The Baloch 'disappeared'

ARTICLE: How long are 11 years, or 4,000 days? Especially if the best part of them has been spent in a protest camp outside the Quetta or Karachi Press Clubs? The answer to these questions can only provided by the two daughters of Dr Deen Mohammad. The good doctor was 'disappeared' in 2009. On June 28, 2009, a daily sit-in protest against his enforced disappearance was launched before the Quetta Press Club. Amongst the protestors on that day were his two daughters, then aged 10 and eight years. Eleven years later, they are still protesting aghainst their father's disappearance, with the elder, Sammi Baloch, now 21. She tells us of the poignancy of her family's grief and misery: "Our little hands were holding pictures of our father back then; now we have grown up and we still have no clue if he is alive."

If we have any humanity left, we should try and put ourselves in her shoes to experience second-hand what it means to be robbed of a dear one and suffer the agony of not even knowing if he is still alive. What dreams of these two young girls must have been shattered along the way of their arduous and painful emotional journey of waiting, waiting, seeking, seeking their lost father. Sad as this is, what is even sadder is that there are many more like Sammi Baloch who have lost dear ones to the dread hand of the enforced disappearers.

The problem Balochistan and its affairs have suffered from since Independence is that we are fed only on a daily diet of officially sanctified truth, which proves a thin tissue of making all real news about Balochistan disappear into a black hole from which not even light can escape. This has been the pattern of Balochistan's troubled relationship with the Pakistani state from day one.

A brief recap of that sorry history may help readers unfamiliar with what ails Balochistan. At the time of negotiations with the departing British colonialists in the 1940s, the Khan of Kalat, the head of the Baloch tribal confederacy, wanted to stake out his people's claim to be treated as a state having treaty status with the British Crown. To fight his case, the Khan employed the services of one of the most brilliant constitutional lawyers of the time, none other than Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Mr Jinnah argued Balochistan's case right up to the Privy Council, only to reverse his sympathies for his former client once partition had taken place, Pakistan had been created, and Mr Jinnah had become the Governor General. Commentators have wondered whether this change of a sympathetic understanding of Balochistan's case was owed to the difficulties the newly created state faced, especially the first war in Kashmir in 1947-48. Whatever the merits of this view, the Khan's autobiography states unequivocally that he was forced to accede to Pakistan in March 1948 in Karachi.

That event sparked off the first nationalist Baloch armed rebellion with the Khan's brother, Agha Abdul Karim, leading it. The rebels were invited to parleys with an oath that they would not be harmed. However, the state went back on this solemn oath and Agha Abdul Karim spent 16 of the next 22 years in prison, while his comrades also suffered various terms of imprisonment. The smouldering resentment at this treatment had not quite dissipated when the next blow to Baloch-Centre relations was administered in 1958, just 10 years after the first revolt.

Then President Iskandar Mirza, and his ambitious army commander General Ayub Khan sought an excuse to impose martial law and take over the country. An accusation was framed against the Khan of Kalat that he was preparing an armed rebellion against the state. He was arrested after a military assault on Kalat and brought to Lahore where he was kept under house arrest for many years (as children we often cycled past the house in Gulberg where the Khan was detained, only to be shooed away by the armed guards outside). The Khan's arrest and incarceration had the opposite effect of what the martial law regime may have been aiming at. Whether there was a rebellion in the making or not (and the Khan has vehemently denied it), the treatment of the Khan led to an uprising in 1958 led by octogenarian tribal chief Nauroze Khan. Again the state swore an oath of no harm to induce the rebels to come down from the mountains and hold negotiations. Again the oath was violated and Nauroze Khan and his followers were arrested. Subsequently, nine of Nauroze Khan's sons and nephews were hanged for treason in Hyderabad Jail, where the elderly chief too passed away.

The quelling by underhand means of the second Baloch rebellion did nothing to quieten things down. The Marri tribe rose in 1962, led in the field by famous guerrilla commander Sher Mohammad Marri. This uprising continued till the Ayub military regime fell in 1969, gathering support from other Baloch tribes such as the Mengals along the way.

General Yahya Khan, who took over from Ayub and declared yet another martial law, led a regime with a mixed bag of good and bad steps and policies. As far as the Baloch question was concerned, he negotiated a ceasefire and peace with the Baloch guerrillas and gave Balochistan the status of a province for the first time in preparation for the 1970 elections. The East Pakistan debacle led to Yahya's fall, with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto invited by the military to pick up the pieces of a broken up Pakistan. Initially Bhutto did negotiate with the Baloch, giving them their own elected coalition government for the first time in Pakistan's history and garnering moderate nationalist support such as that of Mir Ghaus Buksh Bizenjo for the 1973 Constitution. Unlike the received wisdom, the four elected MNAs of Balochistan, including towering figure Nawab Khair Buksh Marri, refused to sign that Constitution on reservations about its quantum and quality of provincial autonomy and the retention of laws militating against political and human rights, shattering the myth of it being unanimous. Sardar Attaullah Mengal's provincial government was dismissed by Bhutto within one year, triggering the fourth armed struggle in Balochistan since Pakistan came into being. That struggle ended only when Bhutto was overthrown by General Ziaul Haq in 1977.

For the next 25 years, the Bizenjo line of peaceful political and parliamentary struggle for the rights of the Baloch (which by now included control over provincial natural and mineral resources such as Sui gas) dominated Baloch politics but failed to yield even an inch of concession or reform from the state. Despairing of this toothless strategy, a new generation once again took up arms in 2002, a struggle that continues to date. Along the way, General Pervez Musharraf ensured for the first time in history the entry of one faction of the Bugti tribe into the armed struggle by killing Nawab Akbar Bugti in 2006. Since then, the nationalist armed struggle has spread from the Marri and Bugti areas to the Mengals and the Mekran belt.

It is in this latest period of nationalist revolt in Balochistan that the tactic of enforced disappearances first appeared. Students of history will wonder whether the Pakistani authorities took a leaf out of the 1960s military dictatorships in Latin America that first introduced this heinous practice. Whatever the inspiration, the policy of enforced disappearances of peaceful dissidents has yielded by now thousands of disappearances, a handful of such cases being traced and returned to their homes, and thousands more disappeared over the years.

The state comforts itself with the assertion that the Baloch struggle is India-sponsored and -supported and therefore the policy of total repression (including enforced disappearances) is justified. Those familiar with Pakistan's history will bear witness that such assertions have accompanied the castigation of every political movement and leadership that does not meet with the approval of the state (not just the Baloch). Evidence to back up these assertions of Indian support vis-à-vis the current conflict cannot be had for love or money. This short-sighted, historically-proved-disastrous approach is only embittering the Baloch further, hardening their resistance, and stoking the fires of separation amongst the angry youth. In the long run, it may prove once again to be disastrous for the country.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2020