Riots after 'Tiger of Baluchistan' killed in Pakistan

Many of the Baluch tribesmen do not want to be part of Pakistan. Picture / Reuters

Thousands of Pakistanis defied a government curfew and took to the streets on Sunday to protest the killing of a 79-year-old warlord, setting fire to shops, banks and cars.

In one town, the protestors even set off a bomb, damaging a government building and at least three demonstrators died.

But Nawab Akbar Bugti was no ordinary 79-year-old. He was the leader of an ethnic insurgency that has at times threatened to drag Pakistan into civil war.

The life and death of a man who was known as the Tiger of Baluchistan could easily come straight out of the nineteenth-century frontier wars fought by the British in his homeland, Baluchistan.

Bugti was killed on Saturday when the Pakistani army finally tracked him down to his hiding place - a cave in the desert mountains of Baluchistan.

It was a massive operation. Bugti was holed up inside with between 50 and 80 of his relatives and tribal forces.

The Pakistani military called in air strikes on the caves and sent in a huge force of commandos on the ground. At least 21 army commandos - including six officers - and 37 of Bugti's forces are believed to have been killed in the fighting.

The official version from the Pakistani government was that Bugti was killed when the cave collapsed under the exchange of fire.

But it appears more likely the cave was directly hit in air strikes.

Most observers believe the government's version is deliberately opaque and that the military meant to kill Bugti.

The killing provoked mass demonstrations throughout the capital of Baluchistan, Quetta, where revenge was in the air.

"The government has pushed Baluchistan into a never-ending war," said Hasil Bizinjo, a senior figure of Baluch Yakjehti, or the Baluch Solidarity alliance.

It was not an unexpected death for a man who headed his own tribal army and had effectively declared war on the Pakistani state.

Only last year, he was openly directing ground battles against the Pakistani army from his family home - a mud-walled desert fort.

Bugti was a mass of contradictions.

He was educated at Aitchison College, an elite Pakistani public school modelled on Eton; and subsequently at Oxford.

Yet he is also said to have killed his first man at the age of 12, and legend has it he killed as many as 100 men to avenge the death of his son in 1992.

As soon as he finished his elite, Western education, he returned to Baluchistan to live by his ancient tribal codes.

It was a life that pitted him constantly against the Pakistani authorities.

Put simply, many of the tribesmen of Baluchistan do not want to be part of Pakistan - possibly the majority, though it is not the sort of place you can conduct a survey.

Baluchistan has barely changed since Alexander the Great passed through more than 2000 years ago. It is a vast land of desert mountains that lies between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.

But the Baluch tribesmen have never accepted that their land belongs to anyone else.

The British never fully suppressed them, and had to forge a power-sharing deal with the tribal leaders instead - Bugti's ancestors among them. Modern Pakistan has had a strained relationship with them.

Baluchistan is one of the most barren places on earth, and life is extraordinarily harsh. But beneath its parched ground lie Pakistan's most valuable mineral resources.

The tribesmen accuse the government in distant Islamabad of bleeding their land of these precious resources but investing nothing on them.

A massive new port Pakistan is building at Gwadar, on the Baluchistan coast, has inflamed feelings further - the tribesmen say thousands of outsiders will move in and erode their culture and grip on the land.

Into all of this was plunged Bugti, who, as leader of one of the most powerful and influential tribes, became effective leader of the Baluchistan Liberation Army, a rebel group fighting against the Pakistani state.

He had fought against the government before, in the seventies, when a Baluch rebellion was brutally suppressed by the military, who killed thousands of tribesmen in the process.

But he had also been allied to Islamabad at times over the years, serving briefly as both governor and chief minister of the province.

It is believed his attitudes hardened after his youngest son, Salal, was killed by pro-government tribesmen.

Last year the tribesmen openly rebelled against the government again, and heavy fighting broke out in Bugti's home town.

At the time, there were fears it could cause a civil war, but the rebellion has simmered away without erupting since.

Yesterday there were fears Bugti's death could spark a greater uprising, as thousands defied a curfew in the capital of Baluchistan, Quetta, and there were violent protests as far away as Karachi.

"The rulers and the army have triggered an endless war.

We won't let it cool down," said Mir Hasil Khan Bazenjo, the leader of a Baluch political party.

- INDEPENDENT