Families in Balochistan’s Kech district staged a sit-in on Tuesday after four members of the same family, including two women, were allegedly forcibly disappeared by Pakistani armed forces, blocking the CPEC road in the Karki Tejaban area.
Family members said the missing individuals include Fareed Ijaz, Mujaid Dilwash, Hani Dilwash and Hairnisa Wahid. They said Hani and Hairnisa were forcibly disappeared during a pre-dawn raid in Hub Chowki earlier this week, while the remaining two were taken in Kech district.
Protesters said Hairnisa is a 17-year-old student who had travelled to Hub Chowki during her holidays, while Hani is eight months pregnant. Protesters said they would continue their sit-in until all four are safely released, calling on residents of Tejaban and surrounding areas to support them.
‘A deliberate attempt to normalise the abduction of women’
The Baloch Women Forum (BWF) said the recent enforced disappearances of Hani and Hairnisa were part of what it described as a “deliberate strategy to normalise the enforced disappearance of Baloch women.”
In a statement, the group said the 20 December raid in Hub Chowki, during which both women were taken to an undisclosed location, reflected “ill-state intentions” and showed that “law enforcement agencies are going outside laws, ethics, morality and humanity”.
BWF said the targeting of women amounted to “a cultural violation of the indigenous people” and warned that state institutions were shaping a “mass psyche of normalisation” around enforced disappearances of Baloch women.
“It would also allow them mass crimes against the Baloch in the future, as were practised in East Pakistan back then – termed as a mistake, but contemporarily, efforts are underway to repeat the past,” the statement said.
The group reiterated its “firm stance” against rights violations and demanded the immediate release of Hani and Hairnisa as well as all other “illegally detained” Baloch women. It also called for urgent international intervention, saying the scale and nature of the cases required global attention.