Lost in Pakistan

6th February 1976 was a pleasant winter day in Karachi. 

Asad Mengal, son of former Chief Minister Balochistan Atta Ullah Mengal, and his friend Ahmed Kurd sat at the home of Baloch politician Balakh Sher Mazari. They were discussing politics over tea. As they stepped out to leave, shots and sirens suddenly filled the air. The pair were shot and whisked away by law enforcement agencies. They disappeared. 

On 5th July 1977, Army Chief Zia Ul Haq declared Martial Law and imprisoned Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto wrote several books from jail. He wrote his last book titled “Ufwah aur Haqeeqat” (Rumour and Reality) and in Chapter Three, shocking insights are revealed about Asad Mengal’s disappearance. According to the book, Bhutto received a call from Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi (CM Sindh) who informed him about Asad Mengal and Ahmed Kurd’s abduction. After several days of unsuccessful search for both men, Bhutto talked to General Tikka Khan about Asad and Ahmed Kurd. Tikka Khan, in a sad tone, informed PM Bhutto that they were killed during detention and their bodies were buried somewhere along the route to Quetta.

Nobody ever found them or their bodies.

Asad Mengal and Ahmed Kurd were the first missing persons in Balochistan, and their case was the first high-profile case of this sort. The practice of enforced disappearances began in 1973 when Bhutto dissolved the provincial assembly of Balochistan, which was headed by CM Ataullah Mengal. Bhutto initiated a military operation, and as a result, thousands of Baloch went into exile–– including Marri Chieftain Khair Bux Marri (a powerful and popular Baloch nationalist politician). This instigated a militant movement against Bhutto’s regime. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur was one of the comrades of Khair Bux Marri who remembers the beginning of the resistance movement and what led up to it.

“Enforced disappearances began during the 1973-77 insurgency. Apart from [Mengal and Kurd], my friends Shafi Mohammad Marri, Bahar Khan Marri, Ali Dost Marri, Allah Bakhsh Marri were picked up and never heard of again,” Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur shares with Lok Sujag about the early days, “there must have been other Marris and Mengals too – these people were picked up on suspicion and must have been tortured to death during interrogation.”

Baloch people from diverse backgrounds of faith and class participated in the mid-70s insurgency. For example, Duleep Dass (Dali), a Christian Marxist from Karachi, was part of Khair Bux Marri’s militant movement. He was picked up in the summer of 1976 with his friend Sher Ali Marri from Belpat, Balochistan, and nobody heard of him again. 

Mahvish Ahmad, Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics at London School of Economics (LSE), covered enforced disappearances and violence in Balochistan for over a decade as a journalist. At LSE, she’s currently researching state violence in Balochistan. 

“Enforced disappearances in Balochistan play a role in not just disappearing individual bodies, but in disappearing a series of political ideas, of alternative histories, of sovereign claims to land that are seen to threaten Pakistani sovereignty,” she argues. 

Mahvish believes that enforced disappearance is a tactic of oppression throughout the country, and is not unique to the Baloch in Pakistan:

“But it’s interesting how it gets attached to our imagination of the Baloch. The Baloch in particular are missing, more than anyone else. There is a reason that there is an over-identification of being missing with the Baloch. It’s like a chosen tactic of state terror for the Baloch.”

 

Latin America to Pakistan: The Global Origins of Enforced Disappearances 

Pakistan’s tactic of enforced disappearances existed before the Baloch militant struggle, and was not just used for the Baloch. At the backdrop of the Cold War, the first victim in Pakistan was Secretary General of the Communist Party Hassan Nasir, a Cambridge University alumnus who was picked up on 2nd August 1960 from Karachi and disapeared, only to be found allegedly dead later, during the Ayub regime (1958-69).

In his article “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” Nadeem Farooq Paracha writes that Hassan’s mother saw an exhumed body that was presented by the government and told her that he was Hasan Nasir. She refused to acknowledge him, and thus, his body was never found. The state declared his death as suicide.

