A brand new China-backed international airport is getting ready to be inaugurated in Gwadar, a port city in Pakistan’s restive Balochistan province.

Chinese media reported in June that the airport will be completed and handed over to the local authorities this year.

The airport is part of the multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), part of China’s global collection of infrastructure projects and trade networks known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

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The ethnic Baloch, who constitute a majority in the province, have staged massive protests in recent days against the Pakistani government for what they view as unfair exploitation of their natural resources.

The Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), a rights group campaigning for the civil, political and socioeconomic rights of the Baloch, has mobilized people and organized huge rallies across Balochistan.

Mahrang Baloch, the BYC leader, told DW that they were organizing “a movement against Baloch genocide,” accusing Pakistani authorities of carrying out thousands of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

“China or any other country investing in Balochistan is directly involved in the Baloch genocide. The enforced disappearances and forced displacements in the Makran coastal belt are huge. They are looting our resources with no gain to local Baloch,” she said.

But the Pakistani military labeled the BYC as “proxies” for what it called terrorists and criminal mafias.

“Their strategy is gathering crowds with foreign funding, inciting unrest among the people, challenging government authority through stone pelting, vandalism, and making unreasonable demands,” Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the head of the military’s media wing, told reporters last week.

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China announced the CPEC project in 2015 with an aim to expand its trade links and influence in Pakistan and across Central and South Asia.

The idea behind the project was to connect China’s western Xinjiang province with the sea via Pakistan.

This would shorten trade routes for China and help avoid the contentious Malacca Strait choke point, a narrow waterway between Malaysia and Sumatra that links the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

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Some Baloch fear that the Chinese are investing in Gwadar to exploit the province’s natural resources. Baloch separatists have also targeted Chinese interests in Pakistan.

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[Kiyya] Baloch [a local journalist who has extensively covered about the region] added that the protests are “unique,” pointing to the unprecedented number of women taking part in them.

“Never before have so many women taken to the streets to demand their rights, not only in Balochistan but across this region.”