Updated on
Summary Congressman Dana Rohrabacher's resolution calls for right of self-determination for Balochistan.
The chairman of subcommittee on oversight and investigations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Dana Rohrabacher has introduced a House Concurrent Resolution, advocating that the Balochi nation has a historic right to self-determination. Baluchistan, his resolution states, was currently divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan with no sovereign rights of its own.In Pakistan especially, the Balochi people are subjected to violence and extrajudicial killing. They have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country; and they should be afforded the opportunity to choose their own status,” he demands. “The Balochi, like other nations of people, have an innate right to self-determination,” says Rohrabacher. “The political and ethnic discrimination they suffer is tragic and made more so because America is financing and selling arms to their oppressors in Islamabad.”Historically Balochistan was an independently governed entity known as the Baloch Khanate of Kalat which came to an end after invasions from both British and Persian armies. An attempt to regain independence in 1947 was crushed by an invasion by Pakistan. Today the Baluchistan province of Pakistan is rich in natural resources but has been subjugated and exploited by Punjabi and Pashtun elites in Islamabad, leaving Balochistan the country’s poorest province, the resolution reads.It may be mentioned here that Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California, also chaired a meeting of the subcommittee on oversight and investigations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also chaired a hearing last week on human rights violations in Balochistan, in which several leading policy scholars and human rights activists testified.The US State Department spokesperson, Victoria Nuland though had chosen to distance the administration from the Congressional hearing at that time, saying that individual hearing commissioned by Congressmen did not represent the viewpoint of the government and no government official was part of it.Congressman Rohrabacher, a couple of weeks ago, has also co-authored an op-ed with another Congressman Louie Gohmert, Republican from Texas, expressing support for an independent Balochistan. His actions have caused a lot of anguish in Pakistan, which has called it a clear case of interfering in Pakistans internal affairs.He is also seeking to introduce another bill in the House of Representatives for granting US citizenship and a Congressional medal to Dr. Shakeel Afridi, who is detained in Pakistan on charges of running a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad on the behest of CIA to help them reach Osama bin laden.- Contributed by Awais Saleem, Dunya News correspondent in Washington, DC
