‘1,101 Baloch missing since 1992’ – report of the Baloch Unity Conference in Karachi
Around 1,101 Baloch have gone missing since 1992, a leader of the Baloch Unity Conference (BUC) Majeed Baloch said at a seminar on the Case of Missing Persons of Balochistan held at the Karachi Press Club on Tuesday. “This figure is based on cases which have been reported in the media. In reality, thousands of Baloch political activists, students, and common people have disappeared without any trace. Thousands others have been killed since the insurgency started in the province.” According to a report of the Asian Human Rights Commission, which has been published in a booklet form by the BUC, some 168 children and 148 women have disappeared from the province.
Majeed Baloch demanded that the government take immediate notice of the alarming situation and take steps for the recovery of missing persons. “The Baloch have always been deprived of their rights. Our people have been abducted without any reason, illegally detained and murdered. We demand an end to the atrocities and recovery of those missing.”
Justice Retired Wajihuddin Ahmed urged the Baloch people to approach the commission formed to deal with the cases of missing persons. “The Baloch should stage demonstrations and demand of the commission to take notice of their cases. The Baloch should elect those leaders who are sincere and devoted towards their struggle.” He said that the people of the province should ask for demographic guarantees from the government, demanding that no one would colonise the province. “Some countries have their eyes on the province which is rich in mineral and natural resources. In such times, the citizens should unite themselves and fight for their rights.” Tracing back the history of the province, he said that during the British rule, the Sardars did not work dedicatedly for the people, depriving them of basic amenities such as healthcare and education.
Human rights activist Iqbal Haider said that it was saddening that a majority of the missing persons are Baloch. He blamed the United States for the polarisations in the country, saying that they wanted to create disharmony amongst the people under a conspiracy.
Workers Party leader Yusuf Masti Khan said that the cause of the Baloch people could not be fought in isolation. “The struggle of the Baloch for their rights should not be in isolation. People are calling for independence but the path to freedom is not an easy one. By secluding oneself, no one can attain success. Therefore, the Baloch people should work with others and garner international and national support for their movement.”
Meanwhile, the participants, especially journalists, were stunned and offended when a Baloch intellectual bluntly criticised the media representatives for not highlighting the Baloch issues. Speaking during the seminar, Professor Saba Dashtiari said: “Today, journalists have become criminals. Their minds have become polluted and impure. Shaheed Ahbar Bugti had rightly said that journalists are dogs and they are just in want of bones.”
On this, a senior journalist, Nargis Khannum, approached the stage and asked the speaker to leave the stage. She said that the speaker was openly abusing journalists at their home, in the Karachi Press Club. However, the speaker kept on saying that that “Gundagardi” of journalists would be not tolerated. Retired Justice Wajiuddin Ahmed then intervened and controlled the situation, asking the journalists to stay calm and the speaker to focus on the topic. The media, however, did not boycott the event and the speaker was allowed to continue his speech.
Source: The News
‘Baloch should seek demographic guarantees from state’
By Razzak Abro
KARACHI: The Baloch struggling for their rights should seek demographic guarantees from the state instead of striving for separation, Justice (r) Wajihuddin Ahmed said at the Karachi Press Club (KPC) on Tuesday.
While addressing a seminar titled ‘The Case of Missing Persons of Balochistan’, Ahmed said, “In case Balochistan loses joint cover (being a federating unit in Pakistan), it would turn into a colony of international forces, which are already active in the region for their vested interests.”
The Baloch Unity Conference, a Karachi-based organisation, had organised the seminar in collaboration with the KPC, and invited politicians, lawyers and intellectuals from Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan. Ahmed, who had contested the presidential election against President Asif Ali Zardari, said the present time was the best for seeking the state’s guarantees while a Baloch was the head of the state.
Majority of the participants of the seminar, however, did not support his point of view, as they vocally disagreed with him.
He disagreed with Hamid Ali Khan and Ahmed Owais, former leaders of the lawyers’ bodies, who considered the missing persons’ issue of the whole country the same. The missing persons’ issue in other parts of the country is totally different from the case of the missing persons of Balochistan, as it is linked entirely with the ongoing war on terror, he said.
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan leader Iqbal Haider expressed views similar to Ahmed’s and said Baloch’s struggle for separation could not be supported. He also criticised the establishment, saying that it should not have dissolved the previous governments of Baloch leaders Attaullah Mengal and Mir Ghous Bux Bizenjo. He said people from Sindh and Punjab were also among the missing persons. Speakers from Sindh and Balochistan, however, mostly agreed with each other on the issue of the missing Baloch and injustices done to the people of Balochistan.
Jamaat-e-Islami’s Maulana Asadullah Bhutto said ensuring safe return of the missing Baloch people was the responsibility of the state. He said Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry should take up the missing persons’ issue on top priority basis. All those who had supported the CJP in the movement for an independent judiciary are not satisfied with the speed of providing justice, he added.
Jeay Sindh Mahaz leader Abdul Khaliq Junejo said Balochistan’s issues could not be resolved in this system. He said the judiciary and political parliament could not do anything in this regard because all the state institutions were working to keep the system intact.
The programme’s organiser Majeed Baloch said all the democratic and progressive forces should come forward to support the movement of the Baloch’s rights.
Source: Daily Times
The ISI’s press release via their assets in The News:
India continues to rock Balochistan
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
By By Khalid Khokhar
As the fresh spate of violence in Balochistan shows no sign of abating, there is a growing possibility of Indian involvement in the recent killing of BNP-M leader Habib Jalib Baloch – a respected leader who believed in a peaceful and democratic struggle for the people of Balochistan.
