Terror outfits nexus in Balochistan

November 02, 2012 - Updated 119 PKT
From Web Edition


ISLAMABAD: A nexus of Taliban, Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and Jandola exists in the province, said the Federal Interior Minister, Rehman Malik during the Supreme Court hearing of the Balochistan law and order case on Friday here.

A three-member bench headed by the Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Cahudhry heard the case.

During proceedings the Chief Justice told the interior minister to go and catch hold of the Taliban, BLA and Jundullah and why they were not being arrested.

Rehman Malik said he would be giving a briefing about it.

CJ in his remarks said that whatever was happening in Balochistan was the responsibility of the provincial government. Those of us in Islamabad could not feel the heat of it. Is it possible for the people in Balochistan to move about freely, is anyone safe and secure in any place, he inquired and added that the chief minister’s own nephew was murdered and the murderer could not be arrested.

On this, interior minister said that this perception was not correct, "you come along with me, I will be driving the car," he said.

CJ said that you are good at driving, but Balochistan is not limited to Quetta, the Hindus have left from Kalat, all the shops are closed and the caravans move in security during the night in Kalat. Governor and chief secretary were subjected to firing. You sitting in Islamabad saying all is well.

Then, Rehman Malik said that your observations are correct, but is it the government machinating all this. He said that Taliban, BLA and Jundullah nexus exists in the province.

CJ appreciated the President’s statement stating that action should be taken instead of giving briefings.

Rehman Malik said that we have inherited these anomalies from former President General Musharraf.

Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja said that if you have information give it to the police. Some 800 such incidents occurred out of which 432 army and FC personnel were killed Tell me any case where the accused were caught.

The News

Taliban hell awaits asylum seeker

DateNovember 3, 2012

Dan Oakes

FOR much of the past decade, Bamiyan was the shining light for the US-led coalition in Afghanistan.

With its emerald green potato fields, snow-fed streams, pristine air and wealth of Buddhist relics, the central province is an area of extraordinary natural beauty. But it was the peaceful nature of the area that made it so valuable as an example of what could be achieved in Afghanistan.

Populated by the minority Hazara ethnic group, Bamiyan suffered horribly under the Taliban, with many inhabitants abandoning their fields and fleeing to refugee camps in surrounding countries.

Not content with slaughtering the Hazara, the Taliban - dominated by the majority Pashtun group - blew up the famed giant Buddhas carved into a cliff in the 6th century.
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But when the coalition invaded Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks, the Taliban were pushed out of Bamiyan, the Hazara woke from their nightmare and the province became a byword for peace and stability.

When this reporter visited Bamiyan more than two years ago, New Zealand troops drove around in unarmoured utes, waving to children. Locals were talking about enticing tourists to the province, which was a stop on the hippie trail in the 1960s and 1970s.

However, a farmer warned, ''When the Taliban controlled this place, we fled to Pakistan, to Iran, to other provinces. Each household left one person here to watch over our land. We need the central government to protect us, so this does not happen again.''

Fast forward 2½ years. Five NZ soldiers were killed in two separate incidents in August and The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Taliban fighters are roaming openly in parts of the province.

There are no Afghan army units in Bamiyan, security is in the hands of an under-equipped and demoralised police force and the governor has to fly to Kabul for meetings as the Taliban control the roads.

The asylum seeker - who cannot be named - the federal government is trying to force back to Afghanistan comes from neighbouring Ghazni province, which also has a substantial Hazara minority but is one of the country's most violent and dangerous provinces.

There have been reports of the Taliban beheading Hazara in Ghazni (and in the Australia-controlled Oruzgan).

With foreign forces leaving Afghanistan, the Taliban moving back into Hazara areas and the history of brutality against the minority group, it is hard to understand how the Australian government could claim it is safe for the asylum seeker to return.

But to admit it is not safe would be to admit the last 11 years of occupation have done nothing to improve the security of an oppressed minority. And that raises questions about what exactly Australia, the US and their allies have achieved.

The Age

Read more:

The Nightmare Scenarios

Munir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn Afghan woman and child in Kabul on Oct. 23.

By MATTHIEU AIKINS

KABUL — Two separate killings this past weekend sent a new kind of chill down the spines of observers in Kabul. The first was a suicide blast in a mosque in Faryab Province, in the northwest, during the Muslim festival of Id al-Adha, which killed at least 45 people, many of them civilians. In the second attack — which got much less attention — five Hazaras, a Shiite ethnic minority, were reportedly pulled off a van and killed in Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan.

