Today, every Baloch woman is standing up to the Pakistani state

Collateral Damage had the honour of talking to Farzana Majeed, the General secretary of the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP). Along with the Secretary of the VBMP, Mama Qadeer. Farzana launched a 3,000KM long march from Quetta to Islamabad via Karachi to raise the issue of the Baloch missing persons.

The interview was conducted by Jahanzeb Hussain, the editor of Collateral Damage.

My congratulations for your march from Quetta to Islamabad for the cause of the missing persons. What are your sentiments after completing the march? 

Thank you for your well wishes. When we started the march, we thought that the awareness we would raise might force the intelligence agencies and the state to release our loved ones. But along the way, we received the news that the Supreme Court and the High Court had dismissed some of the cases pertaining to the missing persons. Even more traumatic was the discovery of mass graves in Balochistan as we were marching. Nonetheless, it was still a major achievement that we managed to raise some awareness in Pakistan and abroad about the barbarism of the Pakistani state in Balochistan.

Act of desperation

Latif Johar’s 46-day hunger strike, which he was finally persuaded to end on the evening of June 6 by Baloch elders and human rights activists, as his health deteriorated to critical levels, was an act of desperation. The 22-year-old Baloch student sought the recovery of his friend Zahid Baloch, a leader of the Baloch Students Organisation (BSO), through the hunger strike staged outside the Karachi Press Club. According to reports, Zahid Baloch was ‘picked up’ by the Frontier Corps in the middle of March this year.