Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum

by Tilak Devasher

  The HRCP Report 2009 made the important point that while in the rest of the country most of the missing persons were picked up due to involvement in terrorism, in Balochistan many belonged to areas where no terrorist activity was reported. The inescapable conclusion, according to it, was that a large number of Balochistan’s missing persons were targeted for their legitimate political activities/opinions.27 The perception had also gained ground that only ethnic Baloch were being targeted in incidents of enforced disappearance and none of the disappeared was a ‘settler’.28

  The situation had become so bad and attracted such international opprobrium that Pakistan was compelled to allow a UN mission in September 2012. The mission spent ten days in Balochistan meeting with government officials and private citizens to investigate the fate of disappeared persons in Balochistan. Some of the witnesses who met with the delegation told its members that they had been ‘threatened or intimidated’.29 However, neither the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) nor the Frontier Corps that are blamed for most of the disappearances met the delegation.30 The UN mission did succeed in drawing international attention to the issue of enforced disappearances. The United States and the United Kingdom also expressed concerns over the human rights situation in Balochistan during the nineteenth session of the United Nations Human Rights Council.31

  The Legal Situation

  Enforced disappearance is defined in Article 2 of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, which the UN General Assembly adopted in December 2006, as: ‘... the arrest, detention, abduction, or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the state or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.’32

  Part II of the Constitution of Pakistan dealing with Fundamental Rights and Principles of Policy states: ‘(1) No person shall be detained in custody without being informed, as soon as may be, of the grounds for such arrest, nor shall he be denied the right to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner of his choice. (2) Every person who is arrested and detained in custody shall be produced before a magistrate within a period of twenty-four hours of such arrest to the court of the nearest magistrate, and no such person shall be detained in custody beyond the said period without the authority of a magistrate.’ There are provisions for preventive detention but here too: ‘No such law shall authorize the detention of a person for a period exceeding three months,’ unless approved by the appropriate Review Board.33 All these constitutional guarantees have been systematically and repeatedly abused by the state.

  For example, Munir Mengal, director of a proposed Baloch television channel, was illegally detained in April 2006. He was released in September 2007 on orders of the Balochistan High Court after he was exonerated of all charges. However, according to his family, he was again detained by the intelligence agencies at an unknown location.34

  Despite undeniable evidence of ‘disappearances’, successive governments have consistently denied subjecting anyone to enforced disappearance or knowing anything of their fate or whereabouts. In September and December 2006, after Amnesty International released reports documenting dozens of cases of enforced disappearances, President Musharraf responded by stating: ‘I don’t even want to reply to that; it is nonsense, I don’t believe it, I don’t trust it.’ He added that; 700 people had been detained but that all were accounted for.35 In March 2007 President Musharraf asserted that the allegation that hundreds of persons had disappeared in the custody of intelligence agencies had ‘absolutely no basis’ but that these individuals had been recruited or lured by ‘jihadi groups’ to fight for their ‘misplaced causes’: ‘I am deadly sure that the missing persons are in the control of militant organizations,’ he said.36

  The security forces when confronted by the Supreme Court and the provincial high courts about enforced disappearances have resorted to a variety of falsehoods to avoid being exposed. Not surprisingly, the refusal of the state to meaningfully and truthfully respond to Supreme Court directions has stalled the tracing of persons subjected to enforced disappearance in Pakistan. More wide-ranging damage is being done by giving the intelligence agencies immunity to commit such grave human rights violations and collaborating in their cover-up. The state has also sent a dangerous signal that it condones the impunity of committing, condoning or concealing such human rights violations.37

  In July 2011 the Human Rights Watch published a report named ‘We Can Torture, Kill, or Keep You for Years—Enforced Disappearances by Pakistan Security Forces in Balochistan’. It starts with a summary that gives the account of the person who witnessed the disappearance of Abdul Nasir in June 2010: ‘Even if the president or chief justice tells us to release you, we won’t. We can torture you, or kill you, or keep you for years at our will. It is only the army chief and the [intelligence] chief that we obey.’38

