A protest rally was organized on Monday by the Baloch Yakjetti Committee (BYC) Shaal zone in Quetta against the increased cases of enforced disappearances in Balochistan, violence against the families of the victims of enforced disappearances, and various other human rights violations.
The protestors walked from Balochistan Medical College to Hockey Chowk in Quetta. The protest was participated by organizers of the Baloch Yakjetti Committee, leaders of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, and people of different schools of thought.
The protesters staged a sit-in at Hockey Chowk and raised slogans against the intensification of enforced disappearances, particularly of the Baloch youth in Balochistan. The protesters have called on the institutions and the provincial government to put an end to such practices.
Addressing the demonstration, the speakers said that once again Balochistan witnessed a surge in the cases of enforced disappearance where dozens of students and youths were forcibly disappeared by Pakistani law-enforcement agencies at different times.
The speakers said that when Baloch people raise their voices against the injustice that has been going on for decades, the state institutions torture the families of these missing people and try to silence them by brute force.
They narrated that the most powerful institution in Pakistan is the army and the army itself is involved in the crimes of enforced disappearances — Drawing parallels to the Islamabad rally organized by the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM), where figures like Iman Mazari and Ali Wazir were unlawfully detained by the police, they raised concerns over the unchecked power wielded by Pakistan military institutions.
The protesters demanded that the recent incidents of enforced disappearances in Balochistan should be stopped and the missing persons should be recovered. Failure to do so, they warned, would render the military and the Pakistani government complicit in exacerbating the deteriorating situation in Balochistan.
Simultaneously, the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) continued its steadfast protest camp outside the Quetta Press Club against enforced disappearances marking 5152 days of relentless advocacy for the safe return of “missing persons.”
Mama Qadeer Baloch, vice-chairman of the VBMP said that military operations in Balochistan have been going on for many years. This is the fourth military operation in Balochistan which has been underway since 2002 — in which thousands of Baloch youths have been forcibly abducted by Pakistani intelligence agencies and been suffering in torture cells, he added.
Mama Qadeer further stated that thousands of Baloch individuals have been extra-judicially killed. Their tortured bodies have been recovered from different parts of Balochistan and the recovery of the mass graves in Tootak is a testimony to the brutality of the occupier, he said. “The state of Pakistan is trying all kinds of tactics so that it can continue the genocide of Baloch people and looting of their resources by subduing them,” Mama Qadeer said.