Balochistan remains an untold or at best a half-told story
Three news items about three different incidents in one province appeared on April 11, 12 and 13 earlier this month.
The April 11 news item, that did not become a part of the discussion at all, stated that the ‘mastermind’ of the attack on Quaid-e-Azam’s Ziarat Residency was killed in a targeted raid carried out by Frontier Corps personnel in the Mach area of Balochistan along with two other ‘militants’.
The April 12 news item was a cause of huge concern. It said that ‘militants’ or Baloch separatists or terrorists had opened fire on a labour camp in Balochistan’s Turbat area killing 20 labourers belonging to Punjab and Sindh.
The newspapers reported the following day, on April 13, that FC personnel and intelligence agencies carried out a raid against the killers of labourers in Turbat. In a gun battle, 13 ‘suspected militants’ were killed.
While the last two incidents seem obviously related, they may well be connected with the earlier FC attack on Ziarat Residency planner. Or they may not.
But this is Balochistan where the media shirks from bringing in the context for each disaster story that it reports. So it was left for the discerning reader to make a connection between these news items and the one that appeared on April 15. According to this, the country’s army chief visited Quetta where he was "briefed on operations against terrorists in Balochistan". He warned "all miscreants and foreign intelligence agencies from interference in the country".
His remarks were not too off the mark. The province’s home minister Sarfraz Bugti of PML-N had on the day of the labourers’ killing incident claimed that Indian spy agency could be behind the attack.
So Balochistan remains an untold or at best a half-told story. Sometimes the story is silenced as in the case of a talk in LUMS. At other times, the disaster reports and the missing persons accounts coincide with promises of huge investment as in the case of Gwadar that still don’t go down well with the local people in the province.
The people of the most natural resource-rich province live their lives in abject poverty. The real tragedy is that what is sold about this province to the rest of the country is half-truths.