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Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door Johan Bollen
(Bericht 4229308)
Kijk naar het netwerk van militaire basissen, en hoe dat evolueert. Dat is veelzeggend. Het volgende controlepunt in Afghanistan wordt Balochistan. Met de strijd tegen de taliban heeft dat niet veel te maken. De basissen in Irak blijven ook, ondanks de zogezegde terugtrekking die er eigenlijk geen is.
Escobar is een goed analyst die zijn leven ter plaatste waagt en niet vanuit een of andere nieuwskamer schrijft.
Mijns inziens vergist de VS en aanhangsel Europa zich door te menen die regio (centraal azië) te kunnen controleren. Buitenaziatische krachten zijn op de lange duur niet gewenst door enkele machtige lokale krachten.
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De spelers: Islamabad, Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Delhi, Tehran and Kabul
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In Islamabad, Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Delhi, Tehran and Kabul, as in the tribal fortresses of Hazrat Sulieman’s mountains, countless conflicting stories are circulating about who owns Balochistan’s resources, what should be done with them, who should control them and who should benefit. Every aspiring neo-coloniser, oil mogul and pipeline manufacturer wants a bit of Balochistan, or at least the opportunity of exploiting both the province’s natural resources and its compelling proximity to other oil and gas reserves and supply lines.
In the plush offices of the capitals such narratives are translated into bilateral agreements, Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs), joint ventures, exploration licences and billion dollar contracts, and are materialised on the ground as pipelines, ports, highways, railroads, airfields, mines, oil and gas rigs and refineries and, most importantly, as money transfers, all those transit and protection fees and royalty payments to interested parties. One such deal between the governments of Pakistan and the United States, signed immediately after the fall of the Shah’s regime in neighbouring Iran, facilitated construction of new ports and airfields on Balochistan’s Makran coast overlooking the entrance to the Persian Gulf. Another more recent agreement with US Central Command gave American forces exclusive access to the coastal airfield at Pasni for Operation Enduring Freedom (their joint invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001), and use of the remote former British RAF air base at Dalbandin near the Balochistan border with Afghanistan and Iran plus the smaller Shamsi airfield built for Saudi sheiks. Other deals have given Texas-based companies substantial interests in Balochistan’s oil and gas fields; and Australian companies, such as Pasminco Ltd, have also been busy in Balochistan in recent years.
Similar mega-agreements have been signed by the Government of Pakistan with the People’s Republic of China. State-owned companies, including the China Harbour Engineering Company, have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the deep water sea port at Gwadar in a deal which reportedly also includes provisions for a Chinese naval base. Chinese interests are developing much of the urban infrastructure within this new port city, as well as a new coastal highway from Gwadar to Karachi, and in the process thousands of ethnic Baloch and other groups are being displaced from their ancestral lands. Other Chinese investments include an oil refinery complex near the new port, a road from the port to the Indus Highway to join the Karakoram Highway and on into the Xingjiang Autonomous Region, and a giant copper mine at Saindak in the far northwest of Balochistan. An agreement to build a railway track from the coast to Central Asia’s oil and gas fields through Xinjiang has also been signed by the governments of China, Pakistan, Kazakhistan, Kurgistan and Uzbekistan, and a pipeline from Gwadar to Xinjiang is on the drawing boards as I write. It is these Chinese mega-projects and the people associated with them that are the targets for Uighar militancy in Balochistan.
Balochistan, the invisible war
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De pionnen: de inwoners van Balochistan
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Since the 1830s this dynamic has been known as the Great Game. The cartography of the region has changed since then, as have some of the players, but the goal remains the same. Great Britain, once the only superpower, has been replaced by its former colony, the USA; Czarist Russia has found a more presidential Czar to press its hegemonic claims; and China has won a place at the chess board through the sheer brute strength of its economy. The British East India Company, whose interests were propitiated in the first round of this ‘Game’, has been superseded by the global oil majors, while the Central Asian Republics (CARs) and their neighbours, and Pakistan and its neighbours, India, Iran and Afghanistan, are all playing as proxies for their more powerful allies. In this current iteration of the Great Game the chess board is the entire region, and the ethnic Baloch, like the people of Afghanistan, are pawns.
Balochistan, the invisible war
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