Open letter: From the Baloch Nation to the Chinese people

One cannot dismiss the Chinese nation’s great contribution to human civilization. At one time China was the centre of the world’s economy. However, all this vanished during course of the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries (1840-1940) when Western empires occupied China in the name of trade and civilization. As for trade, they were gifted with opium and in place of economic development they had to endure an ongoing cycle of mass starvation, disease, bloodshed and subjugation. Anything Chinese was treated as unworthy and people felt doomed to colonial submission.

As China lost its self-worth and sovereignty, the leading imperial powers, including a Japanese empire, rushed to hack off pieces from an ailing body of China. This is how the great nation of China was defeated and reduced into several pitiful pieces. The emerging multiple rulers; the colonisers, the warlords and blood-thirsty armies raced over signing bogus contracts and treaties on behalf of the Chinese nation. In the meantime, the Chinese people carried out, numerous rebellions to free their soil from their repressors.  The cost of liberation was immense but the Chinese people emerged victorious in the end. This was for a very simple reason that they fought for their most basic natural democratic rights to live free from colonial subjugation.

The Baloch people appeals to the Chinese nation to take account of their own history of struggle and suffering against colonialism as the witness in their treatment of the Baloch nation. Perhaps, very few Chinese have heard of Balochistan. That is understandable. We Baloch do not blame the Chinese nation for that. However, in the last three decades, the Chinses government has done exactly the same in Balochistan as the colonial powers did to China. This message is merely to inform the fair-minded Chinese about Balochistan and what their government does in Balochistan in their name and in the name of development.

Balochistan is the homeland of the Baloch people and it is located in one of the most strategic locations in the world. The total area of Balochistan is about 560,000 square kilometres. Balochistan is rich in natural resources and has a long coastline of about 1,200 kilometres. The British imperial army invaded the sovereign state of Balochistan in 1839. Baloch have consistently fought a liberation struggle and this eventually led to Baloch regaining their independence, from Britain, in 1947. However, eight months later, the newly created theocratic state of Pakistan, led by a Punjabi Muslim army, illegally occupied Balochistan and forcefully annexed it to Pakistan.

Ever since the Punjabi army and subsequent rulers of Pakistan have been looting Baloch resources, destroying Baloch society, its economy and its environment. In the meantime the Baloch struggle for freedom has never stopped but increasingly has intensified. As a result of this, the jihadist Punjabi rulers of Pakistan have carried out five major military operations in Balochistan. Just in the last two military operations thousands of Baloch have been imprisoned, tortured, disappeared, killed and displaced. During the 1973-77 conflict, Baloch Sarmachars (freedom fighters) managed to virtually liberate Balochistan. During this period about 90,000 Punjabi Islamic fundamentalist mercenaries confronted 60,000 Baloch partisans. It is estimated that the Pakistani army have killed about 15,000 to 25,000 Baloch people during this time.

The latest Pakistani military offensives in Balochistan began in 2000. Since then the Pakistani security forces have killed around 5,000 Baloch people in the name of their macabre ‘kill and dump’ policy. The Pakistan army have abducted and caused the disappearance of more than 20,000 Baloch political and human rights activists.  On 24 January 2014, Baloch discovered three mass graves of previously abducted Baloch activists in Tootak area of Khuzdar containing more than 160 dead bodies.

The Jihadist Punjabi rulers of Pakistan have polluted Balochistan’s environment, testing their ‘Islamic nuclear bombs,’ in the Koh Kambaran ranges and the Chaghai hills on 28th May 1998.

Pakistan is neither a nation nor a legitimate country. The term ‘Pakistan’ was coined by an Indian Muslim fundamentalist student, Chaudhri Rahmat Ali, in Cambridge, in the early 1930s. Pakistan means the land of the clean nation. Putting it in historical context when the term was coined it meant dividing Indian Muslims, as the clean nation, against the believers of other religions and non-believers, which were deemed unclean. The whole idea has a racist, xenophobic and jihadist origin. When the British Empire wanted to create a buffer zone, soon after the Second World War, against a Soviet Union expansion towards the Indian subcontinent, the Islamo-fascist idea of Pakistan gained acceptance by the British. The Indian Punjabi Muslim establishment, who served the British Empire in supressing the Indian liberation movement for several decades, were backed by the British to divide India and create Pakistan. This is how two parts of India, west Punjab and east Bengal were carved up and separated from India and were presented to the military, commercial and religious establishment of Punjabi Muslims in the name of the state of Pakistan.

Therefore, Pakistan is a pure colonial theocratic construction. It is nothing more than a closed confederacy of Punjabi jihadi army, security forces, feudal and commercial establishments and their fundamentalist proxies and theologians. Pakistan is an artificial colonial theocratic state and has no natural identity. The Chinese government has been collaborating with these fanatical crooks and criminals and signed several economic contracts on behalf of the Baloch nation. Currently the Chinese government hand in hand with the Punjabi Jihadist army of Pakistan is exploiting and looting Baloch natural resources and is enabling the further killing, imprisonment, torture and displacement of Baloch people.

