Khuzdar, The City Of Opportunities

It was Friday the 13th of March 2015, when in the evening after having a tiring but amazing day in university with friends, I begin chatting with my cousin in Karachi. While sitting in my peaceful living room,I was telling her about various educational programs being offered by Balochistan University of Engineering and Technology in Khuzdar. In the middle of conversation, she showed me a piece of writing, written by someone I had never heard before. Whatever was written in that article was hard to believe for a person like me, who actually belonged to Khuzdar. I began a little investigation and came across many things. I even contacted few journalists and tried to figure out things, the more I studied, the more my curiosity increased. After completing my research, I have so many things to share with all those who believe in the crap written.

            Before I come to the actual point, I would like to ask you to imagine the height of anger and frustration if you plan something for fifteen years and then that hard work goes wasted? Due to my quest as a student, I acquired some information and came to know about Operation Blue Tulsi, which was exposed by Pakistani media in 2009. Since then its planners are fuming with anger and frustration as it broke the back bone of their greater plan. A plan that is even greater then it smells to an average mind like yours and mine,as it is spread from North Waziristan to FATA, Karachi to Lahore and Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa to Balochistan. 90 out of 100 attempts of defaming the security forces and establishment got miserably failed; frustration turned into never ending revenge with sand slipping out of their dirty hands with failed cards to play around.

            When all on ground attempts of creating chaos begun to fail and rate of success stayed constantly below 2 to 3 percent only, one thing could help the enemy and that was “PROPAGANDA”. Just to make you understand the power of propaganda, I would like to quote an example here, the example of “Jakob the Liar”. A poor but clever Jewish shopkeeper, who was caught out in curfew during World War II and sent to Nazi concentration camp in Poland, where Hitler used to torture and kill Jews. Jakob begin to cook imaginary stories regarding a radio hidden in his cell and news bulletins about Allied advances against the Nazis. Jakob told prisoners that they should remain hopeful as the army of Hitler is facing savage beating in the battlefield. These lies brought humor and life among the disheartened ghetto inhabitants. Later, when prison officials discovered about Jakob’s stories and his radio news bulletins, a search operation was conducted that revealed that there was no radio found in his cell. The propaganda of Jakob succeeded, even after he was caught and killed by Germans. His propaganda did the job that no one could do at that time. The Jews still consider Jakob as a hero and believe that the Germans were liars.

            The reason why I quoted this example is to tell my readers that the same method has been applied in Pakistan since decades, where even after getting failed time, our enemy is not going on back-foot, and the reason is that the enemies within our ranks are playing the key role for their foreign masters intentionally or unintentionally. Stories of lies and deceptions are everywhere on the name of freedom of speech or journalism or whatever you may name it. They will tell you stories but will never come up with proof or even the identity of their sources is dubious. On one hand they openly accuse security forces and on the other hands claim that identity of sources cannot be disclosed due to life threats. They can tell you that they were kidnapped by security forces but then they escaped after few months. Did captors show them their identities after kidnapping? Is it possible that someone who kidnaps you, tells you that he is working for someone whom you are against and actually he (the kidnapper himself) is also against that group or specific person? Why the enemies kill your relatives instead of killing you directly? How come you are still alive? This is because they want you to defame the establishment otherwise your loved ones would have to pay the price with their blood.

            It is obvious that the writer has written the story from the angle of Baloch separatists by maligning the establishment and the people who are siding with the state. There must be some kind of real investigative journalism to find out the truth about him. Who knows that this report might be a complete fabrication of his mind because anyone can fabricate stories like these claiming to have come from anonymous sources? According to my research even if his kidnapping story is true, It’s a known fact that different groups of kidnappers who work under the orders of foreign masters tell their hostages that they are in custody of state agencies, to make them believe that state is responsible for all these atrocities. There is no way to know if he was kidnapped by Mengal or someone opposed to Mengal to malign him. Similarly, there is no way to know if the people killed were killed by one group or the other to malign each other.

            At the end of the day, the benefits of this title “Khuzdar, the city of padlocks” seems to remove all the checkpoints of law enforcement agencies, so that the foreign elements involved in terrorism do not have to face much trouble in transporting weapons into these areas? I do not consider the writer to be a true journalist, rather an novice one, who has left so many question unanswered even after writing lengthy paragraphs.