Episode Details

Amitabh Pal spoke with Shezad Baloch about the situation in in Balochistan, a province in his native country, Pakistan where he was a journalist for more than 10 years. Reports of recent clashes between the Balochistan Liberation Army alongside financial reporting about proposed and ongoing international plans for investment in large-scale mining there means current and future animosity and struggle. And while extraction has sometimes brought economic success, it has rarely brought normalized political situations or prosperity for all. That would require a thoughtful plan where local communities would have a say and a share in it rather than dispossession and marginalization. The current plans for increased Pakistani and international investor security measures falls very short of that ideal. Amit and Shezad talked about Balochistan’s people, culture, land and aspirations existing in an important strategic landscape and how the province might escape the cycle of broken promise, uprising and retribution. Baloch music Ustad Noor Bakhsh - Shahbaz Qalandar http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRtv6WDWH7A Pakistan's dependency on military deployment fails to address root causes of 77-year Balochistan crisis: Report http://www.thehansindia.com/news/international/pakistans-dependency-on-military-deployment-fails-to-address-root-causes-of-77-year-balochistan-crisis-report-1048772 Why peace remains elusive in Pakistan’s troubled Balochistan http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/3/why-peace-remains-elusive-in-pakistans-troubled-balochistan photo: faysulkhan101 on pixabay.com