Mother of Waheed (killed) and Kabeer (abducted) holding pictures of her sons victims of Pakistani state atrocity in Balochistan.
A UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) mission arrived in Pakistan on Monday. The 10-day visit will allow the mission to meet federal and provincial government representatives, the military leadership, intelligence agencies, civil society and family members of the missing persons to collect information about enforced disappearances in Pakistan, with special emphasis on Balochistan, and report back to the UN Human Rights Council next year. At the end of its information collection/collation exercise, the mission will review the measures taken by the government for recovering victims of enforced disappearances. WGEID’s annual report stated that enforced disappearances in Pakistan had reached unprecedented levels, while voicing concern over abductions of civilians in Balochistan and other parts of the country. This led to a request to host a mission, which the government accepted and extended an invitation. According to the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, an organisation of the families of victims agitating for information regarding the whereabouts of their loved ones and their safe return, 13,000 people have been abducted from Balochistan alone since 2005, when enhanced fighting broke out as a result of the confrontation between the subsequently slain Bugti chief and Musharraf’s government. The authorities do not admit to more than 32 missing persons, a gulf that reflects the lack of governmental seriousness about the issue. Even the intervention of the Supreme Court (SC) and its repeatedly admonishing the authorities has failed to recover even one missing person. As a matter of fact, every time the SC holds hearings on the missing persons case at its Quetta registry, tortured dead bodies of missing persons start appearing all over the province. Dissenters in the province, especially Baloch nationalists, are at extreme risk to life and limb. The WGEID was set up under UN auspices in 1980. It receives an annual renewal of its mandate from the UN Economic and Social Council. Given the situation of missing persons in Pakistan, it will have its work cut out for it to discover the facts and the truth of what has arguably become one of the blackest blots on Pakistan’s image.
Baluch Sarmachar 