Slain tribal chief's body retrieved - Baluchistan

AP on Yahoo ^ | 8/31/06 | Paul Garwood - ap

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistani soldiers retrieved the body of a renegade tribal chief Thursday whose death in a military raid provoked widespread rioting in a restive province on the volatile border with Afghanistan.

The body of Baluch tribal chief Nawab Akbar Bugti was found pinned underneath a boulder in his collapsed mountain hide-out in southwestern Baluchistan province. Pakistani forces and rebels clashed there Saturday, leaving the 79-year-old dead, along with several supporters and five army officers.

Bugti's killing sparked five days of rioting and protests in the impoverished province bordering Iran and Afghanistan. At least six people were killed, dozens wounded and 700 arrested.

Bugti's body was returned to tribal chiefs in his ancestral home of Dera Bugti for burial Friday, said a military intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was unauthorized to speak to the media.

On Wednesday, hundreds of protesters blocked highways across Baluchistan, cutting off access to major cities, including Karachi in the south and Lahore to the east. Hundreds of people were unable to get to work and scores of businesses and offices were shut for the day.

The situation was reported calm on Thursday.

Bugti was a political and militia leader who led an often violent campaign to win a greater share of the wealth from natural resources like gas and oil extracted in Baluchistan.

The government accused him of organizing attacks on government installations, including gas pipelines and railway lines.

Bugti had been holed up in the cave hideout since shortly after a December rocket attack on President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Government officials accused ethnic Baluch tribesmen of carrying out the attack, but Bugti never claimed responsibility for it.

Analysts warned Thursday the government must quickly settle the long-running grievances with the impoverished Baluch minority or risk a widening of the insurgency on the border with Afghanistan.

"It is so important for the government to reach out to the Baluch people as quickly as possible," said Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group. "I don't think they can leave off political negotiations too long because then it gets harder to get them back on track."

Pakistani officials acknowledged that Baluchistan — the poorest of Pakistan's four provinces — has not received the government assistance it needs.

Despite possessing one of the country's largest sources of natural gas and huge coal and oil reserves, just 25 percent of villages in Baluchistan have electricity and only 20 percent have safe drinking water.

Musharraf's spokesman, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, said violence in the province had halted government development projects, including a school, hospital and dam building.

"Baluchistan has been neglected in the past and the people have suffered," Sultan told The Associated Press. "Things need to be done to fix the problems."

Bugti's son, Talal, scoffed at the government's sincerity and accused it of detaining hundreds of Baluch activists and tribespeople in a campaign to crush opposition to the government.

"The public is feeling insecure and as if anything can happen to them," he said in a telephone interview from Quetta. "Baluch people need full autonomy and control over their resources instead of the federal government taking them."

Robert Oakley, U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 1988-92 who traveled widely in Baluchistan with Bugti, said Musharraf's government must reach out to ethnic Baluch leaders as it has done with tribal chiefs in North Waziristan.

Dialogue in North Waziristan has brought a halt to violence that had pitted Pakistani troops against pro-Taliban insurgents and al-Qaida militants since the Sept. 11 attacks.

"For the past year, the Pakistani government has taken the approach that we want to crush resistance (in Baluchistan) and haven't really succeeded. And they haven't worked out a new political approach," said Oakley, now a consultant specializing in Pakistan, Afghan and NATO affairs with International Defense University in Washington D.C.

Patrick Cronin, an American expert on U.S.-Asian affairs at the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, warned: "If there is not a perception of progress being made ... there is bound to be further tumult inside Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, terrorists running around the region and militants wanting to get a hold of weapons of mass destruction. This is a very volatile cocktail that may blow up."

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Associated Press writer Munir Ahmad in Islamabad contributed to this report.

[NormsRevenge]

Journalists visit a cave as Pakistan army soldiers reinforce its roof where rebel Pakistani tribal chief Nawab Akbar Bugti was killed on Saturday in Tartari, the Kohlu district, about 220 kilometers (140 miles) east of Quetta, Pakistan to retrieve his dead body Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006. Pakistani soldiers searching a cave found the body of a fugitive tribal leader whose death in a military raid sparked large-scale unrest, but it was pinned under a boulder and will take days to retrieve, army officials said Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006. (AP Photo/B.K.Bangash)

[NormsRevenge]

Pakistani soldiers stand at the cave hideout of slain Baluch rebel chief Akbar Bugti in Kohlu, about 220 kilometers (140 miles) from Quetta August 30, 2006. Violent protests have erupted across Baluchistan province since nationalist leader Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was killed on Saturday in a government assault on his cave hideout in the remote hills of Pakistan's biggest but poorest province. REUTERS/Rizwan Saeed (PAKISTAN)