What Pakistan suicide blast reveals about the Balochistan insurgency and China

Name: 3 Chinese staff of Confucius Institute killed in Karachi bomb attack
Uploaded: 2022-04-30T00:30:18.000Z
Duration: 1 min 41 s
Description: 3 Chinese staff of Confucius Institute killed in Karachi bomb attack

While three Chinese were killed in the attack, observers say Beijing and its belt and road projects in Pakistan are a collateral damage of Balochistan’s separatist bid

Baloch have long demanded more control over their natural resources, and new multibillion-dollar projects such as the CPEC are deepening their resentment towards the Pakistan government

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Pakistani security officials at the site of a suicide attack in Karachi. Photo: EPA-EFE

Tom Hussain

Published: 8:30am, 30 Apr 2022

China and its belt-and-road projects in Pakistan are a collateral casualty of the insurgency in Balochistan region, rather than the target, according to politicians, dissidents and analysts.

The suicide bombing on Tuesday by a militant Baloch nationalist, which killed three Chinese academics and their Pakistani driver inside Karachi University, was a strategic move to build pressure on Pakistan’s security establishment, the observers told This Week In Asia.

“The Baloch dissidents’ agenda is primarily directed against the Pakistani state,” said Mushahid Hussain, a ranking member of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party who chairs the Senate committee on defence. The China factor became an “add-on” issue only after the US$60 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) was established in 2015, he said.

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3 Chinese staff of Confucius Institute killed in Karachi bomb attack

Balochistan is a vast, largely inhospitable province in western Pakistan that is rich in natural resources. Separatists in the region have long fought for greater control over their minerals and political autonomy.

Nawab Akbar Bugti, a former governor and chief minister, launched the insurgency in 2005.

Pakistani politicians in 2006 and 2015 came close to reaching peace settlements with Baloch militant leaders, but these efforts were sabotaged by establishment hardliners, said Hussain.

As chairman of the parliamentary subcommittee on Balochistan in 2006, Hussain wrote a report on recommended conditions for a peace deal, the terms of which Bugti had accepted. However weeks before it was published, Bugti was killed in a military operation.