Word: pakistan
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...natural gas and oil reserves, which, while largely untapped, yield revenues from which the Baluch feel excluded. Successive generations have waged armed rebellions against Pakistani rule - in 1948, 1953, through the 1960s and 70s, and now. According to analysts, continued abuses at the hands of security forces and Pakistan's shadowy intelligence agency, the ISI, have intensified separatist feeling to an unprecedented scale. "Baluch nationalism is more broad-based, is a more serious phenomenon than at any time in the past," says Selig Harrison, a leading authority on the Baluch and director of the Center for International Policy in Washington...
When the world looks at Pakistan, its attention justifiably focuses on the rugged northern border with Afghanistan, a nexus of Taliban activity and the site of an ongoing multi-pronged campaign against the militants. Battling jihadism there is a pivotal plank in the Obama administration's plans to stabilize the war-ravaged region and eventually dial down America's military presence...
...shadow of this "Af-Pak" frontier, another conflict has grown new life in recent years and, according to experts, poses a possibly greater existential threat to the Pakistani state. The province of Baluchistan, situated along Pakistan's west and northwest borders with Iran and Afghanistan, comprises more than 40% of Pakistan's landmass but less than 5% of its people. Its unforgiving deserts nearly annihilated the armies of Alexander the Great as they marched home. The native Baluch, descendants of nomadic tribes who roamed these arid wastes, number around five million and have for years complained of marginalization and mistreatment...
...dimensions of the Baluch struggle are made all the more complicated by the region's political geography. Around a million ethnic Baluch live on the other side of the border in Iran and there, too, have long agitated against a repressive state for greater freedoms. During Pakistan's most brutal crackdown on Baluch separatists in the 1970s - when civilians reportedly died in the thousands - Iran lent Pakistan logistical support, including helicopters. At the time, the two countries were allied together under the U.S.-led CENTO Cold War pact, but following Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 relations changed, with Tehran...
...presidential re-election and turn the country into a puppet of his left-wing ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Those fears were the basis for the June coup. Many Zelaya supporters, meanwhile, feel Micheletti and other coup leaders should stand trial as well. Still, Clinton, amid her visit to Pakistan on Friday, hailed Honduras for being a rare "example of a country in Latin America that, having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order, overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue...