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Pakistan's heart of
darkness
By Abdul Hamid Khan
Even as the much-publicized war on terror labors
on, the world at large and the Indian sub-continent in
particular remain oblivious to the happenings in the
occupied mountainous region of Pakistan, better known as
the Northern Areas (NAs) or Balawaristan
(Pakistan-occupied Gilgit Baltistan).
Since the
beginning of 2002, the surviving dregs of the
Afghanistan-based terrorist infrastructure have
reportedly moved into Pakistan, with the active
connivance of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Initially, they moved into the Federally
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan and have
since spread out from there, along with many cadres of
proscribed Pakistani terrorist groups, to
Pakistan-administered Kashmir, including Balawaristan.
President General Pervez Musharraf's own
domestic "war" on the jihadi apparatus has remained a
non-event thus far. During July 2002, while there were
many raids by Pakistani security agencies during their
hunt for suspected terrorists in Sindh, Punjab,
Baluchistan, the North West Frontier Province and the
FATA, there was not a single raid reported from
Pakistani Kashmir and the Northern Areas.
There
have been consistent indications that, in order to avoid
detection of their presence in Pakistani territory by
the US intelligence agencies, and possible cross-border
punitive strikes by US forces operating in Afghanistan,
the Pakistani military regime has commenced shifting
important leaders of the al-Qaeda network to Punjab
province, Pakistani Kashmir, Gilgit Baltistan and other
places, which are now emerging as the primary hub for
the elusive al-Qaeda.
Over June and July, two
groups of Taliban and one of al-Qaeda cadres arrived in
the NAs, after entering the Dahrkoot Valley from Broghol
in the Chitral district of the North West Frontier
Province (NWFP) of Pakistan, which links with the Wakhan
corridor with Badakhshan province, Afghanistan. Each
group consisted of about 30-50 persons. Their movement
was facilitated despite protestations from the local
Ismailia Muslims by the Wahabbi fundamentalist
administration of Yasen Tehsil in Ghezar district of
Balawaristan. The first group of Taliban cadres
reportedly stayed at Giyekooshi in the Dahrkoot valley
for a month and were later transported towards Gilgit to
head to the Darel and Tangir valleys of district Diamar.
Unmarked ISI vehicles were used to transport al-Qaeda
terrorists from Dahrkoot Valley to Gilgit City between
1am to 5am.
There has, in fact, been a steady
inflow of Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives into the
Ghezar valley in recent months. Terrorist training to
Afghan mercenaries and various groups active in
Indian-held Kashmir is being provided in the remote
hilly areas of Hazara, Darel Yashote, Tangir, Astore,
Skardu city and Gilgit city. These Pakistan-sponsored
terrorist camps remain active despite Musharraf's
apparent crackdown against terrorism.
Besides
the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (previously Harkat-ul-Ansar)
camp in Tangir, Diamar district, camps were located in
Ghowadi village in Skardu, Juglote near Gilgit and
Konodas, Gilgit. A large camp was established near
Mansehra in the NWFP on the Karakorum Highway, from
where the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, Kashmiri,
Pakistani and other terrorists are deputed to different
parts of occupied Balawaristan, Pakistan Kashmir and
across the borders to Afghanistan and Indian Kashmir.
Reports in December 2001 indicated that
approximately 12,000 Kalashnikovs had been stored in
Skardu city alone. Many Wahabbi youth of Balawaristan
had reportedly been recruited by the ISI to join the
jihad, earlier in Afghanistan and subsequently in Indian
Kashmir. Indeed, in the light of evidence thus far, it
would not be far fetched to say that Pakistan, and not
Afghanistan, has been the center of the "terror
factories".
After the post-January 12, 2002
crackdown on jihadis, while the offices of certain
terrorist groups have been closed down in Pakistan, many
cadres of banned groups have been shifted to the NAs. No
reports of arrests of terrorist cadres have been made
from this region. As many as 3,000 terrorists are said
to have recently secured training in the Hum camp in the
Darel and Tangir area. Pakistan's mutating policies in
the light of its frontier state status have evidently
led to the movement of terrorist cadres from Afghanistan
to Indian Kashmir via the NAs.
