Moderate quake hits Balochistan

IANS

Islamabad, May 25, 2012

An earthquake measuring 5.1 on the Richter scale hit Pakistan's Balochistan province late on Thursday, a media report said.

The quake's epicentre was located some 90 km from Khuzdar district of Balochistan, reported Xinhua quoting Pakistan's ARY news channel. Tremors

were felt in different areas of the province, including Quetta city, Khuzdar and Kalat.

There was, however, no immediate report of any loss of life or property, said officials of seismic monitoring centre in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan.

Hindustan Times

Quetta: One shot dead at Sariab Road

QUETTA: Unknown men gunned down a man at Sariab Road in Quetta on Thursday, Geo News reported.

According to police, the victim Ameer Mohammad, resident of Hazara Town, was on his way to work when unidentified men riding a motorcycle opened fire on him.

He was rushed to Bolan Medical Complex but he succumbed to his injuries on the way to hospital.

Police termed it a ‘target killing’ incident while the culprits managed to escape from the scene.

Geo Pakistan

Another Hazara Targeted in Quetta

Picture of the Hazara labor, who was targeted killed by terrorist, this morning at Killi Chakar area of Sariab, Quetta. He was on his way to work, when armed men riding on motorcycle targeted him.  He was identified as Ameer Mohammad s/o Haji Hasan, a resident of Hazara Town.

Planned Extermination: Balochistan’s Shia Hazara Community

By Nadir Hassan 18 MAY 2012



Photo: AFP

You don’t need to travel to Balochistan to understand how it has been systematically separated from the rest of the country. There is a cell-phone company advertisement at the airport in Karachi showing off the breadth of its network. A thousand points of light illuminate most of the country. However, Balochistan is mostly shrouded in darkness.

It has now become a journalistic cliché for an outsider to breathlessly report on the diversity of a city and Quetta, Balochistan’s capital city, certainly is diverse. But what is truly astounding is how diversely militarised Quetta is. There is the XII Corps of the Pakistan Army stationed there, now headed by Lt Gen Aslam Khattak and moved to the city in 2004, just before the Baloch rebellion began. A base of the Pakistan Air Force is maintained at Samungali and the Frontier Corps headquarters in the province is also maintained in Quetta and headed by Major General Obaidullah Khattak. That the military presence in Balochistan has such a strong Pakhtun component is not coincidental, for reasons that will become apparent. In addition, it is hard to walk any place in Quetta that doesn’t have policemen from the provincial police force patrolling the streets. It’s as if Pakistan’s security establishment is playing the world-domination board game Risk and has decided the best strategy is to move all its pieces to one tiny area.

However, in the minds of locals, because of this overwhelming military presence, Quetta may be one of the most insecure places in the country. By now everyone knows that a separatist rebellion is exploding in the province; less attention is being given to an organised war against minorities in the province’s capital. The most systematic of these campaigns may be the one against its Shia Hazara community...Continue Reading..

The Hazara of Afghanistan: Cultural Exhibit & Lecture

The Buddhas of Bamiyan by Llewelyn Morgan – review

The story of two Afghan sculptures, destroyed after a millennium and a half
Samanth Subramanian
guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 May 2012

Afghan girls walk past the empty seat of one of the Buddhas in Bamiyan. Photograph: Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images

In 2001, in a violent attempt to advance the cause of Islamic fundamentalism, a clutch of men empowered by the Taliban brought down a titanic pair of structures that loomed over their skyline. No lives were lost. The few people living near the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, were cleared out first, before anti-artillery weapons were trained on the sculptures, carved out of the russet cliffs of the Bamiyan valley. "These statues have been and remain shrines of unbelievers," a February 2011 edict from Mullah Omar had proclaimed. Their destruction was carried out with a rare and perverse vim. Failing at first to pulverise the Buddhas, the Taliban called in Pakistani and Arab engineers to finish the job. In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart observed that the Taliban had scorched a fresco on the ceiling of one of the caves that honeycomb the cliffs and then stamped boot-prints over the patina of soot. "This must have taken some effort, as the ceiling was 20 feet high....continue reading...

NATO in Afghanistan - Reaching out to Afghan women