Inside Pakistan's bloody war on its own citizens
The description given by Declan Walsh of The Guardian about the victims of Pakistan’s kill and dump policy in France-sized Balochistan is gruesome. “The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognisable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.”
Last week, Nasrullah Baloch, president of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, called a news conference in Quetta, capital of Balochistan, to challenge the figures of the number of people who have died in Pakistan's kill and dump policy in Balochistan. The government had provided a figure of 164 while Nasrullah Baloch said as many as 455 people were killed by the security forces and intelligence services. "He said that 107 of these 455 bodies were identified as that of previously abducted Baloch activists whereas 348 could not be recognised due to disfigurement," according to the pro-independence Baloch Warna website in London. Nasrullah Baloch said that looks like deliberate efforts are being made to make it difficult for the families to recognise the bodies that are dumped across Balochistan. “In the past they use to put notes with bodies containing names of the victims but now they even "acidify" the faces of the dead so that it becomes impossible to ascertain their identity. Because of this situation, their relatives are going through mental trauma,” Nasrullah Baloch explained. More than 2,000 Baloch youths have fallen prey to what human rights bodies call Pakistan's kill and dump policy in Balochistan. "Pakistan's horrific crimes are unimaginable," says Kachkol Ali Advocate, a former government minister, who now lives in self-exile in Oslo, Norway.
The perpetrators of this crime are the Military Intelligence, Inter-Services Intelligence and Frontier Corps, who manage the killing fields of Balochistan. But the question what is the reason behind this show of barbarity? Does it have a history? If yes, where and when?
An answer came right from the horse's mouth last month. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity and war crimes appear to be holding a religious licence. Just after the attack on Army Public School in Peshawar on December 16, the worst ever terror attack on a school in human history, that left 132 students dead, Umar Khurasani, spokesperson for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan made some startling revelations. Khurasani is Pakistan’s “bad Taliban” but his mentor Baitullah Mehsud of course was “good Taliban” until 2006, when then army chief general Pervez Musharraf handed him Swat Valley for enforcement of Shariah. Khurasani, while defending the terrorist massacre said TTP attack was exactly in accordance with Sunnah, or what Prophet Mohammed did with his enemies 1,400 years ago. The Pakistani Taliban leader specifically cited the Banu Qurayza massacre in which Prophet Mohammed “ordered only those children be killed whose pubic hairs have appeared.” At the time, 14 centuries back Banu Qurayza was a very peaceful Jewish tribe in Medina. Historic texts confirm 800 men and boys and one woman of the tribe were beheaded. "Killing of children and women is according to the teachings of Prophet Mohammed; those who are objecting (to Peshawar massacre) should study Sahih al-Bukhari," Khurasani asserted, explaining the TTP followed Sunnah both in letter and in spirit.
Sahih al-Bukhari is an omnibus volume of Mohammed’s actions and words and is considered to be one of the most authentic Islamic texts.
It may have been bad karma for Pakistan. Perhaps a curse of the Kashmiri Pandits? The tribal warlords whose men carried out the Peshawar attack were Mehsuds. The Mehsuds and their Siamese twins Waziris also form the backbone of the Frontier Corps, which is trying to crush an insurgency in Balochistan by using extremely barbaric methods. According to one Pakhtun, the Pakhtun nationalists in Balochistan taunt these tribesmen in the Frontier Corps paramilitary for coming all the way from Waziristan to kill the Baloch for just $60 per month, but they respond they are in Balochistan not for the money but to serve Islam by killing the enemies of Pakistan. The anti-Islam, anti-Muslim narrative is not only trumpeted by Muslim zealots but also the former president general Musharraf, who is politically in bed with them - many Pakistani liberals, including the most famous Salman Taseer, favoured jihad in Kashmir and crushing the Baloch insurgency. These paramilitary soldiers are told that since Baloch are agents of India and Israel, they should be treated with the same brutality as the Banu Qurayza Jews faced in Medina. In this training Muslims were given licence to kill women of the enemies of Islam, used three years ago in the most brutal slaying of Zamur Domki, 34, and Janan Domki, 13, sisters of Geneva-based Baloch resistance leader Nawab Brahumdagh Bugti.
Human rights organisations have deplored the unspeakable torture and killings of the Baloch by the Pakistani security and intelligence services. "This is not counterinsurgency - it is barbarism and it needs to end now," according to Brad Adams of the Human Rights Watch. Pakistan had used similar brutalities in what is today Bangladesh when it massacred three million people and raped 450,000 women there, according to Dhaka journalist Saleem Samad. More than half of the victims were Bengali Hindus.
The indoctrination that atrocities against enemies of Pakistan and Islam were all right was first used by major general Akbar Khan just two months after Pakistan’s inception in August 1947. After fighting his own people for the British Raj for a decade, he raised a force of 5,000 Mehsud tribesmen for a proxy war in Kashmir. Along with their mentors and handlers in the Pakistani Army, dressed in plainclothes, the Mehsud tribesmen engaged in massacre and loot and plunder in Kashmir, unprecedented in the history of the Valley in what was basically a Pakistan military offensive, code named "Operation Gulmarg."
Less than six months after occupying one-third of Kashmir by force, the same general Akbar Khan had crushed the first Baloch revolt against forced annexation of Balochistan on March 27, 1948. As Pakistani Taliban Khurasani explained after the Peshawar attack, all the brutalities that one sees in both Kashmir and Balochistan are in line with Sunnah.
What VBMP's Nasrullah Baloch said reveals that not only killings, but also disfigurement of the dead is rooted in Islamic traditions. Pakistan military, Frontier Corps, Military Intgelligence and Inter Services Intelligence are committing crimes against humanity against the rebellious Baloch in Balochistan by following the same methods used against another tribe of Medina called the Uraynah tribe, who had rebelled. It is most certain the Pakhtun tribesmen, who as soldiers of Frontier Corps are involved in the disfigurements, firmly belief they are at war against Baloch apostates. Pakistan’s Military Intelligence and Inter-Services Intelligence, who mastermind the disfigurements, have also assigned the same task to a number of Islamic death squads. Just last year mass graves were found in Tootak in Balochistan.
Pakistan was carved out of India as a separate state for Muslims, by the British, and the state calls itself a fortress of Islam. Islamabad’s blue-eyed boys like the much-hated defence strategist Zaid Hamid describes the Baloch freedom activists as apostates in the service of the intelligence services of India, Israel and the US Muslim scholars make no secret that apostates were treated rather harshly by Prophet Mohammed - eyes gouged out, limbs chopped off and left to die, unsung and unwept, much in the same treatment being meted out to Baloch victims of enforced disappearances.
In addition to Balochistan, Pakistani soldiers use the same barbaric and inhuman mutilation against troops of arch foe India. The Telegraph reported an incident in early 2013 when two Indian soldiers were killed and "one of the soldiers was decapitated and his head taken away by retreating Pakistani troops."