CORRIDOR OF UNCERTAINTY
WITH BALOCHISTAN IN TURMOIL, CHINA IS LOOKING TO THE PAKISTAN ARMY TO ENSURE SUCCESS OF ITS $46 BILLION ECONOMIC CORRIDOR
On his increasingly frequent visits to China—the most recent in early August—Pakistan army chief General Raheel Sharif has sought to impress upon his hosts India’s supposedly nefarious designs in Balochistan. The message, say sources in Beijing, was that the delays in China’s ambitious $46 billion economic corridor were only because of the attempts of Indian intelligence agencies to foment trouble in Balochistan.
Whether Beijing buys this explanation isn’t clear. For one, it hasn’t raised the issue with India. Secondly, Beijing is all too aware that the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is mired in delays, not only in Balochistan but elsewhere too. It is caught up in domestic politics over investments and delayed project execution that has frustrated Beijing’s mandarins.
What General Sharif’s trips have underlined is that Beijing is increasingly relying on the Pakistani army, rather than the government, to push its ambitious plans in Pakistan. In recent months, there have been more military than civilian delegations from Pakistan to China to discuss the progress of the CPEC and security measures.
One reason for that is the security situation in Balochistan, which Chinese strategists believe holds the key to long-term development plans in Pakistan. It is here that Beijing took over the port of Gwadar from a Singaporean company, now being developed as the lynchpin of the CPEC in the Arabian Sea. The long-term plan is a 2,400 km long expressway, rail line and pipelines from this Arabian Sea port, across Balochistan and into Punjab, and all the way through GilgitBaltistan into China’s western Xinjiang province. The total investment figure is pegged at $46 billion. The CPEC’s western route will connect several cities in Balochistan and KhyberPakhtunkhwa. India, of course, strongly protests the plan as it passes through Gilgit-Baltistan, which it sees as an integral part of J&K. For China, this presents the alluring prospect of an alternative route for its energy imports, avoiding the Malacca Straits and South China Sea, although its urgency for Gwadar has lessened after the operationalising last year of its first pipeline to the Bay of Bengal, from Myanmar to Yunnan province.
The Gwadar port project is key to the success of the entire corridor. Yet it is this leg of the CPEC that has been the most slow-moving, with protests against the plan and intermittent attacks. As a result, Beijing has been supportive of a greater role for the military in taking the plan forward. “The Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) is maybe 500-strong, they can’t make too much trouble. The Pakistan Army has taken stringent measures,” Liu Zongyi, senior fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies, told
india today. Liu, like the Chinese government, believes most of Balochistan supports the CPEC and that separatist groups “don’t have a lot of support... local people want development”.
Not everyone in Balochistan would agree. The CPEC has triggered strong reactions, from concerns over the plight of local fishermen—the Gwadar port project threatens the livelihood of over three-fourths of the local population—to a long-simmering resentment that the mineral-rich region has been exploited by the rest of the country.
Baloch leaders also fear the CPEC could lead to massive resettlement and an influx of Punjabi and Pashtun workers that will alter the region’s demography and jeopardise local interests. Mir Kabeer Ahmad Shahi of the National Party in Balochistan, a member of the Senate Special Committee on CPEC, has demanded legislation on this issue, fearing the project could “marginalise the native people like the Red Indians (in the US)”. Beijing, however, rejects such fears. The CPEC is “widely supported by the people of China and Pakistan,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang told india today. “China is confident about the future of the corridor.”
Beijing has proposed a range of projects to assuage the fears, including
WHAT RAHEEL SHARIF’S
TRIPS TO CHINA MEAN IS THAT BEIJING IS RELYING ON THE PAK ARMY, NOT ITS CIVILIAN GOVERNMENT, FOR ITS PLANS
a university and international airport in Gwadar. However, they have all been slow in moving. Chinese firms, for their part, are not enthused about sending personnel to either Balochistan or Gilgit-Baltistan. “The Pakistan Army gives one soldier for every Chinese worker so we feel safe now, but these are not good conditions to work,” said one company representative who declined to be named.
In March 2015, five oil tankers carrying fuel from Karachi to the Saindak copper project in Balochistan (reportedly for a Chinese company) were attacked and set on fire. The government blamed the attack on the BLA. A month later, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Islamabad to officially launch the CPEC and a range of projects. A suggestion for Xi to visit Gwadar as a symbolic gesture was quickly shelved due to security concerns.
Against this backdrop of security fears, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invocation of Balochistan has raised eyebrows in Beijing. “If India interferes with the building of the CPEC,” warns Liu, “it will not be good for bilateral ties.” Past attacks on Chinese workers have been blamed by Pakistan on Indian intelligence agencies. China hasn’t publicly commented on those claims, but Zhang Chunxiang, a former ambassador in Pakistan, claims a 2004 bomb attack that killed three Chinese Gwadar port engineers was carried out not by local terrorists but by a “foreign country that everybody knows”. A long history of suspicion clouds China’s corridor of uncertainty. And it faces an even cloudier future.