During the Cold War, enforced disappearances were a preferred strategy of all the US-backed regimes across the globe. Communists of Latin America witnessed a brutal crackdown. Governments were overthrown, and dictatorships secured power by force. Subsequently, military regimes of Latin America gained exceptional notoriety for weaponising the practice of enforced disappearances against civilian populations. Harvard Professor Kristen Weld explains the origin of the practice of enforced disappearances in her story for Revista Magazine. She writes:

“As a systematic practice of calculated state repression in Latin America, forced disappearance was first deployed in Guatemala. The year was 1966. In Chile, General Augusto Pinochet cracked down on the opposition to his 1973 coup with a withering ferocity. Those trade unionists and students whom the regime tortured to death or summarily executed had their corpses spirited away and piled in remote mass graves in the Atacama Desert. There, their ageing family members still walk the rocky plains in the thin air, searching for bone fragments, like ghosts.”

Scholars like Dawn Paley (journalist and author), Greg Grandin (Yale professor of history), and others believe that enforced disappearances were used as a tool to sustain neo-liberal policies through military dictatorships during the '60s and onwards. This tactic of enforced disappearances was used throughout the world. From Argentina to Pakistan, enforced disappearances were on the rise to quell any dissent. The incidents had become so endemic that the issue made it to many forums, and then finally to the United Nations.

On 22nd December 1978, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted Resolution 33/173 on “Disappeared Persons.” Its draft was presented to a working committee by Colombia and supported by 24 other Latin American countries. The resolution asked governments to search for the disappeared, investigate incidents and hold law enforcers accountable. The Commission took well over a decade to enable the UN to make the next move. The General Assembly adopted “Declaration on the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance” on 18 December 1992 through Resolution 47/33. 

The Resolution had also recognized the need for progressive development of international law–– to ensure effective implementation of its human rights framework, including the declaration on enforced disappearances. The General Assembly finally adopted and opened for signature, ratification and accession of the “International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance” on 20 December 2006. The Convention went into force on 23rd December 2010.

Pakistan is not a signatory to the convention.

According to Habib Tahir, supreme court lawyer and former vice chairperson of Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Balochistan chapter, “Pakistan is itself involved in activities of enforced disappearances so it makes sense they don’t want to sign the convention––that way, no pressure can come from the United Nations.” However, Pakistan is a signatory to other international human rights agreements which prohibit enforced disappearances, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). “Nevertheless, there is little accountability.” says Habib. 
 

Status Quo

Balochistan was at the peak of a new wave of enforced disappearances when the International Convention on Enforced Disappearances was opened for signatures by the countries in 2006. 

An organised wave of enforced disappearances had started in Balochistan during the fourth military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf in the early 2000s. He came to power in a bloodless military coup, ousting then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. With this coup, Baloch insurgent groups reorganised across Balochistan. 

It was also then that activists started reporting that “Death Squads” (private militias of local criminals, drug lords and pro-Pakistan Baloch political activists) were being run under the State umbrella, which they claimed was responsible for enforced disappearances and subsequent killings. 

A couple of years into Musharraf's governance, the US suffered its deadliest terrorist attack: 9/11. In America’s subsequent “War on Terror,” Afghanistan and Pakistan became targets. Musharraf decided to ally with the US in this war. 

People from across Pakistan, especially from Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan which share a border with Afghanistan, were picked up on unfounded and vague suspicion of being “terrorists”–– associated with Al-Qaeda or its related groups.

“You had a couple of abductions, famous ones, prior to 9/11. But mass scale disappearances happened post-9/11 – and the particular US imperial technique of disappearances travelled here,” says Mahvish. 

“Just after the announcement of a war, people started reporting missing from various parts of Pakistan. Initially, it was targeted at anyone who dressed like a jihadi, but later on, around 2004, we started reporting enforced disappearances from various parts of Balochistan which was not pro-Al Qaeda,” says a veteran journalist who has been reporting missing persons for over two decades. He has requested to remain anonymous due to security reasons. 

