Atrocities beyond Measure
Author: Banul Baloch
A tyrant country will use its all tactics to rule, occupy lands, suppress languages and cultures, and eliminates all those minds and ideas who think differently and protest.
It lowers down to an undignified and degrading extent of victimizing women and children, while practicing collective punishment. It will keep them in torture cells for decades, torture them and abuse them sexually.
Balochistan being a victim of state repression is facing worst inhuman abuses. Everyday state is using different futile tactics on Baloch; disappearing men, throwing their bodies, bombing houses, ransacking the agricultural land. Beside these, the state has now started disappearing women, which is a declared crime in UN charter. But it seems this ruler does not apply to Pakistan, which enjoys complete impunity violate the international laws and conventions.
This is an atrocity beyond measure. Pakistani forces are deprived of conscience and morality. They have no value for human life.
They have disappeared many women, treating them like sheet or cattle. This all is very heart-wrenching and is beyond comprehension for the whole Baloch nation.
Balochistan seems to me a land of missing persons, where people are disappeared for no reason and warrants. These persons go missing for years and we do not even know if they are alive or have been killed and buried in mass graves.
Disappearing people is a tactic, through which state wants to prove its supremacy over the Baloch nation. From infants to youth and elders, nobody is safe from these draconian designs. Now women in Balochistan are also becoming victims of this tactic.
As in Algeria civil war in 1992, as many as 200,000 people were killed during the decade-long struggle with Islamic rebels, including thousands of women who were forcibly disappeared.
The disappearances continued until the late 1990s, but dropped off following the decline in violence in 1997. Estimates put the total number of disappeared people somewhere between 6000 and 15,000 people.
The same history is being repeated in Balochistan by forcefully disappearing women .
People of Balochistan estimate over hundreds of women disappearances, who have gone missing on daily basis.
Recently in Mashkay, Pakistan Army forcibly disappeared three Baloch women on July 22. Noor Malik, 50, wife of Allah Baksh and her two daughters Hasina, 22, and Samina, 18, are among the abductees. Noor Malik’s 10-year-old son Zameer was already disappeared on July 3, 2018 by the Army.
Balochistan is going through a war and the state has failed to weaken the pro-independence political activists. Therefore, the state has inititiated the policy of targeting the women and family members, which is an act of collective punishment.
The UN Geneva convention states: ‘No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed.
Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or terrorism are prohibited.
Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions, collective punishment is a war crime.’
But, unfortunately, the world and UN are silent on these warcrimes, which has given Pakistan impunity to commit all kind of crimes without being held accountable.