Aid to besieged Pakistani province blocked

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's military government is preventing aid groups from helping more than 80,000 people — many of them acutely malnourished children — who have been displaced by a widening civil war in remote southern Baluchistan, international aid workers and diplomats said.

An internal assessment by UNICEF and Pakistan's provincial health officials, who surveyed the area in July and August, report that 59,000 of those suffering are women and children and that 28 percent of the children younger than 5 were "acutely malnourished."

"I would say this now qualifies as a 'crimes-against-humanity' situation," said one foreign observer who interviewed delegates from the region.

For six months, aid agencies and diplomats have been pressing Pakistani authorities to permit them to distribute aid packages, which include emergency rations, tents and medicine. The United Nations won't deliver aid without permission from the host nation.

Meanwhile, reports from the region indicate the situation has grown even more wretched with the onset of winter.

Pakistani authorities dismissed the UNICEF report as overblown, saying the majority of people in Baluchistan were already poor and nomadic, and most of those displaced by fighting returned home after an important rebel leader was killed in August.

Oil, gas fields at stake

Villagers are caught in a conflict between the government and rebel tribesmen, who took up arms last year to demand greater autonomy for the Baluch people and a larger share of the resources in the gas-rich, sparsely populated province.

Vast Baluchistan makes up 40 percent of Pakistan's land area, but is home to only 4 percent of its 170 million people.

Because of federal formulas that dole out development funding for roads, schools and hospitals based on population alone, the impoverished province lags far behind other parts of the country in development and social indicators.

The homelands of the rebel Bugti and Marri tribes sit atop rich oil and gas fields the government wants to exploit.

Their struggle has remained largely out of view of the world media, which focus instead on Islamabad's wavering efforts to root out the Taliban and al-Qaida along the Afghan border.

But it has grown into a major conflict and a major challenge for President Pervez Musharraf, who has sent thousands of paramilitary troops to put down the rebellion. During 2006, the rebel tribesmen bombed civilian buses, rocketed military bases and attacked gas pipelines.

In August, a Pakistani military operation killed one of the main rebel leaders, tribal chief Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, 79. On Tuesday, a former lieutenant of Bugti, who surrendered to the government in June in return for amnesty, was killed by a land mine.

Death triggered riots

Musharraf said tribal chiefs such as Bugti keep their people poor and backward to maintain control. He has repeatedly pledged to bring development and economic investment to the province.

But Bugti's death sparked widespread rioting among his supporters in the provincial capital of Quetta, and four months later, the insurgency shows no signs of abating.

There are aid-worker reports that military trucks rounded up displaced people and hid them ahead of earlier visits by local aid groups.

"The official logic is that they can't guarantee safety for the internationals, or even for local aid groups," said Samina Ahmed, head of the International Crisis Group's (ICG) office in Islamabad.

"The unofficial logic, I suspect, is basically neglect more than anything," she said.

Compounding the lack of aid access is that the displaced families have decamped across wide, isolated areas.

A climate of political oppression, in which more than 150 Baluch activists have been arrested and taken to undisclosed locations, amplifies the crisis, human-rights workers and opposition politicians said.

Baluch politicians, meanwhile, complain that millions of dollars in U.S. military hardware, given to the Pakistani military to fight Islamic insurgents in the tribal belt, have been diverted to Baluchistan and used against the rebel tribes.

"Are the American people aware of how their donations are being used?" a Baluch politician asked angrily.

As debate over the issue rages, Robert van Dijk, the top UNICEF officer for Pakistan, said supplies of medicine and food are sitting in Quetta warehouses and could be distributed in as little as two weeks.