Jaffarabad flooded to save airbase: Jamali

Published September 6, 2010

DERA MURAD JAMALI Former prime minister Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali has said he will approach the Supreme Court on the issue of the Tori embankment breach which has inundated Jaffarabad district.

“I am consulting my lawyers to file a petition in the apex court, making all those party who are responsible for breaching the Tori dyke,” he told this correspondent.

Mr Jamali said he had appealed to the chief justice and the army chief to hold an inquiry into the breach that had destroyed the green belt of Balochistan.

“Whoever is responsible should be brought to justice for inundating parts of Balochistan just to save the Shahbaz airbase being used by American forces since 2001.”

He blamed some Sindh ministers and some other people for breaching the dyke.

It was a pre-planned conspiracy, he alleged, to destroy the green belt of Balochistan because the province depended on it for foodgrains.

Last year, he said, Sindh stopped Balochistan's water share from the Indus and now they have inun-dated Jaffarabad district where standing crops on about 400,000 acres were washed away and half a million people were rendered homeless.

The former prime minister said he had received information that US forces had shifted their aircraft and equipment two days before the dyke was breached.

He said the Jacobabad district coordination officer and some ministers had carried out construction work at the airbase and a flooding of the base would have exposed the quality of work.

The former prime minister, whose village Rojhan Jamali has been destroyed by waters from the Tori breach, said he was a Muslim and a Pakistani but it was ironic that the entire Baloch belt right from Rajanpur to Jhal Magsi had been inundated.

He said that when the Sukkur barrage faced massive floods in 1976, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then prime minister, decided in just seven minutes to breach the Aliwan dyke to divert the floodwaters towards the desert to save the barrage.

This time, some federal and provincial ministers did not allow the breaching of the Aliwan dyke and ordered a breach in the Tori embankment.