The Punjabi rulers of Pakistan sold the natural resources of Balochistan dirt cheap to China and these Punjabi crooks and criminals and Islamists proxies use some of the funds to buy further arms to crush the Baloch secular democratic liberation movement. A good example of the looting and misuse of Baloch resources are the Saindak Gold and Copper mines in Chagai district of Balochistan which China and Pakistan negotiated in 1995 and the subsequent deals for the use of Balochistan’s Gwadar port agreed by Pakistan and China in 2001.

The Baloch people have gained nothing from such contracts but as result of these contracts thousands of the most conscientious Baloch students, writers, poets, journalists, lawyers, artists, teachers, farmers, workers and political leaders have disappeared, been tortured and killed.

Constructing a route linking the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang and Balochistan’s deep water port at Gwadar is yet another Pakistan/China colonial plan for Balochistan. China wants to use this route as a strategic artery to have access to the Persian Gulf gas, oil, minerals and markets. The Punjabi army rulers of Pakistan, as means to consolidate their colonial theocratic power in Balochistan, want a deal at the expense of the Baloch people. For this purpose China’s president, Xi Jinping, visited Pakistan in April 2015. In this visit he met the rulers of Pakistan and promised, in effect, to pay them $46 billion, by 2030. Out of this amount only a few hundred millions is spent in Balochistan. Even this petty amount is not spent for the well-being of the Baloch but in support of the logistic operation of the Punjabi/China scheme. In return Pakistan’s rulers have promised the Chinese authorities that it would provide additional security, in the form of hundreds of thousands of Pakistani army and security forces and station these in Balochistan. Pakistan is deploying 10,000 more Punjabi jihadist mercenaries to crush the Balochistan freedom movement, and thus enable the Chinse to loot the Baloch of their own resources, and sanction the continuing bloodshed of Baloch people.

Balochistan has been illegally occupied by Pakistan and is already one of the most militarized regions in the world. The fact that China is asking Pakistan to station more military personnel in Balochistan is an indication of the Chinese state’s conscious decision to collaborate with the Islamic-fascist colonial theocratic state of Pakistan, in repressing the legitimate, democratic struggle of the Baloch nation to regain its freedom and independence. By taking part in this crusade the Chinese government is also making itself involved with the Pakistani state and army, enabling crimes against humanity in Balochistan.

The Chinese government must understand that Pakistan is an artificial rogue state. This colonial theocratic construction is not viable in the long term and can disintegrate at any moment in time. Moreover, Balochistan is not Pakistan. Balochistan has no link with this unnatural political construction whatsoever. The Chinese who have been working in Balochistan must have realised that they are working under a severely restricted military environment and protection will always be an issue under such circumstances. Deals with Pakistan, where Baloch have no influence, where Baloch resources are plundered and where there is heavy military presence by an occupying state can only lead to conflict.  They may themselves become targets for Baloch freedom fighters, who wish to protect Balochistan’s resources and the area from an occupying state.

The contracts signed by the Punjabi army of Pakistan and the Chinese government in respect of Baloch resources and ports, in Balochistan, are completely illegal. Baloch have not taken part in these deals and have never accepted them and will never consider them as legitimate. The only beneficiary parties in exploiting Baloch resources so far have been the rulers of Pakistan and China. Baloch have every right to use all legal and moral means and routes to stop such exploitation of their natural resources and their land by any colonial power. Above all, they have every right to be free and independent.

Baloch are secular and very conscientious people. Balochistan is a rich land but the colonial rulers of Balochistan have reduced the Baloch nation to one that is one of the most deprived nations in the world. With these deals and projects the Chinese government has collaborated with a Pakistani theocratic state in augmenting further miseries on the Baloch people and has further exacerbated the systematic genocide of the Baloch people in Balochistan.

The Chinese people and its government must learn from their own history. They must know from their own experience that colonialism will not last forever. We request the Chinese nation to stop adding to our existing suffering and not to fall under the spell of the Pakistani army, its crooks and its criminals. For short term economic gain do not sell your humanity, self-respect and the good name of the Chinese people and its civilization. The Baloch nation, as the Chinese nation did in the past and will in future resist any form of colonialism and subjugation. The fact of the matter is, the Baloch struggle for freedom is neither less in time nor less intensive than was the Chinese struggle, in trying to regain their freedom and sovereignty. A free and sovereign Balochistan is inevitable. What the Baloch nation wants from the Chinese people is to be on the side of truth and the inherent democratic rights of the Baloch nation rather than on the side of exploiters and butchers of the Baloch people.

Free Balochistan Movement –  6, November 2016