MULTAN, Feb 13: Tribesmen dislodged from their native Dera Bugti district several years ago are uncertain about their future despite an official plan to repatriate them to their ancestral place.

“What is the surety that we will not be displaced again if the government and Nawab (Akbar Bugti) enter into reconciliatory process?” Mir Ahmadan Bugti, a leader of the displaced Bugtis, asked while expressing his concern over the government plan to take them back to their homeland.

Talking to Dawn at his Multan residence, situated in city slums on Piraan Ghaib road, Mir Ahmadan said that at this juncture of the history the ‘establishment’ would have to decide once for all whether it was with the Baloch people or with the tribal chiefs. “We are in the dark about what exactly is in the mind of the people at the helm of Balochistan affairs,” he asked.

Mir Ahmadan and the Bugti tribesmen loyal to him were banished from Dera Bugti on Dec 16, 1997, under the supervision of paramilitary troops and were forced to live like refugees in their own country in Dera Ghazi Khan town. A day earlier, the Bugti tribesmen belonging to the Kalpar clan and loyal to Wadera Khan Muhammad Kalpar were dislodged in the same fashion for having enmity with the tribal chief, Nawab Akbar Khan.

That was not the first occasion that the Kalpars were forced to leave their native Sui town in Dera Bugti district. They were earlier compelled to leave the area in 1993 owing to an ongoing blood feud with Nawab Bugti.

Khan Muhammad Kalpar’s son Ameer Hamza was gunned down in May 1992 at a polling station in Dera Bugti during local bodies election. Khan Muhammad had accused Nawab Bugti of getting killed his son, who was becoming a potential political threat for the Bugti chieftain and his protegees.

In June 1992, Nawab Bugti’s son Salal was gunned down in Quetta. The incident sparked an intra-tribal armed conflict. It was the time when a neighbouring Baloch tribe chief and a close relative of Nawab Bugti, Mir Balakh Sher Mazari, became the caretaker prime minister of the country.

It was his short stint of 38 days in the top office during which the Kalpars were dislodged from Sui. As they had political ties with the PPP, the displaced Kalpars initially took shelter in the outskirts of Peshawar due to the courtesy of Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, a close aide of then prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Later on, they took refuge in Multan, Larkana and Jacobabad districts of Punjab and Sindh for certain spans of time.

In the general elections held in 1993, Benazir Bhutto was again elected to the office of prime minister. During her three-year stay in the office, the Kalpars were brought back to their native district. In the general elections held in 1997 after the dissolution of the PPP government in 1996, PML-N’s Mian Nawaz Sharif emerged as the premier.

Mir Ahmadan alleged that as Nawaz Sharif’s then close aides Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and Mushahid Hussain had cordial relations with Nawab Bugti, the Kalpars were again forced out of their native town. This time Mir Ahmadan and his people settled in Dera Ghazi Khan and Multan.

Mir Ahmadan remained district council chairman from 1979 to 1983 when Kohlu and Dera Bugti were the parts of same district called Marri-Bugti agency. Mir said in the following years he, Ameer Hamza (Kalpar) Bugti and Mir Ghulam Qadir (Masoori) Bugti forged a political alliance to challenge Nawab Bugti. “We had decided to free ourselves and the future generations from the tyrannies of tribalism,” he asserted.

He said the alliance annoyed the tribal lords who liked to be elected unopposed. He said although the alliance was not succeeding in the electoral bouts, the victory margin for the Nawab and his candidates was gradually shrinking. But the Mir and the Kalpars were dislodged to make it a one-sided affair for the Nawab, both in political and tribal affairs of the district. “The strategy paid dividends when Nawab’s men were elected unchallenged at all tiers of the local government in the polls held last year,” he added.

He said similarly Mir Ghulam Qadir was subjected to confinement in Dera Bugti last year, while his Masoori tribesmen were forced to leave the area. However, Ghulam Qadir managed to flee away when the government forces and the Nawab’s men entered an armed conflict on the issue of the alleged rape of Dr Shazia Khalid in March last year.

Mir Ahmadan refuted the claim made by Nawab’s spokesperson and son-in-law Agha Shahid Bugti, who is also the secretary-general of the Jamhoori Watan Party, that the displaced Bugtis had to leave the area under the verdict of a tribal jirga. He said there existed no forum to which JWP secretary often referred vaguely as ‘National Jirga’.

“We are humiliated and displaced by none other than the powers of status quo at the whims of Nawab Bugti,” he alleged.

Mir Ahmadan has very bitter experiences with what he terms power brokers of the country. Citing one such experience, he recalled that in April 1997 he and some of his comrades were summoned in Islamabad by Mushahid Hussain, then a minister in Nawaz Sharif’s cabinet and now the secretary-general of ruling PML. The meeting, which started at his office in the cabinet division, was yet to finish when Mushahid left his office saying he would be back in no time. But, when he did not come even after a couple of hours, they came out of his office and were ‘greeted’ by the Islamabad police. They were kept for some days in Kohsar police station lockup in the federal capital and then handed over to the Balochistan police as a ‘fabricated’ case was lodged against them in Dera Murad Jamali. They remained in prison for the next seven months and were acquitted of the charges in November only to be banished from their ancestral town next month. He said on all the occasions they were the government forces who compelled them to leave the area otherwise they were braving the Nawab’s wrath.

“Our skepticism about the official plans (to take us back home) in the given situation is not out of place after having experienced such antics of the people at the helms of affair,” he said.

A batch of displaced Kalpars has been taken back to Sui town, while another of the Masooris to Baikarr a couple of weeks ago. However, several thousand displaced tribesmen belonging to Kalpar, Masoori and Raija sub-clans of the Bugti tribe have yet to be repatriated to Dera Bugti.

Talking about the establishment of a proposed garrison in Dera Bugti, Mir Ahmadan said it could not ensure peace in the area because its sole objective seemed to protect the gas installations in Sui and not to guarantee safety of the people opposing the tribal lords by putting their lives at risk.

All the main headmen of dislodged Bugtis __ Wadera Khan Muhammad Kalpar, Mir Ghulam Qadir Masoori and Mir Ahmadan Bugti __ have yet to stage comeback in their ancestral areas.