  During consultations with the families of the disappeared people in Quetta, the HRCP found that families of missing persons living in remote areas, and in not so remote areas such as Kalat, did not have the means to register their complaints; most did not know how to access redressal channels and families were unaware of the cases in courts.39 As a result, Balochistan today has the dubious distinction of being the world capital of enforced disappearances where more than 2,000 journalists, singers, teachers and lawyers have been forcibly abducted, tortured, killed and dumped since 2009—in just five years as many as in Chile during the reign of Augusto Pinochet. In 2014 alone, as many as 455 people, who were forcibly abducted, were tortured and killed by the Pakistani security forces and intelligence services, and their bodies dumped, according to Nasrullah Baloch, chairman of the VBMP.40

  Sabeen Mehmud

  During a discussion titled ‘Un-Silencing Balochistan (Take 2)’ in Karachi on 24 April 2015 organized by Sabeen Mahmud, a prominent Pakistani women’s rights activist, Mama Qadeer noted, ‘Today when I am addressing this conference, the number of missing persons from Balochistan is over 21,000. This is the figure for 2014. We are writing up the figures for 2015 and [will] release them every six months together. So until 2014, over 21,000 missing persons and over 6,000 tortured bodies have also been found. We knocked on every door for the missing person’s issue.’41

  Sabeen Mahmud had organized the discussion after a planned talk by Mama Qadeer at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) was abruptly cancelled. The university said this was ‘on orders from the government’. Some faculty members said the order came from the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The government and the military declined to comment.

  Sabeen Mahmud was to pay with her life that very night for organizing such a discussion at her café ‘The Second Floor’. She was shot dead by two ‘unknown’ assailants. The provocation clearly was her temerity of going ahead with the discussion after LUMS had cancelled the same talk. The attack on Sabeen Mahmud for bringing the Baloch plight into the limelight was no aberration. Exactly a year ago, top Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir barely returned from the brink of death after he was attacked on 19 April 2014, soon after he left Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport on the way to his Jang group-owned Geo TV’s office to interview Mama Qadeer. Mir alleged that elements of the ISI were behind the attack. The link with his interview of Mama Qadeer Baloch was obvious. The treatment of journalists and civil society activists who dared speak out on the situation in Balochistan was clear evidence of the government being rattled.

  Helplessness of Civilian Governments

  The PPP government that came to power in the province in 2008 as well as the coalition PML-N government in 2013 had promised an end to the conflict in Balochistan. But both found that the army was unwilling to relinquish its heavy-handed strategy for Balochistan. With both the federal and the provincial governments bein
g helpless in the face of the army conducting day-to-day counter-insurgency operations, brooking no civilian control, the space for easing the human rights situation has receded enormously.

  Consequently, there has been no change. In November 2010 the chief minister of Balochistan, Aslam Raisani, publicly accused the security forces of abductions and extra-judicial killings. He told the BBC that the security forces were ‘definitely’ guilty of some killings; the province’s top lawyer Salahuddin Mengal told the Supreme Court that the FC was ‘lifting people at will’. He resigned a week later.42

  Dr Abdul Malik Baloch, who was Balochistan’s chief minister from 2013 to December 2015, conceded that his government had failed to overcome the issue of missing persons in the province. ‘Although its intensity has come down, the matter is still alive and this is possibly the only area where we have failed to achieve our target,’ the outgoing chief minister said at a press conference.43 The fact of the matter is that the civilian politicians are powerless to restrain the military’s counter-insurgency operations.44 In December 2013 Dr Malik acknowledged that state agencies were responsible for ‘illegal confinement’ of Baloch activists including, he believed, the secretary-general of his own National Party that was part of Balochistan’s coalition government.45

  Selig Harrison has called these violations ‘slow motion genocide’, which, unlike the humanitarian crises in Darfur and Chechnya, have not troubled the conscience of the world yet. But as he notes, ‘as casualty figures mount, it will be harder to ignore the human costs of the Baloch independence struggle and its political repercussions in other restive minority regions of multi-ethnic Pakistan’.46 His conclusion was that the current revival of Baloch nationalism may pose a far greater threat to Pakistan than any of the previous insurgencies.