“Two events were primarily the reason for the current wave of enforced disappearances. In 2005, Musharraf visited Kohlu, Balochistan. A public gathering was arranged for him, but suddenly eight rockets were fired by separatists in a nearby town. Secondly, killing Akbar Bugti in 2006 resulted in reorganising Baloch nationalist groups against the state.”

He explains that “everyone was a target in Balochistan during Musharraf’s time. Journalists, doctors, political activists, lawyers, and even sympathisers of missing persons. At first, they were disappearing people, but later they started to kill and dump. Those who returned were not mentally stable enough to even talk.”

“It became viciously brutal from 2008 when the PPP formed a government in Balochistan, and the ‘death squads’ were funded and formed,” says Mir Talpur.

Mahvish contextualises this wave of terror on Baloch intellectuals, or as she puts it, anyone with different ideas on how to organise Baloch society: 

“Baloch enforced disappearances are interlinked with other forms of erasure (that is discussed within Baloch nationalist debates). For example, when you have a Baloch exile give a presentation on enforced disappearances abroad, they’ll also talk about a series of other erasures: these schools were shut down, these graveyards were destroyed, these minerals were extracted, this land was dispossessed– they talk about land, knowledge, bodies, corpses, language, cultures, ecologies – so they are all interlinked in this tactic.”

Dr. Deen Mohammad Baloch is one of the hundreds of enforced disappeared in Balochistan. On the night of 28th June 2009, he was forcibly disappeared from the hospital while he was on duty in Ornach, Khuzdar. His 11 year old daughter, Sammi Deen Baloch took to the streets and left her childhood behind for the safe recovery of her father. Today, she’s 25 years old and still seeking an answer.

Sammi has served as the office bearer of Voice of Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP), a Baloch Human Rights organisation that gathers data on Baloch missing persons. She is now organising with the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), a Baloch political organisation which organised the 2023/2024 Long march. She, along with other Baloch women, led the march against enforced disappearances from Balochistan to Islamabad in December 2023, which turned into a sit-in. 

In conversation with Lok Sujag, Sammi shares that her father was subjected to enforced disappearance because “he would speak the truth, he would question the oppression, he could not be bribed into silence; he was a learned man, and the state is scared of literate Baloch (as seen by the state's treatment of Baloch students now).”

Baloch activists from different movements and strategies, in countless interviews and statements, all allege that there is an ongoing genocide of the Baloch people and their identity.

“The Baloch have not only been physically eliminated in this country; they have also been disenfranchised and weakened on cultural, political and historical fronts. Thus, the extermination of the Baloch is more than physical,” argues Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur. 

Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur says that the Baloch use the term “genocide” because they understand the threat Pakistani state’s policies pose for them and where it is leading them to.

In July 2011, an indirect admission of what is happening in Balochistan came from top military authority when Commander of the Southern Command, Lt-Gen Javed Zia “condemned the killing of missing people and dumping of their bodies in different areas of the province.” While talking to local editors and senior journalists at the Quetta Club, Gen Javed apprehended that these incidents “could have an adverse effect on the integrity of the country and cause separation of Balochistan.”

However, he absolved the army and other forces of any responsibility for these crimes. He further stated that the army realised that enforced disappearances was a sensitive and serious issue that would create hatred in the country, particularly among women who received bodies of their sons, brothers and husbands. 

Soon after, amid mounting international and domestic pressure, the Pakistani government enacted the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances Act in July 2011. The act aimed to provide a legal framework for investigating cases of enforced disappearances, determining the fate or whereabouts of missing persons, and holding perpetrators accountable.

In the following years, despite the commission, enforced disappearances and kill-and-dump continued unabated. On 25th January 2014, three mass graves were discovered by a shepherd in Tutak, Khuzdar district of Balochistan. 15 human bodies were exhumed and locals reported that a total of 169 bodies were found. 

A BBC report published in 2016 quoted the Federal Ministry of Human Rights, counting that at least 936 dead bodies have been found in Balochistan since 2011. Most of them were part of kill-and-dump operations in the regions of Quetta, Qalat, Khuzdar and Makran, where the insurgency has its roots. 

