Behind the Sind uprising in Pakistan This article, by the author of the recently published Can Pakistan Survive?, London, Penguin, 1983, was first published in the British weekly journal New Statesman. Tariq ALI
When Sir Charles Napier's expeditionary force, with its customary brutality, occupied Sind in the 1830s, its commander is said to have reported it with a Latin peccavi (I have sinned/Sind). General Zia's officers, currently engaged in containing the mass movement in that strategically important province (it shares a long border with India), are not yet in a position to despatch the modern Punjabi equivalent to their backers in the Pentagon. These are still early days.
The significance of the present unrest in Sind is twofold. struggle for democratic rights, marily, an expression of Sindhi nationalism. The eruption is a direct result of the cruel military occupation that followed
Bhutto was a Sindhi politician. Ever since his execution in 1979, Sind has been restless. The army acknowledged the seriousness of the situation by stationing six of its 20 divisions there. As there are hardly any Sindhi officers in the army - and since the Sind Regiment (sic) is composed almost exclusively of nonSindhis - it is hardly surprising that the imposition was viewed as a violation of Sindhi national rights.
The Pakistan Army and its high comare experienced in dealing with submerged nationalities inside Pakistan. The attempt to crush the Bengalis led to the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. Only the army occupied Baluchistan (another Pakistani province bordering on Iran and Afghanistan) and conducted a civil war for five years. won, but the guerrillas of the Baluchistan People's Liberation Front (BPLF) fled to neighbouring Afghanistan. Today there is important Baluch political leader who does not believe in Baluch independence.
Now the army seems to have decided to teach Sind a lesson. Over the past fortnight, nearly 200 people in the province have been killed, several hundred wounded and thousands imprisoned under martial law regulations. The only support has come from Baluchistan, where a general strike paralysed Quetta and several smaller towns in a display of inter-provincial solidarity. The Baluch nationalists have accused the military regime of internationalising' the conflict by permitting the United States to construct a naval base near the port of Gwadur. According to Ataullah Mengal, the former Chief Minister of Baluchistan, this base is linked to the strategy of setting up local relays for the American Rapid Deployment tary dictatorship, the army and its network of competing intelligence agencies have sought to avoid, at all costs, public manifestations of discontent. played Machiavellian skills in manipulating politicians and parties during his first five years in office. Warned of impending unrest, he tried on this occasion, too, to pre-empt the movement by promising elections to provincial and national assemblies in 1985. This time, no one was taken in. The Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD); an alliance of nine political parties spanning the entire political spectrum, called for civil dis obedience on 14 August (Pakistan's Independence Day). The response in Sind shook both the dictatorship and the MRD - both of whom in the past, have underestimated the effects of the national op pression that underlies the rickety structures of the State in Pakistan.
What makes the Sindhi response a powerful shot across Zia's bows is that the people have demonstrated their readiness to die. Even though the movement is restricted to Sind and Baluchistan, it represents a powerful stimulus to the common people of the Punjab and NorthWest Frontier Province. This regime may not fall tomorrow but Zia's months are now numbered. His staunchest backers in the West - Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — are, no doubt, already searching for a replacement model. His own senior officers have sounded the tocsin by beginning a clandestine dialogue with politicians with the aim of achieving a lasting political settlement.
Zia attempted a cynical use of religion to cement the army's hold over the state. The result was barbarities on every level. Women were deprived of rights and sub-
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jected to an institutionalised brutality. Last December, a pro-regime cleric led his congregation after Friday prayers to stone a new-born baby to death: the child was illegitimate and, thus, a 'product of sin'. A few weeks ago, a religous court sentenced a young blind woman to be flogged for the 'crime of adultery. (The man, of course, was set free.)
Pakistan's generals, however, have failed to make religion the opium of the people. Ironically, what they've done instead is to make heroin a minority religion. There were 50 registered addicts in Karachi (the largest city) in 1972. Today, there are 50,000. A number of generals have become overnight billionaires, while the victims of heroin are dying at an alarming rate. Add to this the treatment of trade unionists, journalist and national minorities and it becomes clear that drastic remedies are needed.
Any regime that follows Zia will be under mass pressure to push through drastie reforms on every front. A demand already emanating from the minority provinces of Sind and Baluchistan is for the Pakistan army to be dismantled from top to bottom as the necessary prerequisite for a voluntary federation. A thoroughgoing land reform is vital for social and economic advance. If the politicians, currently waiting in the wings, succeed in forcing the army's officer corps voluntarily to surrender its powers of patronage and privilege, the choice facing them will be stark, but simple. Either they reconstruct the State on totally new foundations, or else it will cease to exist.
in the framework of the state budget for 1984. The response was a general strike of public workers that lasted for more than ten days
The breadth of the mobilization testifies to the depth of the opposition to the austerity measures envisaged by the government. This opposition was expressed with the same strength in Flanders, Brussels, and the Walloon country.
Workers who had already waged strug gles without gaining anything, such as the bus and tram drivers and the Liege city workers, came out again in support of this strike.
This opposition to austerity is not limited to the public workers. All the working people feel the same way about it.
Despite the hysteria campaign by the right and certain newspapers, who claimed that the strikers were "using the public as a hostage," the strike enjoyed very broad sympathy among working people.
Very rapidly, the need for extending
Balance sheet of the general strike of Belgian public workers the strike to private industry began to be felt, especially in the Walloon country.
The strike in the public services did not run out of steam. It was halted at the moment when the workers in the public services and private industry should have gotten the call for an alltrades general strike from the FGTB and
The general strike of public workers in Belgium started with a spontaneous walkout by four train drivers in Charleroi on September 9. to all the public workers and forced the unions concerned to issue formal strike calls. The public services were shut down, including transport and post, and the country ground to a halt. egan to have problems because of lack of transport, and some managements ordere 'he auestion of a general strike of all workers began to be posed. Many big plant partial or complete shutdowns as a result. In the Walloon industrial center of Charlroi, strikes began to develop in private industry as well.
1 particularly severe austerity drive has been underway in Belgium for some time he Belgian economy is one of the weakest of the small north European imperialis national economies in Europe, in the same class as Denmark. Unemployment has been hit hard, running over 13 percent.
The dismantling of the welfare state and the drastic decline in the standard of living has aroused an increasing desperation among the Belgian working class. have been repeated big strike movements, with a national general strike last Febru-
All these actions, however, have been undermined by union leaderships that are unprepared to put up a decisive fight against the bosses and the government. perience explains how a walkout by four train drivers could ignite a strike that paralyzed the country and came close to touching off a national general strike.
The mood of the workers this time was that they wanted a showdown. Day by day, the workers assemblies voted overwhelmingly to continue the strike, right up
But on Friday, September 23, the national leadership of the FGTB (Belgian General Confederation of Labor, the SP-dominated union federation) came out for a return to work. The Catholic and Liberal Party unions had withdrawn earlier, so this decision by the FTB pulled the rug out from under the strikers.
The Catholic confederation predominates in Flanders, and the Walloon country. Historically, the traditions of class struggle in the Walloon country are stronger, while the Flemish workers have remained politically tied to the bourgeois Catholic party, the PSC/CVP. The leadership of the Catholic union federation, the CSC, is correspondingly more conservative. tism of the Flemish is also often used as an excuse by reformist and class-collaborationist leaders in the Walloon country.
Because of the national division of Belgium and linguistic sensitivities, every organization has two names, one French and the other Flemish, and sometimes they are not exact equivalents. Both the Catholic and SP-dominated confederations are divided along national lines, although the Catholic one predominates in Flanders and the FTB in the Walloon country.
The following two articles are from the October 7 issue of La Gauche, the French language paper of the