QUETTA, May 26: Jamhoori Watan Party chief Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti has warned that the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline will pass through Balochistan and it will be difficult to implement the project if Baloch people are not taken into confidence.

He was talking to newsmen on a satellite phone on Friday.

“It will be difficult to execute the tripartite gas pipeline project without involving the Baloch people,” he said. He made it clear that he was not expressing these views to please any particular country.

Acknowledging the United States’ status as a major global power, the nationalist leader said the government of Pakistan was already obeying its orders.

The chief of the Bugti tribe said that the Baloch people were fast losing the province’s coastal areas with the government speedily implementing its plans in Gwadar. He said that according to all indications, non-Balochs would soon be settled in the port city. They would practically run all affairs in Gwadar, he added.

According to him, the main issues confronting Balochistan were the right to rule and preservation of provincial control over its coastal areas and resources. Nawab Bugti said that President General Pervez Musharraf himself had accepted that Balochistan’s main issue was the right to rule and people’s legitimate rights.

He said that General Musharraf had repeatedly said that he would restore the rights to the Baloch people but had done noting so far. “(President) Musharraf’s statement proves that it was not a personal problem. Balochistan belongs to the Baloch nation and the Baloch people are fighting to protect their resources and (the province’s) coast,” he said.

He warned that the Baloch people would expand their struggle in the face of accelerated efforts to snatch away Balochistan’s coast from them. He said that the struggle to protect the province’s coastal areas and its resources required more than issuing statements, holding protest demonstrations, hunger strikes and rallies.

“It needs a strong resistance movement,” he said, adding that history would not forgive the Baloch people if they failed to forge unity now.

He said that any change in situation depended on the rulers, who had “imposed a war on the people of Balochistan”.