all the aid Washington has bestowed on the (by now lost) Ukrainian cause.

Another major loser in the second Trumpian era is Europe, which has been excluded from the table as US-Russia meetings roll out. The European Union’s angst about Ukrainian, and therefore European, security has been trashed by the new/old incumbent in the White House. Trump had in the past railed against the continuation of the US stationing troops in and bearing the cost of Europe’s security (a hangover of the post-WWII world) and repeatedly asked for Europe to increase its contribution to European defence. This had not been taken too seriously in practice by the EU, lip service notwithstanding. Now it seems the free lunch is over and the chickens have come home to roost.

Welcome to the Trumpian universe.

 

 

 

 

 

rashed.rahman1@gmail.com

rashed-rahman.blogspot.com