  The dehumanizing nature of the violence is evidenced not just in the ways people are tortured—with holes drilled in the head and bodies mutilated beyond recognition—but also in the way their bodies are discarded. One note accompanying a decomposed corpse said, ‘Eid gift for the Baloch’.47

  Violations by the Nationalists

  Human rights abuses are not limited to the army. The nationalists too have been responsible for violations including targeting ‘settlers’—unarmed civilians, mostly from neighbouring Punjab, many of whom have lived in Balochistan for decades. Declan Walsh, quoting government figures, wrote that 113 settlers—civil servants, shopkeepers and miners—were killed in 2010. On 21 March 2011 militants killed eleven workers in a camp of construction workers; the Baloch Liberation Front claimed responsibility.48 According to one estimate, until 2011, around 1,200 settlers were killed in Balochistan mostly in ‘hit-and-run incidents’ and grenade attacks on their businesses and homes. Such killings created an atmosphere of fear and terror among the settlers and led to an exodus. Estimates vary, but between 2008 and 2011 it is believed that about 100,000 to 200,000 settlers left Balochistan for other provinces. Along with settlers, the militants also started targeting teachers, doctors and lawyers from other provinces. While Quetta still hosts a substantially large population of Punjabi and other settlers, few remain in the Baloch areas of the province. Even in Quetta, the settlers are afraid of going to the Baloch-dominated neighbourhoods.49

  The killings have continued intermittently. Thus, on 4 May 2018, six ethnic Punjabi labourers were killed and one injured in an incident of firing in the Laijay area of Kharan District. On 31 October 2018 five construction workers of non-Baloch ethnicity were shot dead, while another three suffered injuries in an attack near Ganz, some 15 km west of Jiwani in Gwadar District, on 31 October 2018. According to official sources, the labourers were working at a China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC)-related private housing scheme on Peshkan–Ganz road, which links Gwadar with Jiwani, when a group of unidentified assailants riding motorcycles appeared on the scene and opened fire.50

  The Dawn quoted Muhammad Khalid of the Balochistan Punjabi Ittehad saying ‘… the militants began to target the Punjabi settlers after Nawab Bugti was taken out by the military (in August 2006). Before that there were occasional incidents in which Punjabis were targeted’. According to a Balochistan Students Organisation (BSO) activist: ‘How can you expect us to let your people live in peace when our own land has been turned into a hell for us?’51 One apparent reason for this appears to be the government’s insistence on constructing new cantonments because the army, seen as an instrument of suppression, is predominantly Punjabi. Denouncing the Punjab as a ‘colonial’ power and the army as the ‘Punjab army’,52 ‘Baloch militants are now targeting Punjabi settlers,’ says the International Crisis Group (ICG). In the wake of Akbar Bugti’s killing ‘… resentment against Punjabis has reached extreme levels’, said a Quetta-based journalist. ‘Since Bugti’s death, there is also a visible social segregation between the Baloch and the Punjabis; even in schools and universities.’53

  Then there have been attacks on education: twenty-two schoolteachers, university lecturers and education officials have been assassinated since January 2008, causing another 200 to flee their jobs.54

  Cases

  Some representative cases are listed below.

  Three local political leaders, Gul Muhammad, chairman of Baluchistan National Movement (BNM), his associate Lala Munir, and Sher Muhammad Bugti, a leader of the Balochistan Republican Party (BRP)—all prominent in the nationalist movement—were seized from a small legal office in Turbat in April 2009. They were handcuffed, blindfolded and hustled into a waiting pickup truck in front of their lawyer and neighbouring shopkeepers. Their bodies riddled with bullets—badly decomposed in the scorching heat—were found in a date palm grove five days later. Government officials said the men were being prosecuted for activities against the state but denied any involvement in their deaths.

