Monday, June 22, 2020
U.S. Commission Recommends “Binding Agreement” to Protect Religious Minorities in Pakistan
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recommended a “binding agreement’ between the United States and Pakistan, with the goal of improving the treatment of Pakistan’s religious minorities.
Pakistan’s state religion is Islam and 97% of the population is Muslim. Laws against blasphemy in Pakistan have led to both attacks and death sentences for members of Pakistan’s religious minority communities. Extrajudicial killings of at least 65 victims accused of blasphemy have also been reported from Pakistan.
Pakistan have been designated as a “Country of Particular Concern” by the U.S. State Department since 2018 for ongoing abuses of religious freedom. The blasphemy laws, introduced in the 1980s, are frequently abused to settle personal scores or to persecute religious minorities.
A recent USCIRF report recommended eliminating the practice of listing a person’s religion on their identification cards which have led to strong discrimination against Christians and other religious minorities. Also, USCIRF urged Pakistan to expedite the review of all blasphemy cases and enforce proper handling of blasphemy accusations. USCIRF went on to call for the humane treatment of those accused of blasphemy and the removal of materials from educational curricula that denigrate religious minorities.
Religious leaders in the country have repeatedly spoken out against the country’s treatment of minorities and have signed a joint resolution urging the Pakistani government to adopt policies to protect religious minorities from persecution.
Pakistan’s ‘Occupied Balochistan’
By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
Drawing parallels with Bosnia, Palestine, and Kashmir, the Balochistan National Party chief accused the state of colonizing the region.In a scathing speech in the National Assembly on Wednesday, Balochistan National Party (BNP-M) Chief Akhtar Mengal asked that the province that he represents be declared “occupied Balochistan” if the state wants to continue its abuses in what is currently a “no-go area” spearheaded by “death squads.”
Announcing his party’s departure from the federal government coalition led by the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), Mengal underlined that the currently ruling party is the latest in a long list of culprits to have backtracked on its vows for Balochistan since 1948.
Without naming the military, Mengal castigated the crackdown in Balochistan, and the growing number of missing persons, which has reduced the locals to mere “bloody civilians.” Drawing parallels with Bosnia, Palestine, and Kashmir, the BNP chief accused the state of colonizing Balochistan, rendering the blood of the Baloch “less worthy than tomatoes.”
“You can think about Kashmir when you get it, what you have in hand is slipping away,” Mengal said, alluding to the separatist movement in Balochistan.
Mengal’s speech came during National Assembly deliberations on the federal budget, which saw Balochistan’s provincial share slashed in the National Finance Commission transfer.
Balochistan’s seven-decade-old grievances with Pakistan range from being denied a fair share in the province’s own resources to a continuum of military operations. Baloch nationalists maintain that the province was militarily usurped in March 1948, against the will of the locals. The growing ethno-nationalism in Balochistan saw insurgencies in the late 1950s and 1960s.
The 1973–1977 conflict, launched under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, reaffirmed control over the province’s riches, and reinstated centralized political control in the aftermath of the separation of East Pakistan in 1971 – which, like Balochistan, saw an ethno-separatist movement against misappropriation of resources and military occupation.
The ongoing dirty war in Balochistan exploded following the turn of the century under Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharraf, with the 2006 killing of nationalist leader Akbar Bugti sparking the most gruesome wave of Baloch insurgency.
Over the past decade and a half, thousands of Balochs have gone missing, if not tens of thousands. The exact numbers are unknown owing to complete control over information exercised by the state.
On Saturday, two senior journalists became the latest to go missing in Balochistan. In April, the dead body of Sajid Hussain Baloch, editor-in-chief of Balochistan Times, was found near Uppsala, Sweden, with Reporters Without Borders (RSF) maintaining that his death could be linked to his work.
Between 2007 and 2015, 29 journalists were killed in Balochistan. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is only allowed to run the military’s press releases as part of its coverage on Balochistan.
As a result, one story that wasn’t covered last week was that of a Baloch woman, a mother of three, who killed herself after giving up on the protracted fight to find her missing brother.Similarly, many other families – most of them unheard and unseen – await the return of their loved ones, dead or alive. The state, however, continues to either deny the existence of many missing persons, or lumps them in an undefined category of “terrorists.”Mama Qadeer, the activist who initiated Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) and launched a 2,800 kilometer march from Quetta to Islamabad five years ago, leads regular protests in front of the local press club. Qadeer says that at least 47,000 Balochs have gone missing since 2000, the figure also quoted by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan in its latest report.Parallel to the military abuses, resulting in the growing number of missing persons, is the center’s unabated stranglehold over Balochistan’s resources. This is exemplified by the Balochistan town Sui, which has supplied gas to the entire country over the decades, but is still not getting any of the daily 800 million standard cubic feet of natural gas that it produces.
Balochistan, which still supplies almost a quarter of Pakistan’s total gas, this year faced the worst gas shortfall in history amid plummeting winter temperatures. After decades of the center’s control over their gas, the Baloch now have similar apprehensions vis-à-vis the Reko Diq gold and copper reserves.
After long having raised alarm bells over “Punjabi” hegemony, Baloch nationalists are deeming the growing influence of Beijing in the area as bona fide “Chinese colonization.”
