The Burnt Malalas of Balochistan

By Yousaf Ajab Baloch

The 16, June 2013 was a day for severe suffering for the parents in Balochistan, when they were receiving burnt dead bodies of their daughters, whilst the rest of the world was gifting flowers to their fathers on world father’s day. Even as fathers with immeasurable pain and anguish were trying to identify their daughters’ dead bodies those had been burnt in 15th June’s suicide attack in students bus of Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University, The only women university in the city of Quetta with 3000 female students, established in March 2004.

COMMENT : An eye for an eye — Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

The declared eye for an eye response against the Baloch is absolutely misleading because it signifies a justified response, while in fact the repression of the Baloch has always been without excuses 

Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali’s response to the burning of the Ziarat Residency by the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) in a nutshell was ‘an eye for an eye’, while the Lashkar-e-Jhangavi’s (LeJ) criminal carnage in Quetta at Sardar Bahadur Khan University and Bolan Medical Complex were not considered grave enough to evoke an equally venomous response. I really was not surprised that so much more smoke was emitted by the media and social media than the actual conflagration at Ziarat; it was even termed Pakistan’s 9/11. All this just proved that the plight of the Baloch who have been at the receiving end of state atrocities for decades will never evoke sympathy from people under the spell of the establishment-projected narrative, which squarely blames the Baloch for resisting injustices and consequently getting killed.

Woman suicide bomber behind Quetta bus attack

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

BALOCHISTAN: A woman Lashkar-e-Jhangvi suicide bomber carried out the devastating attack on a university bus carrying women and her male accomplice struck a hospital in Pakistan’s southwestern city of Quetta, police said, as the death toll on Sunday rose to 26 in the multiple strikes.

The banned sectarian outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) has claimed responsibility for Saturday’s attacks on the bus and at the Bolan Medical Complex, saying they were carried out in retaliation for a raid against the group by security forces.

From Quetta to Turbat – Sajid Hussain

I was all packed and ready when PIA suddenly decided to cancel its flight from Quetta to Turbat, which I was supposed to take to attend a family wedding the very next day. I panicked and called my uncle in Turbat to inform him that I couldn’t make it. But he was persistent and insisted that I had to come. So I decided to take a bus for Turbat the same evening.

As the bus left the station, I realised that I was wearing black clothes and that my surname was Hussain – enough reason to get killed on my journey to simply see two cousins tie the knot. Details of massacres of bus passengers who had taken similar bus journeys were quite vivid in my mind.