A senior leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), Sammi Deen Baloch, has said that “the most brutal expression of state power in Balochistan today is written on the bodies of Baloch women,” accusing Pakistani state institutions of using arrests, disappearances and intimidation to silence female activists and the families of the disappeared.
In a statement marking the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Ms Baloch said Baloch women were being “charged with crimes they never committed, arrested without cause, made to disappear, and pushed into cells or silence.” She said women were beaten, stalked, surveilled and punished “simply because they have the courage to live with dignity and honour.”
She said the arrests and imprisonment of women activists, including Dr Mahrang Baloch, Gulzadi Baloch and Beebow Baloch, amounted to a tacit admission by the state that “the political voice of a Baloch woman can shake the ground beneath it.”
Ms Baloch added that other women, including Mahjabeen Baloch and Nasreena, remained forcibly disappeared. “The state neither speaks their names nor answers for them, because to answer would mean acknowledging who took them, and why,” she said.
She said women who take to the streets to demand the return of missing relatives were routinely met with “batons, fists, insults and arrests,” arguing that the response reflected a mindset in which the state “has already stripped them of basic human worth.” Those who speak publicly, she added, are often labelled with “the ugliest word the state can conjure: terrorist.”
“There is no such thing as justice in Pakistan,” Ms Baloch said. “There is no such thing as the rule of law. There is only the machinery of dictatorship, and the women who stand in its path, bleeding and unbowed.”