Volume 7, No. 1, January 2025
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Gwadar has a number of advantages as a port; it is an all-year, all-weather deep channel port that could eventually handle the largest of oil tankers. It is close to the Gulf and on major shipping lanes. It puts Middle East oil and gas reserves within the reach of China. Gwadar’s planned link with the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan’s north could cut almost 8,000 kilometres (5,000 miles) from the Malaccan route for China, and it would have a direct route from the Gulf to its energy-hungry interior.
China has had designs on Balochistan for long because its Gwadar port and Balochistan’s resources are an essential springboard to its global ambitions A foothold there would facilitate and hasten the achievement of its goals. Pakistan presented Gwadar to it on a silver platter when in 2000 the military ruler General Pervez Musharraf inked a deal with it for developing Gwadar. It invested more than $ 200 million in the first port building phase. However, in 2007, Singapore’s PSA International Ltd was given a 40-year contract, with a 20-year tax concession, to run the port. It promised to invest $ 525 million over five years but the deal did not work. The PSA accused the government of reneging on commitments, including the non-availability of the essential 670 acres that the Navy occupied. Then in August 2012, Pakistan and China cut a deal giving the latter the operational control of Gwadar port.
The Pakistan government is granting the most profitable terms to China and also begging it to revive the Gwadar Coastal Oil Refinery project shelved in 2009-10 due to China’s declaration of the province as a no-go area for Chinese nationals because three Chinese engineers were killed by a bomb in Gwadar on May 4, 2003 and three more Chinese engineers were killed in Hub in February 2006. To lure China back, Pakistan is offering a 20-year tax holiday and the waiver of one percent Workers Profit Participation Fund (WPPF). All concessions are aimed at ensuring China’s involvement in the exploitation of Balochistan’s resources. The Baloch resent this parcelling out and surrender of Gwadar on the pretext of development, as it would hasten demographic changes and give China a military foothold there.
The Baloch in Gwadar face multifarious problems. The legendary land grab has deprived them of their most valuable possession. A perennial acute drinking water shortage persists. Locals’ share in employment is only manual labour while they are being turned into a minority and the state repression keeps mounting. They resent being dispossessed, deprived and disenfranchised on the lame pretext of development. In March 2011, a Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) camp outside Gwadar city was attacked; 11 persons were killed and two vehicles torched. Moreover, the Navy prescribes fishing on fixed timings. The fish do not heed it so fishermen violate the timings and the administration punishes them by damaging their boats. In January 2006, militants torched three Pakistan Navy submarine force launches at the Gwadar Fish Harbour in retaliation against the security forces damaging dozens of fishermens’ boats.
Gwadar is a microcosm of how Balochistan is being dealt with. First of all, it has been literally handed over to China to further its designs of exploiting the natural resources of cash-starved countries and economies for its own benefit. All things stem from this basic approach. Its land is being parcelled out between the state, China and land grab mafias. For that very reason land allotment has often been blocked but the loot has not stopped for it is away from monitoring by any independent body due to its distance and inaccessibility. Obstacles put up by the state in the same way as the Saindak exploitation continue unchecked. The projects initiated by China and Pakistan do not give the slightest consideration to the rights and welfare of the locals.
The extent of the irregularities, transgressions and frauds in land deals must have been extraordinarily vicious to prompt the judges of the Supreme Court, Justice Javed Iqbal (who headed the Commission on Missing Persons) and Justice Raja Fayyaz Ahmed, in their October 2006 judgment to say, “The allotment of land in Gwadar has been made in violation of the policies formulated by the government itself. The discretionary power has been exercised in an arbitrary and capricious manner, which has been cited as a clear example of abuse of authority and misuse of power. Nobody knows how the settled land owned by the state has been transferred to private sector, that too on peanut price which depicts lack of transparency and mismanagement.”
They ordered cancellation of allotment of residential and industrial plots in Gwadar. They observed that the Balochistan government is not competent to allocate land quota for politicians, ministers, elected representatives, high civil officials and provincial judiciary without having proper legislation on the subject. They also observed that “every allotment, sale and disposed of land appears to have been made in a dubious and suspicious manner”. This was then; now the land mafias are more subtle and have very powerful backing of the army which has a share in every racket.