After Operation
Anaconda (March 2-18, 2002) in Afghanistan,
approximately 1,000 al-Qaeda cadres are reported to have
escaped to Pakistan, and of these, some 600 are believed
to have been re-located around Gilgit-Baltistan (mostly
in Darel and Tangir), with another 200 pushed into the
upper reaches of the Pir Panjal region in Indian
Kashmir.
Pakistan-occupied Gilgit Baltistan is
administered directly by Islamabad as a virtual
Pakistani colony. The population here, primarily Shi'ite
Muslims, was brought under one federally administered
territory after Pakistan occupied Balawaristan on
November 16, 1947, in the name of Islam.
Balawaristan, or the Northern Areas, comprises
five districts of Gilgit, Skardu, Ghezar, Diamar and
Ganchhe, where basic human, political and civil rights
have not been conferred on the people, and which are out
of bounds to foreigners and journalists, except for
occasional tightly controlled guided tours selectively
organized by the army or the intelligence agencies.
Some nationalist groups beginning to protest
against the prevailing situation have embarrassed
Islamabad, and the response has been a crackdown against
the fledgling political organizations here. The entire
region is governed by a Kashmir Affairs and Northern
Areas Affairs (KANA) Division of Islamabad, and the
local elected body, called Northern Areas Legislative
Council, has no power even comparable to that of a
municipal body in a Pakistani city.
KANA runs
the administration from Islamabad through non-local
officers, including a judicial commissioner (chairman
chief court) against whose judgements there is no right
to appeal in any high court or supreme court. The area
has been under virtual martial law for almost five
decades. Under the existing frontier crime regulations,
framed during the colonial era, every resident of
Balawaristan has to report regularly to local
intelligence personnel, and all movements from one
village to another have to be reported to the
authorities.
The Pakistani administration has
also been involved in efforts to alter the demographic
profile of Pakistan-occupied Gilgit Baltistan, reducing
the indigenous people to a minority. In the Gilgit and
Skardu areas, large tracts of land have been allotted to
non-locals. Other outsiders have purchased substantial
stretches of land since they are, by and large,
economically better off than the locals. As of January
2001, the old population ratio of 1:4 (non-locals to
locals) had been transformed to 3:4. The rapid induction
of Punjabi and Pashtun outsiders has created a sense of
acute insecurity among the locals. Balawaristan is also
a deprived region in terms of education and
infrastructure, and there is only a negligible presence
of daily newspapers, radio or TV stations.
In
May 1999, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ruled that
Balawaristan (Pakistan-occupied Gilgit Baltistan) "is a
disputed territory and the government of Pakistan has no
claim over it". The region has also been used as a
battleground for Pakistan's sectarian agenda, and soured
Shi'ite-Sunni relations have claimed many lives in the
ongoing sectarian violence.
The military regime
had used Afghan and Pakistani Wahabbis, along with
tribal sympathizers, to suppress the indigenous Shi'ite
population of Gilgit in year 1988. Gilgit witnessed
widespread unrest for a fortnight commencing the last
week of June 2001, due to protests by certain religious
organizations against a decision by the Pakistani regime
to impose religious text books in the schools, based on
the ideology of a particular sect of Islam, and
neglecting the majority Shi'ite sect. Pakistani
authorities terminated all movement between Gilgit and
the rest of Pakistan and also imposed strict censorship
on the publication of details of the Gilgit unrest
during the agitation.
The political and
administrative circumstances in Pakistan-occupied Gilgit
Baltistan, with total control exercised by Islamabad
through the Pakistan army, with no popular freedoms or
rights, and tight censorship of all information flows,
makes the region an ideal and secret place for the
relocation of the dislocated hub of international
terrorism. This alone, if not the neglected rights of
the people, or the region's systematic demographic
destabilization and transformation, should be a matter
of urgent concern for the international
community.
Abdul Hamid Khan is the
chairman, Balawaristan National Front,
Gilgit.
Published with permission from the
South Asia Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism
Portal.
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