Abdul Hamid Khan is chairman of the Balawaristan National Front (BNF) , a nationalist political party of Gilgit-Baltistan, the Northern Areas of Pakistan. Along with his unemployed friends, Nawaz Khan Naji, Mohammad Rafiq and Shujaat Ali, Abdul Hamid Khan established BNF on July 30, 1992 and started a political struggle for the human and political rights of the deprived people of Gilgit-Baltistan. But, in the depoliticized region the bureaucratic establishement tortured him severely and sent him to imprisonment by framing many charges. He fled Pakistan in March 1999 when the country’s spy agency ISI allegedly threatened to kill him on writing a letter to the Uited Nations and the Western governments about an intrigue of Taliban’s programe to invade Gilgit-Baltistan. In a website he says,

“I was mentally shocked and my conscious shook when Pakistani and Afghan terrorists attacked our brothers (Shia Muslims) by using the name of religion in 1988 during General Zia’s regime, otherwise I was sympathizer and worker of Pakistani parties like Tehrik-e-Istiqlal. I was supporer of Nizam- e-Mustafa campaign in 1977 against Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto." [1]

Abdul Hamid Khan was born on July 10, 1953, in Bahrkohlti, a small village of Yasen in the Ghizer district. His opponents accuse him as a lackey of the former despotic ruling families, known as Mir or Raja. He has remained a sympathizer of them, who were dismissed from their years of despotic rule in 1974 by the then Pakistani prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

External links

• Balawaristan National Front
• South Asia Analysis Group
• The Changing Northern Areas
• Pakistan's Northern Areas dilemma
• Northern Areas Development Gateway
• Pakistan's Northern Areas
• Northern Pakistan's Karakoram & Hindukush Mountains
• The Mountain Areas Conservancy Project
• Gilgit Map
• Not ‘Mir of Hunza’