The Gwadar Fishermen Alliance has been protesting from March 1, 2019 to protect the centuries-old livelihood of local fishermen if the government makes no decision in this regard by then. The Alliance leaders, Khuda-i-Dad Wajo, Khuda Bakhsh and Ali Akbar Rais, said for the development of Pakistan, the local fishermen had surrendered ownership of lands in their ancestral area Mullah Band. But after the government embarked on construction of Eastbay Expressway, they expressed their concern that it would block their access to the sea before officials of the federal and provincial governments but their protests were not heeded and most have lost their livelihood. To add insult to injury, they can go fishing during certain timings and when a VIP is visiting, their fishing trips are banned completely.
Water is a scarce commodity for the locals as no arrangement for providing water has been made for them while the Chinese and the government have their desalinated water and can also afford to buy this otherwise scarce but precious commodity. It is only now that they are promising a desalination plant but to be made and to become operational it will take a long time.
Militarisation of Gwadar also goes on apace. Gwadar’s new airport’s 6,500 acres were purchased for Rs 1.05 billion by the Military Estates Officer (MEO), making it military property. An airport this size is surely for military purposes, for even London’s Heathrow Airport, where a plane lands or takes off every 46 seconds at peak hours is on 2,965 acres. In May 2011, after China acceded to take over the Gwadar port, Pakistan’s former Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar, during his China visit had said, “However, we shall be more grateful to the Chinese if they agree to build a naval base at Gwadar.”
The area of land acquired is by itself of importance because New York’s JFK airport, one of the largest in the world, covers only 4,930 acres. There the total number of flights was 34,361 in November 2006 alone and the number of passengers 3,484,448. Gwadar airport is also twice the size of London’s Heathrow (2,965 acres), which handled 128 million passengers in 2005.
Contrary to normal procedure, the Rs1.05 billion earmarked for the purchase of 6,500 acres for the new Gwadar airport were released to the Military Estate Officer (MEO) in Quetta instead of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). Any land acquired by the Military Land and Cantonments (MLC) makes it the property of the Pakistan Army and this fact alone thoroughly exposes the claim that Gwadar is an exclusively commercial project.
It goes without saying that the volume of air traffic at Gwadar will be a tiny fraction of the numbers cited above. This oversized place is obviously required for objectives other than those publicised.
Gwadar and Security
In November 2015, Zahid Gishkori, a journalist, wrote that an unnamed army officer told him, “We are going for a four-layer plan for the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), integrated with a new security policy and an estimated 32,000 security personnel will guard over 14,321 Chinese workers engaged in some 210 small and mega projects in Pakistan.” This means some two-and-a-half security personnel will protect every Chinese national. This plan includes the presence of over 500 Chinese security personnel for capacity building of the newly raised special force. It also means Chinese boots on the ground in Balochistan and that is just the beginning.
A ministry of interior official disclosed that according to this plan Balochistan would get more security as six wings (5,700 personnel) of the Frontier Corps (FC), 3,000 police constables and 1,000 Levies personnel would guard all the routes. The Pakistan marines and the border security forces would also guard the port and its adjacent routes. He added that the military was setting up a special security force (nine battalions) comprising an estimated 12,000 personnel for induction into the special division to be headed by a serving major general. So, there is going to be the further militarisation of Balochistan on the excuse of protecting the Chinese for the CPEC projects.
Not content with this martial law being imposed in Gwadar to protect the Chinese, simultaneously it is being made out of bounds for the Baloch. The then in-charge of the Gwadar security force, Brigadier Shahzad Iftikhar Bhatti, disclosed that new resident cards would be issued to citizens of the port city. He said, “The responsibility to make Gwadar a safe city has been given to the Pakistan army and new army check points had been established at the entrance of the port city to enhance the security for foreign investors and the general masses.” This in practical terms meant that along with repression, the demography would be suitably doctored.
This demography thing cannot be brushed off lightly. The government wages a subtle demographic war in Balochistan that has witnessed the highest population increase of approximately 250 percent. Senator Jehanzeb Jamaldini disclosed to a Senate committee: “The government settled four million people in various parts of Balochistan in the past three decades.” Add to this the introduction of religion into the political, social and cultural ethos to wreak fundamentalist changes within society and it confirms the Baloch view that the Pakistani establishment is waging an all-out war to obliterate the Baloch identity forever.
