Slide into chaos

If we visualise a pictorial slideshow coming out of Balochistan, the images that arise before us are horrifying ones. As a new report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) documents, 140 bodies of missing persons, often with signs of torture on their bodies, have turned up in various parts of the province. It is not very hard to imagine what plight they must have suffered in their final days. Seventy-one people remain missing between July 2010 and May this year, while there have been 18 target killings and five sectarian deaths. The situation resembles one that could easily have unfolded in a typical South American dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s or during regimes such as the one run in Chile from 1973 to 1990 by the late General Augusto Pinochet, rated as among the most brutal in modern history.

As HRCP’s top office-bearers stated at a press conference in Islamabad, addressed by chairperson Zohra Yusuf and other activists, a key problem is that Balochistan remains in the grip of security forces with the provincial government virtually invisible. The organisation, citing the findings of a mission that had recently investigated conditions in the province, noted in particular that the Frontier Constabulary appeared to be behind many of the disappearances. The force has long been reviled by the people of Balochistan who have for years accused it of harassment of citizens at check-posts and the illegal detention of citizens. One has to say that this is usually with good reason because of the admission by officials before the Supreme Court that security institutions are indeed involved in missing persons cases. As the HRCP has stressed, the sense of alienation among the people of Balochistan is high. The reasons for this are quite evident. The real question for the government though, in both the centre and in Quetta, is why things have reached so critical a situation. The real need is to tackle the steadily worsening situation through political dialogue which involves as many groups as possible and end the steady spiral downwards towards the chaos we are currently seeing in our largest province, where both state agents and other elements have been responsible for creating an anarchy that now threatens to engulf all the people of Balochistan.



Published in The Express Tribune, July 1^st, 2011.