Daily Times Editorial April 13, 2013

A belated outreach Caretaker Prime Minister Justice (retd) Mir Hazar Khan Khoso has belatedly woken up to the need to reach out to the angry, disgruntled and alienated Baloch (who arguably comprise not just the insurgents but the overwhelming majority of the people of Balochistan). He has now appealed to people who answer to this description to cooperate with the government for the conduct of elections in a free and fair manner. He argues that the people of Balochistan are desirous of participating in these elections, therefore the disgruntled Baloch leaders should respect and submit to their will, irrespective of differences with the government. Strangely, during the ongoing briefings by the top officials of the Balochistan government, it was revealed that stringent security was in place despite the fact that one million names had been deleted from the list of voters in the province. Now this is a very serious and non-transparent development. One million voters in a sparsely populated province is nothing to be sneezed at. Provinces like Balochistan already arguably are under-enumerated because of the scattered population, tribal structures and forbidding geography. The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) must explain how and why these one million names have been deleted, what the figure for the electorate has now been reduced to, and whether it is credible in relation to the total population and demographics of the province. Despite the claims of stringent security, the briefings also revealed that ECP staff are receiving life threats, sensitive areas have been defined, and it is claimed steps have been taken to deal with these issues. With due respect, it is difficult to take the efforts of the caretaker prime minister in Balochistan seriously, since they reflect a complete disconnect from the ground realities. Quetta is nothing if not a city under siege, evidence of which is the proliferation of check posts, the heavy presence of security forces, and the sense of insecurity that grips the citizens. In the remoter parts of the province, under- or not reported at all, the situation is arguably even worse. Nationalist and dissident sources speak of widespread and continuing atrocities by the Frontier Corps (FC) and its mercenary death squads. People are afraid to move around freely, let alone participate in election activity. The only ‘free and fair’ election that can be held in these circumstances is an election carried out in a virtual graveyard. If the caretaker prime minister and his interim government are truly interested in holding a credible (not just free and fair) election in Balochistan, they will have to wrest matters in the province from the vice-like grip of the military and the security forces (including the military’s intelligence agencies). For the last five years, it became quite obvious fairly quickly that neither the federal nor the provincial government called the shots in Balochistan. The military was (is) in charge and its policy and approach towards the province was to use repressive force, decapitate the intelligentsia of that society, and thereby crush brutally all sentiments of nationalism or separatism. All this shortsighted approach managed to achieve was a hardening of nationalist opposition to the oppression, and stoking the fire of separatism even more. If only our military would itself sum up the results of its use of force against a people struggling for their rights and correct course. In the absence of such a ‘miracle’, the least caretaker Prime Minister Justice (retd) Mir Hazar Khan Khoso can do is to persuade the military, FC, security forces and mercenary death squads to halt their murderous activities until at least the elections are over. This minimum step would be unlikely to persuade all dissidents to temporarily at least alter their focus to the elections and even participate in them. But it may persuade some, and is certainly worth trying if the present impasse between the repression of the military and the armed resistance by the insurgent nationalist groups is not to wind the province down the road of a farce instead of a credible election.