The Baloch Battle Field

Editor-In-Cheif voicepkdotnet Munizae Jahangir in conversation with Nawab Akbar Bugti

Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti – Chief of the Bugti tribe of the Baloch people and the Jamhoori Watan Party – served as the Federal Minister for Defense and also as a former Governor and Chief Minister of the Balochistan province.

Akbar Bugti received his initial education from the Karachi Grammar School and later Aitchison College in Lahore. He graduated from Oxford and came back to Pakistan and he always maintained that it was because of a strong affiliation with his tribe and his people.

Nawab Akbar Bugti was never an ‘anti-Pakistan’ leader, but one who voted for Baluchistan’s accession to Pakistan in the Baloch Shahi Jirga held in 1947 at Quetta. But while he recognized himself as a Pakistani, he remained a staunch Baloch nationalist as well, often locking horns with the federal government over the discrimination that Balochistan faced. He demanded that the wealth generated from the natural resources of Baluchistan must be utilized for the uplifting of the Baloch people.

For most of his political career, Bugti remained a member of the established political parties but in 2004 he rallied his fellow chieftains of Balochistan to form a united Balochistan Party focused on uniting the Baloch people but the plan fell apart.

In 2005 Bugti’s relationship with the state of Pakistan worsened when the military dictator Parvez Musharraf essentially imposed war on Balochistan. According to several senior Pakistani political figures, Bugti was ready to negotiate until the last minute but General Musharraf’s rigid approach made negotiations impossible.

After an assassination attempt on General Musharraf in Kohlu in December 2005, an attack was launched on Bugti’s home by the Pakistan military forces, pushing the 78-year-old leader to leave his stronghold and seek refuge in the mountains with his handful of armed supporters.

Finally, in 2006 the Pakistani army found Bugti hiding in a cave near Kohlu. According to Bugti’s son missiles rained down on the cave in which his father was seeking refuge, killing him and his companions on the spot.

Bugti’s death sparked the fifth and the longest insurgency in the history of Baluchistan. In 2006, just a few months before his death, the Editor in Chief of Voicepk.net, Munizae Jahangir visited Akbar Bugti for an exclusive and in-depth interview. It remains the last interview that Bugti gave, just months before he was killed.