With Beijing calling the shots on the much touted $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the nationalists maintain that one occupier is being replaced with another looking to exploit Balochistan’s rich resources and its geopolitical significance. The deep-water port at Gwadar holds the geostrategic key to CPEC, connecting Eurasia, South East Asia, South Asia, and Africa with the much peddled Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
It is poetic injustice that CPEC is wrapped around a corridor of estrangement that connects Xinjiang and Balochistan. To the native populations, CPEC might as well be a multibillion-dollar graveyard for the aspirations of the two subjugated territories.Baloch nationalists are now issuing stern warnings over growing Chinese influence in Balochistan. Local militant outfits like the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) are targeting Chinese consulates and luxurious hotels in Gwadar.Instead of managing to curb the growing Baloch militancy, which has also targeted civilians, the Pakistan Army has long used Balochistan’s volatility to serve its strategic interests, with the large swathes of uninhabited land bordering Afghanistan and Iran providing havens to many jihadist groups. It is similar to the military’s duplicitous security policies in the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the Afghan border.The military has also historically kept check on Baloch separatists by deploying groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), which have now overlapped with the Islamic State’s (IS) South Asia factions. The LeJ and IS, meanwhile, have collaborated to devastate the religious minorities in Balochistan, especially the local Shia Hazara and Christian populations.
In his meeting with the Hazara protestors in 2018, Army Chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa conceded that sections within the military have collaborated with jihadist outfits in Balochistan in the past, owing to a “mindset that has existed” for decades.
As far as Balochistan is concerned, the colonialist mindset of the military, and its selected band of politicians, remains well and truly there. And now with Baloch insurgency intensifying in recent weeks, and echoes of “occupied Balochistan” resonating in the National Assembly, Islamabad and Beijing have to consider giving locals due right to their own resources – or spend a significant chunk of Balochistan’s riches just on continuing the military occupation.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/06/pakistans-occupied-balochistan/
India-Pakistan Balakot tensions were never really a crisis ‘in substance’: Ex-US NSA Bolton
NAYANIMA BASU
John Bolton’s memoir ‘The Room Where It Happened’, which releases Tuesday, recounts incidents of 26 February 2019, when President Trump was in Vietnam to meet Kim Jong-un.Tensions between India and Pakistan peaked in February 2019 after the Balakot airstrikes. However, former US National Security Advisor John Bolton has written in his tell-all memoir, The Room Where It Happened, that the tensions “never really had been” a crisis “in substance”, though his country chose not to ignore it.
The Indian Air Force conducted the airstrikes on Jaish-e-Mohammed terror camps in Balakot, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the early hours of 26 February. This was India’s retaliation to the killing of 40 CRPF personnel 12 days earlier in a suicide attack in Pulwama, Jammu, and Kashmir.
Trump & officials were in Vietnam
Bolton’s memoir, which will be released Tuesday, states that US President Donald Trump was engrossed in dealing with North Korean supremo Kim Jong-un on that day. Trump and his senior officials were touring Vietnam at the time for a summit meeting with Kim, their second after a bilateral meeting in Singapore in 2018.
According to Bolton, it was “the big day”, and the meeting was aimed at launching diplomatic talks between Trump and Kim in an effort to deter North Korea away from its secret nuclear and missiles program.
“I thought that was it for the evening, but word soon came that Shanahan (Patrick Shanahan, then Acting Secretary of Defense) and Dunford (Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) wanted to talk to (Mike) Pompeo (US Secretary of State) and me about a ballooning crisis between India and Pakistan,” Bolton writes.
“After hours of phone calls, the crisis passed, perhaps because, in substance, there never really had been one,” he stresses.
“But when two nuclear powers spin up their military capabilities, it is best not to ignore it. No one else cared at the time, but the point was clear to me: This was what happened when people didn’t take nuclear proliferation from the likes of Iran and North Korea seriously,” he says.
Trump said Modi ‘will be OK’ while cutting Iran oil
In his scathing memoir, Bolton, who was fired by Trump as the US NSA on 10 September 2019, also talks about how some US bureaucrats were in favour of extending India a “waiver”, so that it could import oil from Iran, on which the Trump administration had imposed stringent economic sanctions.
“(State Department) bureaucrats found endless reasons to extend the other waivers, as ‘clientitis’ took hold. ‘But India is so important’, or ‘Japan is so important’, said officials, arguing the interests of ‘their’ countries rather than the US interests at stake,” Bolton writes.
“One of the worst cases involved India, which, like the others, was buying Iranian oil at prices well below the global market because Iran was so desperate to make sales,” he says, adding that India “complained” about being disadvantaged not only because of having to find new suppliers, but also because the new sources would insist on prevailing market prices.
“India’s making this argument was understandable, but it was incomprehensible that US bureaucrats echoed it sympathetically,” he writes.
Bolton goes on to describe a phone call between Trump and Pompeo where they were discussing asking India to bring its oil imports from Iran down to zero.
“In a phone call with Pompeo, Trump had not been sympathetic to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying, ‘He’ll be okay’,” the former US NSA writes.
India completely stopped importing oil from Iran in May last year under US pressure.
Bolton also adds in his memoir that Trump was concerned over news reports emanating from India that New Delhi was planning to buy S-400 air-defense systems from Russia over America’s Patriot defense systems.