For imperialist forces, neither land, nor nature, nor villages or towns matter. Why should they, in the first place? The rules of capitalist modernity are those of profit and exploitation, and of course, they will act according to them. There is little meaning in trying to change the minds of those who are the agents of this system. Just as everyone lives by morals and culture, they do as well.
For the people, societies, their land, their home, their villages, and towns mean everything, for these are the places where they live, love, grieve, create, and pass away. This is what connects all people, this is the culture every society lives out. The love for their own homeland puts the society in natural opposition to Capitalist Modernity. They try to live and preserve while Capitalism tries to destroy and steal. Wherever the society is strongly connected to their homeland, and have not been corrupted, there will be resistance. There they will insist on their life.
One of these places, where the both opposed sides of history encounter each other in the most direct way, is the city of Gwadar. But where is Gwadar? Gwadar is a harbor city on the Arabian Sea but considered a Gateway to the Indian Ocean. It is located in the East of Baluchistan, which is occupied by Pakistan. To understand the struggle between society and the Capitalist Modernity that is unfolding here, let’s first look at Gwadar from the perspective of the people.
Gwadar appears to be an old settlement, like most of the Baloch cities. For the region has always been an object of power struggles of different dynasties, a part of the historical Balochistan is today occupied by Iran, dividing the people and the area by an artificial state border. From the earliest stage of global imperialism, when Portuguese invaders came to the region, Gwadar became of interest to them. They tried to seize the town by looting and burning its surrounding areas, but it had been defended by Baloch tribes. Later, the British colonizers took advantage of power concurrence between different local kingdoms and made Gwadar one of their centers of overseas trade and political interventions.
The harbor became a strategic point for Pakistan with the emergence of the so-called “Belt and Road” project by China since the beginning of 2014. While there is a lot to say about this project, we want to explain shortly. For its imperial plans, China is working on a trade route that passes through the Middle East and goes until Europe. By building such a route, they want to control trade and geopolitics on one side, and on the other side, they want to be able to export products in the best ways possible to the world market and become hegemonic in these fields. Its concurrence with India makes the coast of Balochistan, controlled by Pakistan, the closest entry to the westbound sea route. Pakistan, being both economically and politically weak and also experienced with the oppression of ethnic and religious minorities, is the perfect partner, or better to say object, for China’s plans. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the local realization of the “Belt and Road” is mainly focusing on Balochistan and has caused protests by different organizations and movements of the wide landscape of the Baloch resistance movement.
This resistance ranges from demonstrations and media campaigns to armed actions by Baloch guerrilla groups, targeting Chinese and Pakistani implementers of the colonial projects as well as local collaborators. Actions have been carried out by the Baloch Liberation Army, leading to losses in the ranks of the Pakistani army and Chinese engineering staff, in Gwadar itself but also in other parts of the huge Chinese-Pakistani trade route project line (1)
These different forms of resistance and agencies that oppose the CPEC brought the Pakistani state to a situation in which it is scared of losing its role as a local agent of global capitalism. The Chinese investors are not too satisfied with Pakistan not being able to control the people and oppress their resistance. This situation led the state to a new offensive against Baloch people, the Gwadar Fence Project. As reported by different Baloch organizations(2), the already militarized city is bound to become a trade castle, keeping the indigenous people out of it and fully sacrificing it to the means of profit. Therefore, 24 square kilometers are being fenced and over 500 surveillance cameras being installed. The number of military personnel being deployed was not shared until now.
While these are only numbers, the meaning of this project needs to be understood rightly and not separated from the global warfare of the Capitalist Modernity against the people for the sake of a new order that they hope will save them from the crisis they have maneuvered the world into. The Middle East has been for a long time the center of what Abdullah Öcalan (3) named the third world war. The occupation and genocidal politics in Kurdistan, Palestine, and Balochistan bring pain, suffering, and grief to millions of people, but they all appear just as calculations in the projects of Capitalist Modernity for establishing new routes to trade goods and energy.
Capitalist Modernity turns the most precious and ancient lands into graveyards of people and their culture. While they may be the ones that get the most blood on their hands, it is neither the Turkish State, Israel nor Pakistan alone that is about to turn the Middle East into seas of blood and ruins of erased heritage. It is a logic that chooses profit over life, calculation over empathy, and state over people. As we painfully witness, hoping for help or support by international institutions like the United Nations, did not stop any of these imperial aggressions. For decades, genocidal politics have been implied in Kurdistan, Palestine, and Balochistan and besides empty words and statements, nothing has happened. This should not be astonishing for them being a part of the same system, the same logic.
What should astonish us are the shortcomings in building up a unity of the people, those who are connected to life, society, heritage, freedom, peace, and equality. Building stronger ties and structures that don’t fall for false friends and overcome racism and religious differences that have been created to divide are crucial tasks for the near future. The trade route may be one of its first stations in Gwadar, but it is not going to stop there. For Capitalist Modernity, every ethnicity and every region is just a number of calculation, every town is a potential trade spot that can be cleaned from its people.
(2) https://bsoazad.org/editorial/editorial-the-gwadar-fencing-project/ and https://twitter.com/BalochYakjehtiC/status/1786077208504852606
(3) https://www.peaceinkurdistancampaign.com/resources/abdullah-ocalan/
This report was published on/by Internationalist Commune of Rojava