By doing so, India is expecting to achieve two-prong objectives: (a) Proving Pakistan’s security apparatus guilty of killing Habib Jalib Baloch in the eyes of Baloch people. (b) Thwarting the possibility of reconciliation efforts between the government and the angry nationalist leaders. Within no time, India yielded the desired results when veteran Baloch nationalist leader and the patron-in-chief of Balochistan National Party (BNP) Sardar Attaullah Mengal held state intelligence agencies responsible for the killing of former Senator and BNP Secretary General Habib Jalib Baloch.
It was followed by widespread riots in provincial capital and other towns of Balochistan. It is pertinent to mention here that similar response was elicited last year when the killing of three Baloch nationalist leaders was blamed squarely on the state’s security apparatus.
The allegations and claims of tribal chief Mengal are misconstrued as it would be very unwise for the sitting government to reignite the insurgency in Balochistan. In fact, the new democratic set-up has taken a number of bold initiatives to remove feelings of deprivation among the Baloch people. The government, on behalf of the people of Pakistan, has already apologised to the people of Balochistan for the atrocities and injustices committed against them by the past governments and pledged to turn over a new chapter of mutual respect in the province.
The attitude of the government from the very beginning has been conciliatory and compromising. This was not liked by anti-Pakistan forces working to dismember Pakistan. Undoubtedly, the dastardly acts were aimed at sabotaging the ongoing reconciliation process in the province. India is exploiting the bad situation by providing financial and arms support to the insurgent forces targeting important strategic installments in Balochistan.
Ms Christine Fair, a leading American expert on South Asia, supported Pakistan’s concerns about India’s involvement in fanning unrest in Balochistan through consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar along the border. There has been authentic evidence about the complicity of few angry tribal chieftains with India and Afghanistan in fomenting trouble through opening up of 26 Indian consulates along the western border in Afghanistan. Reliable sources have revealed that explosives were brought in by Indian Border Roads Organisation (BRO) under the garb of “reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts” in Afghanistan through Iran to be used for sabotage acts against Balochistan.
Some statements of high-ranking Baloch activists are relevant to establish the complicity of angry tribal chieftains/BLA with India in fomenting trouble in Balochistan. The statement of Brahamdagh Bugti, grandson of late Akbar Bugti, was very alarming when he revealed that he would accept any “moral help and material support” from India to create mayhem in Balochistan. Baloch rebel leader Hyrbiyar Marri has once stated that “American enslavement is better than Punjabi enslavement because the Punjabis will obliterate our national identity”. The statement of rebel tribal chieftain Zamran Marri that “they are coordinating with India and Afghanistan to get all kinds of resources, wealth and arms to strengthen Baloch insurgency”.
US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, William Burns, gave Indian officials a terse directive to “shut down Indian consulates in Afghanistan, reduce presence in Kabul and stop sending mercenaries across the Durand Line.”
Why Balochistan has been gripped by insurgent violence since 2002? The things started to go wrong when the Centre launched fast track developmental projects aimed to bring the area into socio-economic mainstream. The militants are supported by a handful of tribal chiefs bent on resisting socio-economic development and progress of Balochistan. They challenged the writ of the government by targeting national installations. Therefore, it was necessary to protect the population at large against a “handful of irresponsible, ignorant and anti-development elements” led by some “tribal warlords”.
The favourite targets of insurgents were energy production sites – such as Sui in Dera Bugti – and energy infrastructure that supplies natural gas to other parts of Pakistan. The massive growth of development in Balochistan was against the interest of Indian strategists who want to extent their zone of influence vis-‡-vis enormous natural wealth in the CARs. Some reasons are: (a) Operationalisation of Gwadar port has empowered Pakistan to control strategically important energy sea-lane on the Persian Gulf. (b) Gwadar deep Seaport has enabled Pakistan to have a strategic depth southwest from its naval base in Karachi that has long been vulnerable to blockade by the Indian Navy. (c) Increased Chinese presence in the region.
In order to thwart Pakistan from becoming hub of the economic activity, India is doing psychological operations by creating dissidence and disaffection within the ranks of Baloch people by: (a) Widening the gulf between Punjabis and Balochis on the Gwadar Port by making it believe that the developmental projects are aimed at turning the Balochs into a minority. (b) Cultivating in the minds of the Baloch nationalists that China intends to occupy their natural resources. (c) Widely publicising incidents of human rights violation in Balochistan by highlighting the so-called miseries of Balochis, like disappearances, political victimisation, displacement due to clean-up operations, etc. (d) Generating suspicions in ethnic Balochis that Islamabad wants to possess the riches of Balochistan.
Today, the Baloch national resistance is more widespread acquiring many dimensions. In order to foil the Indian conspiracy of destabilising Pakistan, following are important: (a) removal of mistrust between the Baloch and the Federation by adopting Confidence Building Measures. (b) Political, social and economic disputes need to be addressed through a policy of reconciliation and mutual accommodation. (c) Starting of meaningful dialogue process with all the stakeholders to bring perpetual peace in the province. (d) A transparent and credible investigation to the satisfaction of Habib Jalib’s family must be initiated to ensure that the perpetrators of the crime do not go unpunished and their mischief does not cause any more harm than it has already done.
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=252017
i s i kidnap mehboob wadhila scince 02 04 2010 mehboob wadhila was going to balochistan for work in gawader port when he reached in yosuf goth in karachi for going to balochistan pakistan army stop the vichle and abducated mehboob wadhila after the kidnaping they went unknow place we are still missing him we have no any information about mehboob wadhila im kindly requisting whole minsters of pakistan please do something relase about mehboob wadhila i hope govermeant of pakistan will take action about whole baloch missing person
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