  People were not convinced and said that while the men supported independence, they were not involved in the armed struggle. Mir Kachkol Ali, their lawyer from whose office the three were abducted, said the killings represented a deepening of the campaign by the Pakistani military to crush the Baloch nationalist movement. ‘Their tactics are not only to torture and detain, but to eliminate,’ he said. After telling his story to the press, Ali was harassed by military intelligence, who warned him his life was in danger. He fled the country. ‘In Pakistan, there is only rule of the jungle,’ he said by phone from Lørenskog, a small Norwegian town where he got asylum. ‘Our security agencies pick people up and treat them like war criminals,’ he said. ‘They don’t even respect the dead.’55

  There appears to be a link in these abductions with the kidnapping in February of an American citizen, John Solecki, the head of the United Nations refugee organization in the provincial capital Quetta. The abduction was carried out by a breakaway group of young radicals who wanted to draw international attention to their cause and to exchange their captive for the Baloch being held by the security services. Though Solecki was released, Baloch leaders speculate that the intelligence agencies may have killed Gul Muhammad and his colleagues to provoke the kidnappers into murdering the American, which would have branded the Baloch nationalists as terrorists.

  Instead, ‘… the killing of these three has centralized the national movement of Balochistan’, said Kachkol Ali. He and others said they had no doubt that the intelligence services were responsible. ‘They were persons of the agencies,’ Mr Ali said. ‘They were in plain clothes, but from their hairstyles, their language, we know them.’56

  Another case is of the credible allegations of the extra-judicial execution of a ten-year-old boy Chakar Baloch in Turbat. Four plain-clothes men accompanied by four uniformed personnel from the Frontier Corps picked him up as he was walking to Turbat market, according to eyewitnesses. Chakar Baloch’s family registered a complaint about the abduction with the police in Turbat. However, apart from registering the complaint, the police did not appear to take any further steps as in practice, they have virtually no power to investigate allegations against the Frontier Corps. Th
ree days later on 10 January, Chakar Baloch’s body was recovered from Kech Kaor River, a kilometre from where he was last seen alive. According to a medical examination carried out at the District Headquarters Hospital in Turbat, Chakar Baloch’s body bore torture marks and four bullet wounds to the head, chest and left arm, fired at close range.57

  A Baluch doctor, Bari Langove, thirty-six, said he had examined a student leader, Dr Allah Nazar Baloch, in a prison ward in Quetta and found him so debilitated that he could neither walk nor talk at first. ‘He was mentally exhausted and wholly unable to speak,’ Dr Langove said in an interview in Quetta. ‘We examined him and found he had post-traumatic stress disorder, symptoms of loss of short-term memory, insomnia, loss of appetite and energy.’58 The victim, Allah Nazar Baloch, would go on to set up one of the most effective militant groups fighting the Pakistan Army. Speaking at a book launch, noted human rights activist I.A. Rehman said that Allah Nazar did not choose the path of rebellion: ‘We forced him to it. So, if we keep treating them like we treated Bengalis, the consequences won’t be any different either.’59

  In its 2007 report the ICG mentioned that since December 2005 when military operations began, at least 84,000 people were displaced by the conflict in Dera Bugti and Kohlu districts alone. According to a UNICEF internal assessment in July-August 2006 that was leaked to the media, the displaced persons, mostly women (26,000) and children (33,000), were living in makeshift camps without adequate shelter in Jafarabad, Naseerabad, Quetta, Sibi and Bolan districts. Of the five-year-old children, 28 per cent were acutely malnourished and more than 6 per cent were in a state of ‘severe acute malnourishment’, with their survival dependent on receiving immediate medical attention. Over 80 per cent of deaths among those surveyed were among children under five.60