Letter to the SC: ‘Death squads’ out to subvert polls, Mengal

Letter reads that all the elections in the past excluding 1970 were rigged.

QUETTA: After nationalist parties in Balochistan declared their intention to participate in the upcoming general elections, ‘death squads’ in the province have come extra hard on them, thereby threatening a free electoral process, wrote Balochistan National Party (BNP) President Sardar Akhtar Mengal in a letter to the Supreme Court.

Baloch nationalist leaders have repeatedly blamed the law-enforcement agencies for  extrajudicial killings in the province -- a  charge the LEAs deny.

“The heirs of missing persons are suffering an agony which only they can relate to, and are losing hopes in the justice system,” Mengal said.

Digging from history, the leader wrote that all the past elections in the country, excluding the one held in 1970, were “rigged in favour of the establishment and its cronies”. Reverting back to the status quo in Balochistan, he said that the current ‘manufactured crisis’ in the province was aimed at achieving similar results.

Justice denied

Repressive actions against innocent people, particularly the youth, violated basic human rights of the citizens. He complained that the process of justice initiated by the Supreme Court is disappointingly slow, and is killing the hopes of the common people in the judicial system.



“The paramilitary Frontier Corps should stop hostile action, and the superior judiciary should review its conduct”, wrote the BNP president.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 18^th, 2013.