The helicopter gunships came from the east, out of the sun, flying low and in formation. Bristling with rockets and machine guns, they were to prove more than a match for the Marri Baloch people in their goat-hair tents.

Some 15,000 Baloch families had gathered in the fertile Chamalang Valley to graze their flocks of fat-tailed sheep. It is one of the few areas with rich grazing in all of Balochistan, an austere land of rugged desert that respires its own dust. This was the summer of 1974 and most of the menfolk had stayed in the mountains to fight with the guerrillas. Women, children and the elderly had slipped down from the highlands to escape the unremitting bombs and strafing attacks.

Pakistan’s military, frustrated by their failure to annihilate the Baloch insurgents, sent in the Huey Cobra gunships to lure the fighters from their mountain hideouts to defend their families. Every Baloch knows the story of Chamalang, a vicious six-day battle with the inevitable, bloody finale.

The pastoral communities of Balochistan were divided in three when Britain drew her imperial boundaries in the nineteenth century. Roughly a third went to Persia, a few were destined for a narrow strip of Afghanistan, and the rest to British India, later Pakistan. The Baloch never asked to be in Pakistan. Forced into nullifying their own independence in 1948, an insurgency arose and is periodically suppressed. In that summer of 1974, the Shah of Iran, fearing that insurrection might spread across the border to the Baloch living in eastern Iran, sent the Huey Cobra gunships with Iranian pilots to help.

The massacre at Chamalang helps to motivate successive insurgencies, each protesting against the continued economic marginalization and political discrimination faced by the Baloch. Each suppression leaves a legacy of hatred to fuel another generation.