ISLAMABAD, June 26: Balochistan Governor Owais Ghani has said that bullets cannot resolve the issue of Balochistan which can be resolved only through a political solution.
“Political issues have political solutions and can never be resolved through bullets or terrorism. The Balochistan issue is also a political issue and can be resolved only through political dialogue”, Mr Ghani said at a seminar on “Soft Images of Balochistan” on Monday.
He said the doors of the government were still open for a dialogue but a serious one that could lead to a solution acceptable to all the stakeholders.
He said the recommendations of the sub-committee of parliament could not be implemented because of ‘lack of ownership.’
“No one was ready to own the recommendations. How can the government implement the recommendations if the Sardars do not own them? Recommendations must be owned by not only all the nationalist parties but a single-member party as well to create broad-based consensus,” he said.
Mr Ghani said he had approached Nawab Akbar Bugti, the chief of the Jamhoori Watan Party who has taken to the mountains and has been fighting back government forces — to urge him to abandon militancy and solve the issue through dialogue, but ‘it did not work.’
The governor said the government was ‘reluctantly fighting back’ the militants and terrorists to avoid ‘maximum collateral damage.’ Some of the reported damages were caused by mines laid by the militants, he said.
He said the time for a broad-based serious and open dialogue on Balochistan was never over. He said the success of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in creating a broad-based consensus on the 1973 Constitution lied in his strategy to contact even minority and one-member parties and the issue of Balochistan also needed the same approach.
The governor also reiterated the government’s earlier stance of involvement of foreign hands in deteriorating law and order situation in the province, ‘which has border with the war-torn Afghanistan and Iran and coastal links with other countries of the region and is very difficult to police.’
Mr Ghani presented an analysis of the Baloch population, claiming that Mari and Bugti tribes were in minority and more than 80 per cent of the population was with the government.
