EDITORIAL: Bad news keeps coming from the troubled province of Balochistan. In a horrific incident on Tuesday night in Barkhan district armed men stopped a Punjab-bound bus and after examining passengers’ identity cards offloaded seven men and shot them dead. This is not the first tragic incident of its kind.
In August of last year, 23 people were similarly taken out of buses and other vehicles on the highway linking Musakhel district with Punjab and brutally killed. Before that seven barbershop workers from the same province were killed inside their residential quarters in Surbandar area Gwadar.
There have been several other cases wherein poor labourers from Punjab employed in some construction projects were shot dead as they slept. These ethnicity-based extreme acts of violence are related to a wider conflict that has been going on for about two decades.
As is usual after such appalling incidents Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and other high-ups issued ritual statements. Those who harm innocent and defenceless people will have to pay a very heavy price, averred the PM, vowing to eliminate terrorism from the country.
For his part, Balochistan Chief Minister Mir Sarfraz Bugti while condemning the “cowardly attack by enemies of peace” promised to bring the terrorists to justice. That won’t resolve anything unless good-faith efforts are made to address the issues that have fuelled four cycles of insurgency — excluding the ongoing one — since Independence.
The Baloch people have long-standing genuine economic and political grievances. Theirs is a resource-rich province, but lags behind the other federating units on all counts of progress and development, deepening the Baloch people’s sense of alienation from the Centre, exacerbated by the abhorrent phenomenon of enforced disappearances.
Extremist elements exploit these sentiments for their purposes. Making a bad situation worse is imposition of an arguably unrepresentative political construct on the province. Those familiar with the prevailing conditions say poverty, unemployment, and corruption in high places are rampant, reinforcing public distrust in the system.
Use of force surely is necessary in some situation but force alone has not, will not, eliminate the trouble.
In the end it is a political problem that needs to be resolved through political means. Pre-conditions, like the one articulated by certain quarters that talks can be held with Baloch insurgents only after they surrender their arms, is a non-starter.
A more effective approach would be to allow the mainstream political players, especially pro-federation Baloch nationalist parties, to take the lead in addressing issues and concerns underlying unrest in that province, causing loss of so many innocent lives.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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