Human Rights Abuses in Balochistan

 By Archen Baloch

Balochistan has long been a region marred by brutality, with entire villages and cities bearing the scars of atrocities committed by Iran and Pakistan. The conflict is characterised by extreme measures taken by these states to suppress dissent and stifle aspirations for independence.

Forced Disappearances

One of the most harrowing aspects of the crisis in Balochistan is the phenomenon of enforced disappearances. Thousands of Baloch political activists, students, and civilians have been abducted by state security forces, often without legal justification. These individuals are taken to undisclosed locations, with no information provided to their families. Many victims are subjected to torture, and some are never seen again. Pakistan denies these disappearances, while Iran accuses those abducted of waging war against God or spreading mischief, often sentencing them to death in kangaroo courts.

The case of Zakir Majeed Baloch is emblematic of this tragedy. A prominent Baloch student leader and political activist, Zakir was abducted by Pakistan’s security forces in 2009. Despite years of advocacy by his family and human rights organizations, his whereabouts remain unknown, a fate shared by thousands of others in Balochistan.

Similarly, in Iran, the IRGC and intelligence agents routinely arrest, torture, and execute Baloch individuals on trumped-up charges. A notable case is that of Molavi Fathi Mohammad Naqshbandi, the Friday Prayer leader of Rask, who has been “physically and mentally tortured” for his support of anti-government protests and for speaking out against the rape of Maho Baloch by the Chabahar police chief.

After his arrest, he was accused of “disseminating false information, defaming the Islamic Republic of Iran, and acting against national security.” According to his son, Molavi Abdul Ghafar Naqshbandi, his elderly father endured torture involving a “stun gun and an ironing machine” at the Intelligence Department of Zahedan, the capital of Iranian-Occupied Balochistan.

Impact on Families

The impact of these disappearances on the families left behind is profound. Mothers, sisters, wives, and children live in perpetual grief and uncertainty, marked by protests, vigils, and desperate searches for information about their loved ones. The pain of not knowing whether a son, brother, or husband is dead or alive is a form of psychological torture that continues for years. Many family members of the disappeared carry this pain to their graves.

State-Sponsored Atrocities

In addition to enforced disappearances, the Baloch people face other forms of state-sponsored violence, including extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, and executions. The Pakistani and Iranian governments use these tactics to crush the Baloch freedom movement and silence dissent. Military operations in the region often result in civilian casualties, destruction of property, and further displacement of already marginalised Baloch nation.

International Response

The international community has largely remained silent on the human rights abuses in Balochistan. While some human rights organisations and activists have tried to bring attention to the crisis, the issue remains underreported, and the perpetrators of these atrocities continue to act with impunity.

The Baloch people feel ignored and discriminated against by international human rights groups and the global community. The UN’s silence on the atrocities, brutalities, and genocidal policies of its member states, Iran and Pakistan, is causing the Baloch to lose hope in the organisation.

Feeling abandoned, the Baloch are relying on their own strength, resisting Pakistan and Iran’s barbarism by all means available. The world must step forward to support the Baloch before it is too late.

Pakistani Potion of Lid-Laddu to the Baloch Nation

 By Archen Baloch

During a two-day visit to Balochistan, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, the Chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), left no stone unturned in his efforts to appease his masters in the GHQ. In a public gathering in Quetta, the capital city of Pakistani-occupied Balochistan, he offered free healthcare services to the Baloch nation. He announced that he would provide free healthcare to those who come to Karachi for treatment and build a large hospital in Quetta where free healthcare services would be available.

Behind closed doors, however, Bhutto met with the selected Chief Minister of Balochistan, Sarfraz Bugti. According to Dawn, Bhutto’s primary objective was “to defeat the terrorism narrative and restore peace and political stability in Balochistan through grassroots political processes.” 

Before Bhutto visited Quetta, his father, Asif Ali Zardari, chaired a security meeting of high-security officials in the coastal city of Gwadar. The meeting aimed to convince the Chinese government that the “Azm-e-Istehkam operation” would pave the way for exploiting Balochistan’s regional resources.

