To be a Karachi Bugti who yearns for watan and dry wood

Dawn breaks over Ghaggar Phatak on the edge of Karachi. In a cluster of huts stitched together from rough timber, patched canvas and weathered cloth, the morning begins much as it once did hundreds of kilometres away in the hills of Dera Bugti.

Inside an otaak, sixty-five-year-old Meerdali Bugti sits on a worn charpai with a faded rilli quilt. Beside the bed stands a recycled cooking-oil tin filled with drinking water, covered with cloth to keep it cool. Everything inside the hut has its place. It is a careful attempt to preserve a way of life.

Each morning is a memory. The crowing rooster carries him back to his village of Doi, where dawn arrived over green valleys and clear springs, and where the day began with birdsong instead of diesel engines. Then Karachi stirs around him. Motorcycles rip down the road. Trucks grumble past. Construction machinery pounds.

After Fajr prayers, he picks up a shovel and walks to a farm, where he spends the day coaxing water through irrigation channels. The work feeds his family. It does not quiet his thoughts.

“There is too much noise here,” he says. “Where I came from, there was peace. The air had its own fragrance. Life flowed through our springs. The mountains spoke to us. The flowers, the leaves, the lakes, everything was alive.” He pauses as another truck rumbles past, overtaking his voice. “Now I am a man without a homeland.”

This August marks twenty years since Meerdali left Dera Bugti because Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti was killed in a military operation in their mountains. He believed he would return within days. Instead, those days became years and like thousands of other Bugti tribesmen and their families, he rebuilt his life in scattered settlements across Sindh. The anniversary of August 26, 2006 will revive political debates over the conflict but for Meerdali that date marks something far more personal, the moment they became strangers to their own homeland.

The conflict between the center and Baloch nationalists long predates 2006. Since Pakistan’s creation, Balochistan has witnessed successive insurgencies, each ending militarily but leaving behind political grievances. Yet the insurgency that intensified in the early 2000s proved different. It spread across the province, drew in a younger generation of educated Baloch, and displaced entire communities whose stories were rarely recorded.

For the people of Dera Bugti, the fighting reached a breaking point in 2005 and 2006. As clashes intensified, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti left his fort for the surrounding mountains. His departure signaled that ordinary life was no longer possible so families began leaving and villages steadily emptied. When Bugti was killed, thousands had already fled, and many others followed in the months after.

A fact-finding mission by the........

© Dawn Prism