Enforced Disappearances of Pakistan’s Baloch - Will Imran Khan Act?
By
Nasrullah Baloch
9 Mar 2021
In February
2020, Haseeba Qambrani, a young woman living in Pakistan’s south-western
province of Balochistan, received chilling news: Her brother Hassan and cousin
Hizbullah had gone missing. This was not the first time her family had
experienced such a tragedy, just a few years earlier, in 2015, Haseeba’s other
brother Salman and cousin Gazain went missing. One year later, Haseeba’s family
discovered their mutilated dead bodies.
In this January 5, 2010 file photo, relatives of forcefully disappeared
people from Balochistan are seen as they demonstrate in front of Pakistan's
Supreme Court, in Islamabad, Pakistan [File:Human Rights Watch]
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The
whereabouts of Hassan and Hizbullah are still unknown a year later, and Haseeba
is still trying to find them. She is not alone in her search for loved ones who
have been abducted over the years in Balochistan.
Balochistan
borders Afghanistan and Iran. Full of mountains and deserts, I call this place
my home. Here, thousands of men and boys have been forcefully disappeared, held
in incommunicado detention for long periods, or extra judicially killed in the
last two decades.
My own
uncle, Ali Asghar Bangulzai, was abducted from Balochistan’s provincial
capital, Quetta, in 2001. Twenty years on, we still do not know where he is.
Deen Muhammad, a local doctor, suffered the same fate in June 2009, and his
wife and two daughters Sammi and Mehlab are still searching for him. In October
2016, a student leader, Shabbir Baloch, was disappeared during a military
operation. His relatives are still waiting for his return.
I could go
on. As a co-founder and chairperson of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons
(VBMP), a grassroots collective representing family members of Balochistan’s
forcibly disappeared, I have registered more than 5,000 such cases. Other
grassroots movements across the country have also collected chilling stories
about fathers, brothers and sons who have been picked up by security forces in
other parts of the country and vanished without a trace over the years.
Several
organisations, including the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Working Group on Enforced
Disappearances, have confirmed that the security forces are the primary
suspects behind these disappearances. In 2012, when I admitted cases to the
Supreme Court on behalf of VBMP, a three-judge bench formally declared that
based on the evidence, it is clear that law enforcement agencies have been
behind the abductions.
The
security forces do not deny their role: They say that they are hunting for
“militants.” In 2019, they said that some of the missing may have joined “rebel
groups” and not “not every person missing is attributable to the state.” Yet,
the practice began under the watch of military ruler, Pervez Musharraf, 20
years ago, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the US invasion of
Afghanistan. Musharraf allied the country with the US in the so-called “war on
terror” and assisted the US in the abduction, unlawful detention and torture of
suspected “militants”.
Soon, this
extrajudicial practice spread to Balochistan and started to be used against
anyone demanding social justice and equal rights. Many political workers,
students, teachers and activists who committed no other crime than trying to
help those in need or demanding basic rights and freedoms for Baloch
communities, have been targeted.
Take the
case of my uncle, Ali Asghar Bangulzai. In 1998, a Baloch community called the
Marris left the Afghan city of Kandahar, crossed into Pakistan, and settled on
the outskirts of Quetta, all in an effort to protect themselves from the
Taliban. They had migrated to Afghanistan to escape a 1970s counterinsurgency
campaign in Pakistan. My uncle witnessed their arrival and, concerned for their
welfare, organised aid for them. He distributed food and blankets and even made
some schooling and healthcare arrangements for the members of this impoverished
and displaced community. He also set up a small support committee, of which I
was a part. For these efforts, he was abducted.
For more
than a decade, families have organised as part of the VBMP and protested in
front of press clubs, gone to courts and met politicians to find our missing
relatives and prevent other families from experiencing the same pain.
We have had
some victories and many setbacks on our journey. Since the beginning of our
protests, several representatives of the Pakistani state have admitted that
security agencies are responsible for enforced disappearances. These admissions
led to the establishment of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced
Disappearances in 2011. The commission, however, has failed to achieve much in
the last 10 years.
In 2019,
the Ministry of Human Rights drafted a bill to criminalise enforced
disappearances, giving us hope that this unlawful practice may soon come to an
end. The draft, however, has since disappeared in a web of bureaucracy and is
unlikely to be accepted as law anytime soon.
Last year,
as a result of negotiations between the VBMP and the Balochistan provincial
government, several individuals who have been missing for some time have been
released. We also saw some improvement in the length of disappearances –
instead of disappearing men and boys for months or years, the security forces
started to release many of those they unlawfully abducted after just a few days
or weeks. But thousands of people, including my uncle, are still missing, and authorities
still seem reluctant to provide us with any answers or take any action against
the unlawful practices of the state security forces.
Last month,
frustrated with the lack of progress on our relatives’ cases, I travelled with
thirteen other members of the VBMP to the capital Islamabad. We sat outside the
Islamabad Press Club and demanded that government authorities pay attention to
our plight. When no one from Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government came to
talk to us, we took our protest to the D-Chowk – a square in the government
district close to the prime minister’s office, Parliament and the Supreme
Court.
We sat
there, out on the street, in freezing temperatures, for days, and made it clear
to those around us that we had no intention of leaving before talking to
someone in government. First, members of the opposition started visiting us,
and eventually, several parliamentarians from the ruling party showed up as
well.
The ruling
party parliamentarians promised to find out the whereabouts and conditions of
our relatives. They also assured us that if our relatives are found to be in
state custody, they will either be released or publicly put to trial in a civil
court. In subsequent meetings with Federal Minister of the Interior Sheikh
Rashid Ahmed, Federal Minister of Law and Justice Mohammad Farogh Naseem,
Federal Minister of Human Rights Shireen Mazari and the head of the Commission
of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, Justice Javed Iqbal, we were promised
action on these points by March 13.
We are now
waiting for the government, the judges and the bureaucrats to take action and
give us some real answers. We are hopeful, yet cautious, as we have been
disappointed by promises that proved to be empty many times before.
What we
want from the government is actually quite simple. As Pakistani citizens, we
have rights that are enshrined in the constitution. We ask only that these
rights are upheld and respected. We want to know where our relatives are and
what they have been through since their abduction. If they are accused of any
crimes, we want these charges to be made public. We are ready for our loved
ones to be tried in a court of law. What we cannot accept is their
disappearance. If the Pakistani security forces are not behind their
disappearance, then we want them to work with us to find out what really
happened to them, as is their constitutional duty.
Today,
Pakistan is battling not only the coronavirus pandemic but also a deadly
epidemic of enforced disappearances. It is time our elected representatives
acknowledged our suffering and helped us find our loved ones.
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Nasrullah
Baloch is Chairperson of Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, a collective working
for the release of victims of enforced disappearances in Pakistan.
Original
Headline: Ending Pakistan’s epidemic of enforced disappearances
Source: The Al-Jazeera
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-sectarianism/enforced-disappearances-pakistan’s-baloch-imran/d/124501