Khair Bakhsh Marri

Khair Bakhsh Marri (Urdu: نواب خیر بخش مری) is a politician from Balochistan, Pakistan. He has been leading a nationalist and separatist in the country for the past four decades. He is also the head of his powerful Marri tribe.

Nawab Khair Baksh Marri, a Marxist by conviction who believes in “movements of national liberation” went to Afghanistan after the communists took power there in 1979. Nawab Khair Baksh Marri was among the opposition political figures prosecuted during the widely discredited Hyderabad tribunal. He lived in Kabul while a large number of his tribesmen were located in a big camp near Kandahar in the heyday of the Saur Revolution where they faced hardships as the communists experienced difficulties.

In 1989, the Pakistan Peoples Party government in Islamabad was already anticipating the fall of Najibullah's PDPA government and had set up a government of the mujahideen in exile in Peshawar. The following year, however, under the Pakistan Muslim League government, a move was set afoot by former Balochistan chief minister Taj Muhammad Jamali to bring Khair Baksh Marri, General Sherof Bijarani (Marri) and his men back from Afghanistan.

After the Marris were brought back they were housed by the government of the day in a camp in the suburbs of Quetta. That is why the place was called a “camp”. The government demarcated the land, but did not go through the procedure of legalising the tribe’s ownership of it. It would therefore be wrong to say that the Marris were in illegal occupation of the camp. In fact they have become owners through the law of uninterrupted and unchallenged occupation. That these Marris were a disgruntled lot no one can deny. That they were fiercely loyal to Nawab Marri too cannot be denied. Therefore before further aggressive measures are taken in hand and house-to-house searches are made, these facts should be kept in mind so that the trouble in Balochistan is not compounded with more summary injustice.