“There is definitely a Baloch genocide happening for the past two decades. If you look at the numbers over the twenty years, thousands of educated Baloch men are missing, and this was done by the state. If the state disappeared and threw them somewhere under the kill-and-dump policy then it’s indeed genocide,” Habib Tahir (HRCP) told Lok Sujag. 

 

The Voice of Baloch Missing Persons 

The resistance against enforced disappearances started the day after Ali Asghar Bangulzai, a tailor, was picked up in 2001 from Quetta. His nephew Nasrullah Baloch knocked on every door that vowed to give justice. When he was met with silence, Nasrullah took to the streets and decided to organise against the injustice. The first protest against enforced disappearance happened at Quetta Press Club in 2005 by the family of Ali Asghar Bangulzai. This protest led Nasrullah Baloch (his nephew) to build a movement and document the families of enforced disappearances.

According to Nasrullah (co-founder of Voice of Baloch Missing Persons), “since the day my uncle was picked up 23 years ago, we have been waiting for him to get back home. After his disappearance, we first knocked on the door of law. In October 2000, I submitted an application for his safe release in Balochistan High Court. It was the first-ever application against enforced disappearance. He was released in 14 days only to disappear a second time.”

Nasrullah Baloch founded VBMP in 2009, along with Mama Qadeer, whose son Jalil Reiki, and Farzana Majeed, whose brother Zakir Majeed, also disappeared the same year. In 2011, Mama Qadeer’s son’s body was found with “bullet wounds and cigarette burns” in Mand, Balochistan. With more news of murdered or disappeared Baloch men, resistance against enforced disappearances grew. In October 2013, VBMP’s historic long march started. 

Sammi Deen Baloch, Nasrullah Baloch, Mama Qadeer, Farzana Majeed, including Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur and a handful of other people, predominantly women, decided to walk from Quetta to Karachi, and onwards to Islamabad. It was a journey of 2200 kilometres by foot that took almost four months.

“Before the long march, we had been protesting in front of press clubs and talking to the media about our missing loved ones. The violence was increasing and everyday many Balochs were going missing. We went to the Supreme Court, high court, and human rights organisations, but nothing changed. So we decided to march and make the whole world aware of what is happening to us,” says Mama Qadeer. The march had approximately 25 women and very few men. “We also had 2 kids who marched with us, one of them was my martyred Jalil’s son.” 

Lok Sujag journalist Tahir Mehdi interviewed Farzana Majeed (who was also the general secretary of VBMP at the time) during the Long March: “I’ve read revolutionary books and have noticed that when there is a lot of injustice, protests become more sustained and resilient. Such protests are created so that the world is forced to bear witness.” Farzana believed this to be true about their march. She went on to say, “before you didn’t know who I was and what was happening to me, because of this Long March, because I’m passing by your area, you now know. The Long March will definitely benefit me and my people and our voice will reach human rights organisations.” 

According to Mahvish, “it was a historic March, primarily populated by women.”

“It established a practice and facilitated a kind of new political imaginary in the movement against enforced disappearances, in that the idea that you can march through Pakistan to demand justice around enforced disappearances is now a possibility,” she analyses, “the march drew on other political traditions of long marches – Mama Qadeer often compares it to Gandhi’s Salt March – as does the practice of holding camps and holding portraits up.”

She further explains how this practice “drew from movements against disappearances in Latin America.”  She believes the 2014 march has since inspired similar marches.  

Mama Qadeer's profound grief inspired renowned Pakistani author Mohammad Hanif to create "The Baloch Who Is Not Missing and Others Who Are" in 2013, a poignant booklet for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP). This work chronicles the legal struggle initiated in 2007, when HRCP petitioned the Supreme Court of Pakistan over 240 missing persons in Balochistan. 

According to Habib Tahir, when the petition was filed, nothing came out of it. “In 2011, the Supreme Court rejected our petition and referred us to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances. We initially pursued cases there but later realised it was a controlled commission.”