To understand the reality behind Bhutto’s promise of free healthcare to the Baloch masses and his insistence on addressing the terrorism narrative, we need to view it through the lens of a popular story.

Bhutto’s promise can be likened to a game of lid-laddu. In the Balochi language, “lid” means camel dung, while “laddu” is an Indian sweet made from various ingredients and sugar syrup.

The story behind the lid-laddu game was narrated by the father of the Baloch nation, Khair Bakhsh Marri, during an interview with BBC Urdu. He recounted a tale about a thug in a village who saw children with laddus and wanted to have them. Instead of directly snatching the laddus and offending the children, the thug collected camel dung, which is similar in shape and colour to laddu. He then called the children to play a game, offering four lids for one laddu. In this way, he deceived the children into trading their sweets for camel dung.

The Baloch nation, in terms of natural resources, is one of the richest on earth. With a population of 65 million and a geography of 700,000 square kilometres, Balochistan is well-endowed.

The Bhuttos were brought into power in Pakistani politics to govern the masses with the so-called socialist slogan of “Bread, Clothes, and House,” a strategy crafted by the Pakistani military establishment. The Bhuttos have been selling this laddu, which is lid (dung), to the Pakistani masses. Now, this deceit has extended to Baloch society.

We must consider whether it is appropriate to detail the statistics of our resources before a foreign occupier or to kick him out of our land. They came and occupied our land and started usurping our natural resources. However, it is appropriate to let the world know what we have in Balochistan in terms of natural resources. The variety of mineral resources that we possess in Balochistan, under Pakistani occupation, are mouthwatering for other resourceless nations.

The Sui gas field, one of the largest natural gas fields in the region, was discovered in 1952 and piped to Punjab and other cities in Pakistan, depriving Balochistan of its resources. The Sor Range, Khost-Shahrag-Harnai, and Duki areas have some of the world’s longest deposits of coal. Silver, copper, and gold deposits found in Reko Diq are among the largest reserves in the world, being exploited by Chinese and Canadian companies against the will of Balochistan.

Iron ore deposits are also found in the Chagai District, along with significant sulphur deposits. Balochistan is a major producer of chromite in the Muslim Bagh area, and we have substantial deposits of high-quality marble and granite. Other natural resources include limestone, used for cement production, and high-quality gypsum reserves used in construction and the manufacture of plaster.

The Koh-e-Sulaiman Mountain range and coastal belt of Balochistan contain large quantities of uranium deposits. However, with the support of China, Pakistan is extracting these deposits and polluting Balochistan’s ecosystem by dumping nuclear waste in coastal areas.

Balochistan’s coastline along the Arabian Sea is rich in marine resources, brimming with high-quality marine life. However, it has now been turned into a marine game park for Chinese fishing trawlers. Balochistan has four seasons and produces a variety of high-quality fruits and vegetables, including dates, grapes, watermelons, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, apples, pomegranates, peaches, wheat, rice, and various beans. Balochistan is also known for livestock farming, including cows, sheep, goats, horses, and camels.

With vast open plains and high solar insolation levels, Balochistan has significant potential for solar and wind energy development.

Given our immense natural resources and our status as a large nation, why should we Baloch allow ourselves to be governed by lid-laddu thugs? We were an independent nation but became the victim of the British Great Game in our region. Pakistan occupied our country through military aggression at the behest of the British Empire. Whenever we resisted and constructed our narrative of national liberation, they dubbed our leadership as national traitors.

In their eyes, our narrative is now terrorism! Meanwhile, the looting and plundering of our resources are negligible matters, the killing and dumping of Baloch political activists are not considered crimes, and the destruction of our ecosystem is seen as a social issue, which they believe can all be sorted out with an offer of an apology. They think that their lid-laddu is a potion for taming the Baloch into submission.

Under the lens of their colonial rule, our genuine elder political leadership is often labelled by the Pakistani military establishment and its stooges as tribal chieftains because they refused to buy into the Bhuttos’ lid-laddu game. As a result, they have been defamed, character-assassinated, persecuted, hanged, assassinated, and forced into exile.

