A DIRTY round cap and a pair of stained shalwar kameez is all that is left of the miners in Loralai district’s Dukki tehsil. Work has stopped for a week to “honour the departed”, I’m told.

When the mine caved in after an explosion at around 2pm two weeks ago, Itbaar Khan, 17, was standing outside trying to fix the only thing he owns — a pocket-sized radio he brought with him while leaving Swat. A new entrant at Dukki, Itbaar tells me this was not the first incident of its kind here. All around us are mounds of coal, surrounding and almost bursting out of the small homes.

The gaping black hole of the mine where the explosion occurred seems on the verge of caving in despite being bolstered up by tree branches and sticks. Itbaar says: “We lost seven men inside, and of the two men who went to rescue the miners, one died that day while the other succumbed to his injuries yesterday.”

We are 45 kilometres outside Loralai town in the north-eastern part of Balochistan. Here, according to a rough estimate, there are 100 mines small and big, owned by the Nasir, Tareen and Luni clans.

Amongst the oldest settlers here, the Tareens sold their land in Dukki during the 18th century to the locals at cheap prices. Soon after, coal was discovered by the British and the Tareens sought their lands back. Since the sale of land had been based on verbal agreements, there was not much the locals could do and, eventually, most of the mines started belonging to the Tareens.

Decades later, after the partition of the subcontinent, the Nasir brothers started mining in the same area and proved competition with the Tareens. According to inspector of mines Rasheed Abro, this took an ugly turn and since then, the two clans have been at war with each other. As a result, the inspecting teams are vulnerable to the wrath of the tribal elders. “As an inspector, my duty is to give suggestions and communicate the rules according to the Mines Act of 1923,” he says. “We can’t dictate these rules since they [the elders] don’t believe in them and have their own codes.”

This particular mine in Dukki is co-owned by Raheef Tareen and Agha Mohammad Tareen and is known as the Sharif Tareen Coal Company of the Khan Mohammad Khan Group. Though it was said that the mine was closed for mourning, an elder of the area accompanying us from mine to mine said it was closed down by the inspecting officers on Feb 19 and hasn’t opened since.

The locals accompanying us, most of them miners from Swat and Afghanistan, said that conditions here haven’t improved despite various minor methane explosions over the years. There was one two years ago, recalls Itbaar, in which 12 miners lost their lives.

“It’s a different world around here, with set rules for the miners and none for the owners,” says Gul Naseer, an elderly miner who retired from work two years ago. He adds that the men of Swat choose Dukki because the pay is better even though the work is tough, while those from southern Afghanistan choose to work at better ventilated mines that pay lower wages.

A month before the incident, the manager at the mine had advised against mining for at least four to five months, says Itbaar. “But as soon as he left, we were asked to man up and go inside,” he tells me.

Owner Raheef Tareen, however, says that he was constructing ventilation points at the mine and claims that he has “had a bigger loss, more than anyone”. He says the explosion occurred due to the “wrath of God”, since, he insists, proper ventilation was in place.

A former provincial minister and coal mine owner himself, Sardar Haider Khan Nasir, says that the incident is a sad reminder of the worsening conditions for coal miners. “We are all responsible for not standing up for their rights,” he observes. Two years ago, Haider was part of the team of mine owners that chalked out an agreement plan with the Frontier Corps (FC). Since the local government is “non-existent”, it was decided that Rs220 would be distributed between three departments. The FC would get Rs200, while the mines department and district government would get Rs10 each. The deal was to ensure security, provide educational institutions and health facilities around the area. But that hasn’t happened yet.

“When we met the newly appointed director general of the FC, Lt Gen Nasir Khan Janjua, he said the FC earns Rs1,200,000 as security fees from various mines in Dukki in a day,” Haider says. “But we are responsible too. We only bring up such issues when something big happens. Otherwise, we are fine with the money and the resources we are getting to use.”

Published in Dawn, March 6th, 2015

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