GENERAL Pervez Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan, warned Nawab Akbar Bugti that one day he would die without knowing what hit him. The Baluchi tribal chief replied that he would use his massive private army to give the dictator a war he would not forget. The first warning has been fulfilled; the second may yet be, if not by Bugti himself, then at least in his name.
The urbane, white-haired Bugti, nearly 80 and crippled with arthritis, was killed when the Pakistani Air Force bombed the cave in which he was hiding. It was a measure of the Pakistani Government’s fear of him that he could not even be allowed to see out what little remained of his life.
Bugti will now become a martyr and a symbol for other tribal chieftans who question, or even oppose, the very concept of Pakistan and who are without doubt powerful enough, should they decide on such a course, to tear the country apart. Bugti was killed because he was capable of unravelling the country, and because he had started to do just that with a series of devastating guerrilla attacks on vital infrastructure. Killing him was a gamble designed to hold the country together.
The faultlines in the political and ideological concept that underpinned the creation of Pakistan in 1947 run deepest in Baluchistan, and Bugti, a man so powerful he was above any law of the land, was the human face of those faultlines. As chief of 250,000 Baluchis of the Bugti clan, he was the ruler of a state-within-a-state and the commander of a 10,000-man army. The only evidence of the Government’s writ in areas under his command was the use of official banknotes.
As a tribal chief he voted in 1946 in favour of the creation of Pakistan (ordinary Baluchis were not invited to vote) and of Baluchistan’s membership of it. But in subsequent years he moved in many political and ideological directions: Pakistani patriot, establishment figure, Baluchi nationalist, politician, rebel leader, guerrilla fighter.
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As a sardar, or chief, he ran a fiefdom rooted in 1,000 years of tradition. Loyalty to the clan is everything in Baluchistan, and as clan chief Bugti was practically divine. To oppose him might be to die, or end up in one of his two private prisons — one reserved for “commoners”, the other for high-ranking tribals.
Until Pakistani troops bombarded it, he lived in a fort surrounded by heavily armed guards. He could call up anti-aircraft guns, rocket launchers, heavy artillery and, it was said, surface-to-air missiles.
He was charming, fluent in English, well educated in Pakistan and Britain, eloquent and polite. He was also brutal, a killer of many men and an oppressive ruler through the ancient sardar system.
Legend had it that he killed his first man at the age of 12. When his youngest son Salal was assassinated by pro-government tribals in 1992 he was said to have ordered the murder of 100 men in reprisal. After that he moved his base from Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, to Dera Bugti 150 miles to the southeast. The cave in which he died was nearby.
Bugti’s power came not only from the sardar system; he had also grown wealthy on the commissions he received from Pakistan for the right to extract gas and coal from vast areas of Baluchistan under his control, in particular the gas-rich area of Sui. He received 120 million rupees (just over £1 million) each year as rent for land used by Pakistan Petroleum for natural-gas extraction. He also received two million rupees (£17,500) a month for providing security to the very gas operations his own soldiers had taken to sabotaging.
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Baluchistan is Pakistan’s biggest and least populated province. It is all desert, nearly all tribal and desperately poor. Bugti’s opponents said that he had spent his entire life as politician and rebel leader deliberately keeping his fiefdom undeveloped, backward and in poverty in order to maintain authority over it. Bugti took up arms because he wanted full control of the vast mineral wealth in his territory — or, at least, a more generous slice of the profits.
He was probably the single most dangerous enemy of the state of Pakistan because he was capable of paralysing the natural-gas fields in his territory and thereby rapidly throttling much of Pakistan’s industry — as well as disrupting life in millions of homes across the country. Indeed, the supply was cut off in January when the gas fields in Sui, the biggest in Pakistan, were sabotaged. Bugti sent waves of heavily armed men to capture Sui, and in fierce gun battles they occupied several buildings before being forced back.
The consequent loss of industrial output in Punjab, Pakistan’s richest province, cost the country a fortune. Bugti was also blamed for attacking railway lines and the electricity grid, and the Government decided to step up the attempts to eliminate him.
Another reason for killing him was more personal. General Musharraf, the military dictator, was nearly killed while visiting Baluchistan last year when a shell landed less than 300 metres from him. It was a challenge that Musharraf was bound to accept. Bugti was finally located through an intercepted satellite telephone call.
Bugti had started his political career as an establishment figure — Governor-General of Pakistan — after its formation in 1947. He became Interior minister and Defence Minister and for a time was chief minister of Baluchistan and also its governor. But Baluchi nationalism was never far beneath the surface. He was involved in insurgencies, all crushed with huge loss of life, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
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He launched his latest “Baluchi freedom struggle”, as he called it, in 2004, and for the past year or so his men fought a series of intense battles with security forces. Pakistan alleged that he was able to step up his guerrilla war thanks to financial aid from India — which Delhi denies.
Bugti also became associated with a violent organisation, the banned Baluchi Liberation Army, which surfaced in the 1980s. Its aim is the establishment of an independent greater Baluchistan carved out of Baluchi areas in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. Bugti had been its most visible spokesman for the past three years.
In recent months more than 200 people have died in clashes between Baluchi tribals and Pakistan’s Armed Forces. Bugti would move between hiding places half-carried by his ever-present grandsons or hobbling with the help of a walker — the man known and feared as the Tiger of Baluchistan had become an unlikely-looking guerrilla fighter.
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Nawab Akbar Bugti, Baluchi leader, was born on July 12, 1927. He died on August 26, 2006, aged 79.