What’s Happening in Pakistan’s ‘Most Complicated’ Region Balochistan?

Last week a suicide bomb killed 70 people in Balochistan, the scene of decades of unrest involving separatist rebels, the military, and jihadi groups

J. Weston Phippen

A suicide bomber in Pakistan killed 70 people last week, many of them lawyers, who had come to a hospital to mourn the death of a colleague. ISIS and a local Taliban faction both claimed credit for the attack in Quetta, the capital of  Balochistan province, the scene of a longtime separatist rebellion.

The poor daughter of Balochistan

Benazir is not a traditional Balochi name, so I asked her mother why she named her so. Her reply: “mun watee zagae naam Benazir kurt k ha hum Benazir a dolla zal a jorr beet…” (I named my daughter Benazir with the dream that my daughter will be like Benazir, educated and powerful).

By Dr Sadia Ali

Benazir, a 16-year-old girl from Balochistan’s gas rich Dera Bugti district, came with blood-soaked clothes and escorted by her malnourished and traumatised parents to a government hospital in Quetta.

Is Baluchistan the next Bangladesh?

“I saw Hindus, hunted from village to village and door to door, shot off-hand after a cursory ‘short-arm inspection’ showed they were uncircumcised. I have heard the screams of men bludgeoned to death in the compound of the Circuit House (civil administrative headquarters) in Comilla. I have seen truckloads of other human targets and those who had the humanity to try to help them hauled off ‘for disposal’ under the cover of darkness and curfew.”

By: Mrutyuanjai Mishra 

These were the famous lines written by a Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas narrating the human rights violations committed in Bangladesh under the headline “Genocide” in 1971.  He refused to buckle under the pressure of Pakistani generals, who systematically killed professors, well-educated middle-class people and specifically targeted people who revolted against the dominance of the Rawalpindi Raj of West Pakistan.