The new generation of the current liberation movement is also facing the same policies of persecution and the lid-laddu game. However, the perseverance of the Baloch resistance refuses to give in to Pakistani state terrorism. It has achieved an optimal level of success in terms of persistence and resistance.

https://archenbaluch.blogspot.com/2024/07/pakistani-potion-of-lid-laddu-to-baloch.html

Pakistan’s Sham Elections in Occupied Balochistan

 

By Archen Baloch

Pakistan conducted its general elections on February 8, 2024. It also conducted its elections in occupied Balochistan at gunpoint where only the PPP and Muslim League (N) who were recently favored by the army to make their presence for certain reasons, one of them being the stark question of how to hide Pakistan’s utter failure in containing the 24 years old Balochistan’s insurgency for liberation.

The recent induction of PPP and Muslim League (N) in Balochistan’s politics is widely seen as an attempt of the Pakistan army to hoodwink the international community into believing that Baloch are represented in Pakistan’s mainstream polity and they believe in Pakistan. Their objective is to make sure that Balochistan’s political contour merges into Pakistan’s mainstream politics whereby the nationalistic outlook of Baloch politics is erased.

However, the picture in Balochistan differs from that of expectations of the General Headquarters (GHQ) of the Pakistan army in Rawalpindi. Independent sources say that the turnout in occupied Balochistan was hardly 3 percent. The NA 261 Kalat is a case in point where the total number of voters in this constituency is 371430, out of which only 12,204 voters exercised their right to vote, thus the voter’s turnout was 3.97 percent. The average turnout stands at 2.48 of the total votes for so-called national and provincial elections across Balochistan.

Those political underdogs who failed to deliver on Pakistan’s army script have been discarded and replaced with military stooges and death squad members with no political background. The long-serving pseudo-Pashtun nationalist Mahmood Achakzai, now no more of any use to the Pakistan army after the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, divulged that a Pakistan army officer had taken money and sold his seat to another candidate.

Moulana Hedayatullah, the head of Haq Do Tehrik who won the Gwadar provincial seat with a low turnout margin revealed that the army had rigged the votes and favoured their people, he said that “thieves, under the supervision of the Pakistan army, cast thousands of fake votes at the polling stations where even the staff did not arrive, he further said that  “two Kech sub-districts, Mand and Dasht-Nagor, where no polling had ever taken place and people did not come for voting, yet an Afghan refugee was given the MNA seat with 40778 fake votes”.

The international community, especially the US, UK and the EU who each year give billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan have alleged interference, irregularities and fraud during and after the voting process and urged that these undemocratic practices should be fully investigated.

Pakistani military establishment overwhelmingly dominated by Punjab is hell-bent on stamping their will over the Baloch nation and its state manipulation has always been at work since early times when Balochistan was forcefully annexed – meddling from the pre-poll phase to election day irregularities to the post-poll counting process and cobbling together an alliance, at every stage, the will of Pakistan army is blatantly executed. Every attempt at a manipulative political manoeuvre in Balochistan is aimed at maintaining the monopoly of the Sunni Punjabi army over Balochistan. 

The fact is that the Baloch never joined Pakistan of their own free will, It was a forced annexation at gunpoint against the will of the Baloch people. A large number of pro-independent political parties and armed organizations are resisting and struggling to liberate Balochistan from the illegal occupation of Pakistan. According to Pakistani police reports 130 incidents of bomb blasts were carried out by the Baloch Liberation Army and other organizations.

The Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) in statements said declared Pakistan’s elections in Balochistan a sham and illegal and vowed to resist them with their might available at their disposal.  The BLA’s spokesperson, Azad Baloch, also told the media that fighters of BLA carried out at least 43 attacks on Pakistan’s electoral process in Balochistan on 8 February 2024 making it clear to the Baloch nation and the world that the Baloch do not accept Pakistan illegal occupation and colonisation.