
Landscapes of Balochistan
“I have seen the poverty. My arms are not a sign of terrorism, because my arms are bound totally by a political ideology, that ideology is to help for freedom and to seek it not only for Balochistan but for the rest of the world,” Dr Allah Nazar, BLF.
by Joshua Virasami
Entering Balochistan
“Come here, listen to this”, Ali slowly leafed through the pages of the local newspaper, “look, you see this small paragraph? This is an account from a fighter in the villages.” I asked him if he could translate. “Today we lost several fighters but we killed three Pakistani soldiers and shot down their helicopter”. I asked him whether he had visited the fighters in the Bolan Pass. “Yes, I’ve been there in my role as a government official but also as a Baloch, I negotiated with them on the release of a hostage, but I respect their fight”. We had just come down from Ali’s small mountain, he inherited it from his parents and we were now on his 7 acre farm which he had also inherited. He closed the newspaper and looked over to the mountain face, “People mark out their mountains by spelling their surname over it”, and he proceeded to point out where he had spelled out his surname, ‘Kurd’. Ali is however an ethnic Baloch.
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