Dispatches from Pakistan

A Tempest in My Harbor: Gwadar, Balochistan

168 ATempestinMyHarbor Gwadar,Balochistan hafeez jamali Life in the Dystopia of a City (to Be) On first sight, Gwadar, a small coastal town in the southwestern Balochistan province, is a landscape of abandonment, a bit like a frame from a decaying movie reel that has suddenly wound to a halt and the objects have frozen in action. Skeletons of unfinished buildings, parks, stadium, hospital, and offices litter the landscape. Craters and potholes have developed in the middle of recently built wide-lined avenues and roads. In some places, the Shamal wind blowing from Iran has buried unused dual-carriage roads under big piles of sand that render them impassable. If one ventures outside the town, the windswept sandy plain is dotted by tiny whitewashed concrete cabins, the “site-offices” of incomplete residential schemes, with shiny names like Sun Silver City, Platinum City, Florida Heights, and Miami Villas. There is an occasional flurry of activity in the town when a large cargo ship, lured by promises of government-subsidized transportation, docks at the newly built seaport . But most of the time, the townsfolk seem to wait anxiously for a promised future whose arrival has been delayed or deferred, at least for now. That promised future was the Pakistani government’s ambitious plans for developing Gwadar into a Duty Free Port and megacity of a tempest in my harbor 169 international standards that would rival Dubai and Hong Kong in its splendor. It would attract commercial traffic from the busy waterways of the Persian Gulf and propel a stuttering and phut-phutting Pakistan onto the highway of hypermodernity. Since 2003, General (Retd.) Pervez Musharraf kept telling Pakistanis that Balochistan province would be the engine of growth for Pakistan’s faltering economy. He followed up on his promise by inaugurating a series of large-scale development projects that included Gwadar DeepWater Port, Mirani Dam, Mekran Coastal Highway, and Saindak and Rekodek Copper-Gold Projects. Gwadar occupied the pride of place in this futuristic vision of Balochistan and Pakistan. It was to be the jewel in General Musharraf’s crown, the El Dorado where middle-class Pakistanis’ dreams of becoming “world class” citizens would come true. Soon an army of bureaucrats, private entrepreneurs, industrialists, hoteliers, real estate agents, marketers, and builders—many of them Musharraf’s cronies—descended on Gwadar.Aided by local middlemen and corrupt revenue officials, they poured in billions of rupees to buy land from local people and turn it into commercial and residential real estate. Television commercials, billboards, and newspaper ads showed urban Pakistani couples walking hand in hand on the golden beaches of Gwadar as the sun set behind them into the Arabian Sea. They invited onlookers in Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, and even expatriate Pakistanis living in Europe and North America to buy land in Gwadar. It was touted as “a place where dust turns into gold” (jahan mitti sona ban jaye) and where one could enjoy “a forty-year tax holiday,” that is, not having to pay taxes on goods and services until 2040. Absent from this picture of capitalist development were the fishermen and ordinary Baloch people elsewhere in the province. Ethnic Baloch people form the majority of Balochistan’s population but count as a small minority in Pakistan, which is dominated by civil and military elites from the majority Punjabi and Urdu speaking ethnic groups. Working in their small boats (yakdars) bobbing on the shimmering and gently heaving waters of the semicircular bay, Baloch fishermen were at once the background and provided the requisite element of oriental mystique. They were meant to be the blank slate or tablet on which General Musharraf would inscribe his saga of modernization.They were 170 Hafeez Jamali the silent wall against which metropolitan Pakistani dreams of modernity were being projected. Except that they refused to be.The Baloch have maintained historical grievances against the Pakistani state since the country’s inception in 1947, giving rise to four armed insurgencies in the past sixty years.1 When General Musharraf announced his plans for developing Gwadar at the turn of the millennium, Balochistan was in the grip of a growing armed insurgency, or a war of national liberation as the Baloch call it.2 The guerrillas were disillusioned by the failure of the parliamentary politics of the 1990s to win any significant measure of political autonomy for the Baloch to defend Baloch rights over...