Pakistan's dirty, secret war in Balochistan

Two legendary Baloch human rights defenders and peaceful freedom fighters, Mama Qadeer Baloch, 73, and Farzana Majeed, who marched an epic 2,000 kilometers - one of the longest marches in human history - on blistered feet, first from Balochistan capital Quetta to Pakistan's commercial capital of Karachi and then from Karachi to Islamabad, to highlight the plight of victims of enforced and involuntary disappearances in Balochistan were last week not allowed to board a plane at the Jinnah International Airport for New York, via Dubai, by the Pakistani security authorities. A third member of their team Faiqa Baloch was also stopped. The three who belong to the premier Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, an organisation dedicated to recovering 18,000 Baloch victims of enforced disappearances, were invited by a Sindhi organisation to visit the US and speak at an event. The three were detained at the Jinnah Airport on Thursday and told by the Federal Investigation Agency that they were involved in "anti-state" activities and their names were on the exit control list.

Mama Qadeer Baloch is father of the later Jalil Reki, information secretary of the Baloch Republican Party, which is headed by Nawab Brahumdagh Bugti, a grandson of slain Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a former governor and chief minister of Balochistan, who was assassinated on former dictator general Musharraf's order, was abducted by the Pakistan spooks on February 13, 2009 and his badly tortured body was found two years and three months later from Turbat, hometown of chief minister Abdul Malik.

The youngest of the three, Faiqa Baloch, is daughter of Haji Abdul Razzaq, 35, copy editor of the Daily Tawar newspaper, who was forcibly disappeared in Karachi on March 24, 2013, and his body with signs of "strangulation and torture" and mutilated face was found five months later, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Farzana Majeed is the sister of Baloch student leader, Zakir Majeed, who was 27 when he was forcibly abducted on June 8, 2009, from Parangabad but as his 33rd birthday approaches, the family does not know if he is dead or alive. The policy of enforced or involuntary disappearances was first adopted by Adolf Hitler in Germany under the name "night and fog policy", to mentally torture and make victim families totally despondent.

The Pakistani security establishment feared these human rights defenders will expose Islamabad's night and fog and what Amnesty International called kill-and-dump policy in Balochistan, resulting in cutting off of the US aid. "This is an outrageous interference with their democratic and human rights," an enraged Peter Tatchell, director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation in London told this writer. "It shows the Pakistan authorities are afraid that the Baloch activists will blow the lid on Islamabad's secret, dirty war in Balochistan. They fear international opinion is turning against Pakistan's rapacious military and economic policies in the occupied nation," Tatchell said. Tatchell, who has been a voice for Balochistan in London for a decade now, has to his credit ambushing former dictator general Pervez Musharraf on behalf of Balochistan, said, "Banning these activists is a sign of weakness, as well as downright authoritarian. Western nations should respond by cutting all military aid and supplies to the Pakistan regime and by reciprocating with a travel ban on all senior Pakistani government and military officials."

Baloch patriots accuse Pakistan of carrying out genocide, military aggression, enforced disappearances, burning people alive in coal tar, cutting or burning sensitive parts with cigarette butts, throwing people from helicopters, demolition of entire villages, burying Baloch freedom activists in mass graves and the unending kill and dump policy in blood-soaked Balochistan. While remaining unapologetic for its support to the Kashmir mujahideen, Pakistan blames India for interfering in Balochistan, without providing credible evidence, but Baloch patriots say the biggest foreign interference in Balochistan was Pakistan military boots on their homeland and argue it is the moral obligation of India to openly support Balochistan. The key agency responsible for the enforced disappearances and kill and dump is the infamous Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, with operations in 70 countries, including the US.  According to the landmark Patrick Leahy amendment, the US is barred from doing business with any unit of a country's military that engages in human rights violations, but it is unclear why Pakistan has been exempted from the law. ISI chief lieutenant-general Rizwan Akhtar held talks with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John O. Brennan, just the week before the VBMP team was stopped from visiting the US. It was not clear immediately if the ISI action enjoyed CIA blessings.

In New York, Professor Samantha Power, who was once upon a time a passionate journalist who covered the Kosovo war, founding executive director at the prestigious Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University, author of the Pulitzer winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide and the youngest US ambassador to the United Nations, was once a fierce critic of US policy of being silent spectator to the tsunami of human rights violations in hellish places like Balochistan. According to the Columbia Spectator, reflecting on her work as a journalist, Power said, "I got into journalism not to be a journalist but to try to change American foreign policy. I'm a corny person. I was a dreamer predating my journalistic life, so I got into journalism as a means to try to change the world."

