Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, the chief of the Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP), said on Sunday that the Baloch people were struggling for their rights as the Palestinians were but the government, following in the footsteps of Israel, called them terrorists. Talking to reporters at the house of Qazi Abdul Qadeer Khamosh, the vice president of the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD), on the phone from Dera Bugti, Mr Bugti said that Balochis were not terrorists but the government was victimising them with state terrorism. "They are demanding jobs and the regime is giving them cantonments," Bugti added.He said that Pakistan was set up as an Islamic republic but the rulers had turned into it into an un-Islamic and undemocratic state for their petty interests. He said that the Centre had been plundering Balochistan's resources for the last 56 years and it was kept backward. He alleged that successive governments had denied people their rights and trampled the provinces' autonomy and that was why East Pakistan was separated but the governments had not learnt a lesson from it. He said that Pakistan was facing a 1971-like situation at the hands of the present regime.