The Baloch Missing Persons and the Conspiracy of Silence

Adding more to the hor­rors of the Baloch peo­ple, three mass graves have recent­ly been dis­cov­ered in Khuz­dar dis­trict of Balochis­tan. Asian Human Rights Com­mis­sion have count­ed 103 dead bod­ies recov­ered from the graves while accord­ing to the locals, the body count is 169. Sim­i­lar graves have also been dis­cov­ered in Pishin and Pan­j­gor. This is not an iso­lat­ed inci­dent hard to make sense of. It is just anoth­er episode in a long sequence of atroc­i­ties per­pe­trat­ed by the deep state against the Baloch nation­al­ists. In over a decade, more than 6000 Baloch have gone miss­ing, though the nation­al­ists claim that the actu­al num­ber is around 18000. Despite the dis­agree­ment over actu­al num­bers, the enor­mi­ty of the sit­u­a­tion remains unaf­fect­ed. It also does not change the unde­ni­able fact that hun­dreds of muti­lat­ed and dumped dead bod­ies con­tin­ue to be found every oth­er day.

In any civ­i­lized soci­ety this must have led to pop­u­lar dis­con­tent and pos­si­bly a nation­al cri­sis. But unfor­tu­nate­ly, rest of the coun­try espe­cial­ly the com­mand­ing Pun­jab is com­plete­ly indif­fer­ent to the whole sit­u­a­tion. On the oth­er hand, the com­mon response, if any, to this calami­ty is to deny the hard facts or to active­ly blame the ‘for­eign’ ele­ments. Those who dare to speak for the Baloch miss­ing per­sons have to stom­ach the label of being called ‘for­eign agents’.

Mean­while a small group com­prised of the fam­i­lies of miss­ing per­sons is on a long march from Quet­ta to Islam­abad. Orga­nized under the umbrel­la of the Inter­na­tion­al Voice for Baloch Miss­ing Per­sosns (IVBMP) and led by Mama Qadeer, an old man in his 70s, the help­less women and chil­dren have already trav­elled thou­sands of miles on foot. Hav­ing endured all the adver­si­ties of unwar­rantable ter­rain and weath­er, they are cur­rent­ly walk­ing through the cen­tral Pun­jab. The atten­tion and media cov­er­age giv­en to the IVBMP’s long march is very telling of our over­all reac­tion to the issue of Baloch miss­ing per­sons. There is hard to find any par­al­lel to such a momen­tous long march in the his­to­ry of this coun­try. Yet the main­stream media, usu­al­ly overzeal­ous to give sur­plus cov­er­age to any­thing done in the name of long march, is by and large ignor­ing this out­stand­ing sto­ry.

Owing to habit­u­al igno­rance, cow­ardice or dis­hon­esty, a con­spir­a­cy of silence has evolved around the issue of Baloch miss­ing per­sons. There are some who actu­al­ly are igno­rant of the facts yet do not want to know, and there are oth­ers who know the real­i­ty but do not acknowl­edge it or active­ly deny it. Whether done out of vest­ed inter­ests or out of our erro­neous sense of so-called nation­al­ism, the whole of Pak­istan will have to bear the brunt of this cul­ture of silence. We must learn from the past; the par­al­lel exam­ple of 1971 geno­cide in East Pak­istan is a case in point.

With their moral courage, Mama Qadeer and his fel­low trav­ellers will soon reach the cor­ri­dors of pow­er in Islam­abad. Let’s resolve to join them in their dig­ni­fied demands and break the cul­ture of silence before it is too late.