Human Rights lawyer Imran Baloch explained the procedure: “to identify a missing person before the court, the procedure requires an FIR to be filed. All evidence should be provided before the Commission.” He further explained that the Government of Pakistan has accepted that there are missing persons and they are under dungeons. 

In 2021, the Standing Committee of the National Assembly on Interior did approve a bill on enforced disappearances, which a few months later went “missing” itself (in the words of the then federal Minister for Human Rights Dr Shireen Mazari). 

According to VBMP data, almost 6,500 people are missing. In its 2023 annual report, non-governmental organisation Defence of Human Rights (DHR) records that the total number of cases stands at 3,120, with 51 cases registered in 2023 alone.

However, the government denies this number. Figures released by the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED) in July 2022 posits that a total of 8,696 cases of missing persons have been reported, 6,513 of which have been solved and 2,219 remain pending. Speaking to DW News, Islamabad-based senior journalist Gohar Mehsud asserted that COEID figures are “too low compared to the actual number.” 

COIED has not responded to Lok Sujag’s emails for comment. 

1st April 2023 marked the 5000th day of VBMP’s continuous protest.

 

Baloch Women’s Leadership and the Future 

“Women started leading the marches for missing persons because the men were victims and other men (victims' family members, political activists) were on target. Sammi started in 2009 because her father was picked up. Mahrung’s father (Abdul Gaffar Langove) disappeared in 2009 (his dead body was found in 2011) and she started her activism afterwards. All of them have grown up since then and now these women are leaders,” says Nasrullah Baloch. 

Sammi shares the constant violence she has faced for her political activism. “I can’t go back home. My relatives have been picked up, tortured, beaten up. All this to intimidate me, to stop what I do.” 

One of the important events that highlighted the issue of enforced disappearances internationally occurred in 2014, when the Chairperson of the Baloch Student Organisation-Azad (BSO-A) Zahid Baloch was picked up from Quetta. To replace him, Karima Baloch was appointed as Senior Vice Chairperson of BSO-A. She was the first woman to hold this position in BSO’s history, and later went on to become Chairperson.

During her tenure, 23-year-old student and BSO-A member Lateef Johar participated in a 46-day long hunger strike. The hunger strike ended with an appeal by the Asian Human Rights Commission that vowed to endeavour for the safe recovery of Zahid Baloch. By 2015, the Pakistani state had filed terrorism charges against Karima Baloch which led to her self-imposed exile in Canada.

In December 2020, Karima was found dead under mysterious circumstances. Her death was declared as suicide by the Canadian police.  

Despite intimidation and threat to their lives, Baloch women refuse to stop protesting against enforced disappearances. The recent 2023/2024 March led by them depicted their refusal to the normalisation of decades of state violence, and the resistance led by them pointed to gendered trauma for the women and families left waiting. Mahvish contextualises the leadership of Baloch women in the recent march: “many of those leading the march initially grew up in Mama Qadeer's camp, where they experienced many formative political experiences, demanding the release of their fathers. Mahrang and Sammi Baloch for instance would go to Mama Qadeer's camp to demand the release of their fathers. Today, they led the 2023/2024 Long March.” 

Sammi shares with Lok Sujag what she thinks their resistance has achieved: “first, we could only talk to the families who were victims of enforced disappearance or extrajudicial killing, but now our ambit of awareness has reached beyond Balochistan. Now, if any law enforcement personnel tries to take someone away from a bus or a bazaar, people resist them without fear. That is what we have done.” 

The relentless advocacy of Mama Qadeer, Nasrullah Baloch, Karima Baloch, Sammi Deen Baloch, and Mahrung Baloch over 23 years has ignited a robust movement. Their political struggle has garnered international support, challenging the silence. Reflecting on the way forward Sammi says:

“Even though we do not expect justice from the state, we will keep on demanding the justice the laws of the state promise us…Our women will not back down. We will not tire. We will keep protesting, trying, until we get our fathers and brothers back.”

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Waqas Alam Angaria is a Karachi-based journalist who covers heritage, politics and natural disasters.