But for many of the victims of Pakistan's policies of enforced and involuntary disappearances, including former Balochistan fisheries minister Kachkol Ali, who now lives in exile in Oslo, Norway Samantha Power has dumped Balochistan. Had Professor Power taken a stand, CIA chief Brennan would not have been hosting his Pakistani counterpart at the same time Pakistan blocked the Baloch human rights defenders from visiting the US. As if Islamabad cares two hoots for the UN, Kachkol Ali's son Nabeel Baloch, 21, was forcibly disappeared by the Pakistani spooks on the International Day of Enforced Disappearances last year after Kachkol Ali says he addressed events at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Kachkol Ali accuses Islamabad of flouting the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute on human rights in Balochistan. "Mass graves are being found in Balochistan. Nearly 20,000 Baloch from all walks of lives are missing and my son is one of them. There is not a single district in Balochistan from where people have not been forcibly disappeared by Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence, Military Intelligence and Frontier Corps," said Kachkol Ali, adding, "I am not going to surrender to the Pakistani establishment, come what may. This is my commitment towards my people's cause. I will never compromise on the question of Balochistan independence."

Kachkol Ali, popular leader of the middle classes from the fertile date growing Panjgur valley, said the Pakistani state has launched a full-fledged campaign as part of its state policy to forcibly displace the Baloch natives from their ancestral lands since 2005, when the security forces bombarded the home of Nawab Bugti in Dera Bugti. "In that bombardment, 70 civilians mostly Hindu women and children 85,000 people were forcibly displaced and fled Dera Bugti. "He adds in December 25, 2012 Pakistani forces bombarded and wantonly destroyed Mehi village at Mashkay in Balochistan, killing 30 innocent civilians, including children and women. In the past four military operations since 1948, only Baloch rebels in the mountains were targeted, but Kachkol Ali said now under a so-called National Action  Plan to systematically spread the military operation all across Balochistan "hundreds of houses were destroyed and set on fire in Kech, Panjgur, Mashkey, Awaran, Kolhu, Khuzdar, Chaghi, and Kharan". Kachkol Ali said Pakistan's scorched earth policy in Balochistan has displaced hundred thousand people from Mashkey and Awaran districts. Kachkol Ali urged Samantha Power not to forget her own lifelong advocacy that US should not remain a silent spectator when international law is flouted by rogue armies.

From Karachi, Moniza Inam, an activist for democracy since her student days at Karachi University who now works for Dawn newspaper told this writer, exposing human rights violations is not an anti-state activity."This decision (of travel ban) will also aggregate the feelings of deprivation of the Baloch people. Pakistan has signed but not ratified the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances. The international community should pressurise Islamabad to ratify the convention." Washane Bugti, a grandson of Nawab Bugti and a humanist, explaining why the VBMP team was stopped from going to the US, said from Karachi.

"This army in the garb of government is trying to hide the genocide in Balochistan." Baloch leaders say they never wanted Pakistan."The Khoja's son deceived me," Balochistan de jure ruler of Balochistan, Khan of Kalat Mir Ahmedyar Khan told my former father-in-law the late Rahin Bux Soomro, son of Mahatma Gandhi comrade Shaheed Allah Bakhsh Soomro. By "the Khjosa's son", the Khan of Kalat meant Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the tuberculosis ridden founder of Pakistan. Even Balochistan's independence was announced separately from India and Pakistan independence on August 11, 1947. "As late as June 1947, Jinnah assured Kalat of the continuance and safeguard of its independence status," writes German political scientist Martin Axmann in his book Back to the Future - The Khanate of Kalat and the Genesis of Baloch Nationalism 1915-55.

Axmann narrates the historic speech of former governor of Balochistan Mir Ghous Bakhsh Bizenjo in the elected Baloch House of Commons called Darul Awam in the local vernacular, "We have a distinct civilisation. We have a separate culture like that of Iran and Afghanistan. We are Muslims but it is not necessary that by virtue of our being Muslims we should lose our freedom and merge with others…." Almost four decades later, in the 1980s the late Bizenjo told this writer that Indian National Congress leaders under its then president Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had betrayed the Baloch freedom cause by refusing to support Balochistan in case of a Pakistani aggression, which followed in March 1948. The same general Akbar Khan, who sent the tribals to occupy a huge chunk of Kashmir was the chief architect of Balochistan occupation.