Editorial: Why are the Chinese being targeted?
At 9:30 am on Thursday, a time-bomb blast at Hub Town in Balochistan killed 24 policemen and local citizens. The target was the moving van of Chinese engineers travelling from their location of work zinc mines to Karachi. The person on the spot who probably pressed the button to ignite the bomb missed the front van and hit instead the security vehicle full of Las Bela police guard following the Chinese engineers. Hub Town is located on the Quetta-Karachi road known as the RCD Highway.
Initial reactions from those who observe Balochistan is that the blast is not connected with the ones that took place in the north of the country. Most recently, someone killed the Chinese mechanics in Peshawar providing back-up services to Chinese rickshaws plying in the city. Since it followed the Lal Masjid operation, it is easy to presume that the friends of the Lal Masjid clerics who were punished for kidnapping some Chinese nationals in Islamabad have taken revenge and sent a message through the killing to Islamabad.
In 2004, Abdullah Mehsud kidnapped two Chinese engineers at the Gomal Zam Dam in South Waziristan. He was an old Banuri Masjid (Karachi) warrior. After all negotiations failed, the kidnappers were stormed, which resulted in the death of one Chinese engineer. Abdullah was helped by five kidnappers, two of them from South Waziristan and three from Afghanistan. Mehsud, who was released from Guantanamo Bay by the Americans the same year after two and a half years, demanded the release of five of his friends from jail in Pakistan as ransom. He also wished to take revenge for the murder of his teacher at Banuri Masjid, Mufti Jameel, also information secretary of the JUI at the time of his death.
Earlier in 2004, a car bomb killed three Chinese engineers out of the 500 employed at the Gwadar seaport. Gwadar airport too came under rocket attack. While most opinion focused on the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) as the culprit, there were others who pointed to a foreign hand, which means India in the Pakistani parlance although America too is beginning to be added as the second candidate. Then in 2006, at Hub again, three Chinese were gunned down by unknown attackers. These engineers too were working at the Gwadar seaport.
Opinion is divided on who actually did the latest deed at Hub. Balochistan is subject to insurgency with Baloch nationalists openly condemning federal encroachment on the provinces natural resources. The grievance has grown out of many historical factors but all the Baloch universally complain of lack of development in their mineral-rich province. Increasingly, the sub-nationalism there is fuelled by the desire to repossess these resources. The Gwadar seaport project too is opposed because it is seen as ultimately benefiting people from the rest of Pakistan rather than from Balochistan.
The government in Islamabad, while facing the BLA and its sabotage activities, tends to focus on India as BLAs benefactor and instigator from Afghanistan where India has recently reopened its consulates. It has claimed that large sums of foreign currency supplied by India to the militants have been discovered in the rebel strongholds in the province. Some of the linkages go back to an earlier upheaval when the Baloch sardars fled Balochistan and took refuge in Afghanistan. Today, the rebellious Baloch leaders are under pressure. The Bugti sardar, Nawab Akbar Bugti, has been killed in a military operation and the Mengal sardar, Akhtar Mengal, belonging to the crucially important area of Khuzdar because of the Iranian gas pipeline, is in jail, while some others like Senator Sanaullah Baloch have accepted exile in London.
The Chinese are being killed in the north because their killing hurts the government in Islamabad the most. It was the abduction of the Chinese nationals by the Lal Masjid vigilantes which finally forced President Musharraf to take action against the seminary. An additional factor in both regions is the factor of trespass into territory the tribal rebels wish to cordon off as their no-go territory. In Balochistan, the Chinese are being seen as a part of the international conspiracy allegedly led by America to deprive the Baloch by globalising their natural resources. The Chinese are in the crossfire, so to speak, in the war that the Baloch are waging against the state of Pakistan.
Pakistanis universally admire China as their friend of all seasons, but there remains an unexpressed plaint among the Islamist elements in Pakistan about the suppression of the Islamist rebels in Chinas eastern province of Xinjiang. Some of these rebels have been found among the Taliban in the tribal areas. As the Chinese deaths increase, the Pak-China equation comes under pressure and the Chinese enterprise now increasingly in the private sector is beginning to fight shy of coming to projects in Pakistan. *
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\07\20\story_20-7-2007_pg3_1