Sonmiani Port Plans
During Musharraf’s rule, in April 2007 another plan for land grab was made. The plan was to make Sonmiani too a port and to acquire land at very very cheap rates.
A news report in Dawn, April 6, 2007 stated that Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz approved in principle the concept of the development of a new self-contained port city on the Balochistan coast which will provide business, tourism, housing and industrial development opportunities to local and foreign investors.
Chairing a presentation on the proposed port city called Aladdin Cove at the Prime Minister’s House, the premier said that the actual city would be located at Miani Hor on the Balochistan coast, the large lagoon in Sonmiani Bay. It will provide investment opportunities for development of business, tourism, housing and industry. The new port city would be equipped with world-class infrastructure including roads, airport, hotels, resorts, IT, banking, industrial parks and oil refineries and would be turned into an industrial hub. President General Pervez Musharraf had announced the establishment of the new city on March 20 while inaugurating the Gwadar Deep Sea Port.
Writing about it then, the respected analyst Syed Fazl-e-Haider had written: “Balochistan government is currently undertaking a survey of Sonmiani area in Lasbela district where the federal government is planning construction of the country’s fourth seaport. The ban on transfer of land in Sonmiani and Lairi tehsils of district Lasbela imposed by the provincial government will continue till the completion of the survey. Sonmiani is a small fishing village of 3,000 people and is located 80 km north west of Karachi. The fishermen earn handsome money during the fishing season. If Sonmiani is turned into a deep seaport, the property prices will skyrocket in the area, while these fishermen would sell their land for a song. This is exactly what was witnessed in Gwadar.”
This was opposed by many. Prominent among them were then Leader of the Opposition Kashkol Ali Baloch and Deputy Speaker Aslam Bhootani, but the real thing that led to shelving of the plan was the fear of attacks by the Baloch Sarmachars as the forces to protect Gwadar and Sonmiani would be spread too thin, much making them an easy target. The then Senior Minister Maulana Wasay informed the House that Federal Minister for Shipping Babar Ghori had asked the provincial government, in an official meeting, to allot half a million acres of land in Sonmiani at the rate of a rupee an acre.
An acre for Rs 1, yes rupee one, of the land that then would be sold for thousands of rupees per square foot. This is how the military and civilian elite has enriched itself at the cost of the people, their land and their coasts and resources. They do not bother much about requisitioning the land they want. The Air Force has made the Bolhari Airbase on 90,000 acres. A DHA too will be needed for their living. A vicious circle of land grab by the military and politicians like the PPP Sindh, in connivance with Malik Riaz of Bahria Town, have deprived people of hundreds of thousands of acres and fattened on them.
This brazen and blatant loot of resources and coast is prompted by the military’s increased demands for more armaments and perks. The fact that the Pakistani state is caught up in a debt trap from which it will never ever be able to get out does not stop the corruption in both the civil and military sectors. The enormous expenses on their perks and privileges and debilitating expenditure on useless and unproductive schemes eat away a lot more than can be earned despite the very high prices of energy and government taxes.
The Baloch do not even get crumbs from the supposed trickle-down effect of the schemes like Saindak, Duddar Zinc mines, CPEC or the exploitation of other resources like chromite, gas, coal, marble, etc. This naturally gives rise to resentment for taking away resources without even an iota of benefit to the ordinary people, which is like adding grievous insult to even more grievous injury. The times when people were content with bare food essentials for them and their families have long faded into oblivion and people now demand the lion’s share of what they see is being taken away from them. Those who would like to compromise for an apparently secure future while those who know they are the owners and are being deprived of their treasures, react in the way that sees attacks on the exploiters, their protectors and their workers. The resentment is justifiably intense and persistent. Those who are content with an ‘easy’ life in slavery eventually end up with the predominant aspect only slavery while the easy life eludes most. Those who do get it, it becomes a stigma, but then stigma is for those who have a conscience.
The Baloch have been living in Balochistan for over a millennium. These finds of gas, oil, gold, copper, zinc, etc., are recent. The Baloch love for their land is not because of the resources but because it is the land that gives them dignity and it is they who give dignity to the land. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth rightly said: “For a colonised people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” The Baloch love Balochistan not because it is mineral rich but because it is their Motherland. Even if didn’t have a pint of oil or an ounce of gold they would still love it. Moreover, from the sun that rises and wind that blows there, is their resource and they love their land dearly.
(To be continued)