Although this country already sees a daily toll of civilian deaths from gunfights, I.E.D.’s and airstrikes, these killings were particularly worrisome because they suggest two types of nihilistic violence common in Iraq and Pakistan but that Afghanistan has yet to see: attacks designed to cause mass casualties among civilians and sectarian murders.

The conflict in Iraq has had a strong Sunni vs. Shiite dynamic, with Sunni militant groups bombing Shiite mosques and shopping areas, and Shiite death squads — often with links to the government — kidnapping and executing Sunnis. In Pakistan, the violence is more lopsided, with extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi carrying out a campaign of assassinations against Shiites, mostly Hazaras, in the city of Quetta. It is also common for militants in Pakistan to target mosques and bazaars in reprisal for successful government operations against them....Continue Reading... 

Afghanistan's first national park aims to attract tourists

Five Civilians Gunned Down In East Afghanistan

October 27, 2012
Reports from Afghanistan say five civilians travelling in a bus in the eastern province of Ghazni have been shot dead.

Provincial officials said Taliban militants stopped the bus on October 26 in the Andar district, pulled out five people, and killed them on the spot.

Police recovered the bodies on October 27 from the roadside.

Deputy Governor Mohammad Ali Ahmadi said the five dead were from the ethnic Hazara minority.

Radio Free Europe 

ہزارہ برادری کی مشکلات

ہزارہ برادری سے تعلق رکھنے والے ہزاروں افراد اپنی جان کو لاحق خطروں کے پیش نظر سمندر کے خطروں کا سامنا کرتے ہوئے دیگر ممالک میں سیاسی پناہ لینے کی کوشش کرتے ہیں۔

 پچیش اکتوبر کو تقریباً ایک سو بیس ہزارہ برادری سے تعلق رکھنے افراد کو انڈونیشیا کی پولیس نے غیر قانونی طور پر ملک میں داخل ہونے پر حراست میں لے لیا ہے جو ایک کشتی کے ذریعے آسٹریلیا جارہے تھے۔ ان میں سے زیادہ تر کا تعلق پاکستان سے ہے۔

 گزشتہ سال سے لیکر اب تک کوئٹہ اور بلوچستان کے دیگر علاقوں میں ہزارہ برادری سے تعلق رکھنے والے کئی افراد کو قتل کیا جا چکا ہے۔ رائٹرز فوٹو۔

DAWN

Pakistan: Now or Never?

Perspectives on Pakistan

The killers of Quetta

By Matthew Green
OCTOBER 25, 2012

Cut-out cardboard hearts, stars and a slogan that cheerfully declares “The Earth Laughs In Flowers” adorn the classrooms of the Ummat Public School in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The bright images cannot dispel the sense of foreboding shared by dozens of teenage girls seated at their desks, all members of the town’s Hazara community.

Soon they will finish their exams and expect to go to college. Only these young women will stay at home. A killer is on the loose in Quetta, and their parents are terrified.

Amina, 15, raises a hand.

“I wanted to go to the best college; my dad says ‘It’s not important.’ In our family everybody is frightened,” she said, as pupils in white headscarfs nodded glum-faced assent.

“I don’t want to live that life where I can’t get education,” she said. “I don’t want to be an ignorant person.”

In Pakistan, it’s not unusual to meet people who have suffered unfathomable grief at the hands of men who have arrogated the right to take another’s life in the name of religion.

But there is something uniquely dispiriting about seeing the ambitions of articulate young women being snuffed out by a systematic and preventable campaign of targeted killing.

The capacity of Pakistan’s militants to persuade themselves of their own moral authority was made clear this month when the Taliban issued a lengthy justification for its decision to shoot Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old schoolgirl who had championed female education.

The killer at large in Quetta is Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni extremist group whose adherents see members of Pakistan’s Shi’ite minority as infidels deserving of capital punishment.

Hazaras make particularly attractive targets. Not only are they Shi’ites, but they are also descendants of émigrés who escaped a previous wave of persecution in Afghanistan in the 19thcentury. Such “otherness” was not an issue in Pakistan in the past. Now, it is a death mark.

Attacks on Hazaras have been escalating since 1999, but this year the militants have beaten their previous personal bests, killing more than 100 in the first eight months of the year alone....Continue Reading...