Source: FAST Rising

How does one approach it - Balochistan, the Baloch, Balochi?

Labels and deciphering their meanings, negotiating the maze of connotations associated with even simple terms like development or education, facing up to fears of being “target-killed” in our perceived capacity of Punjabis, going absolutely quiet when a senior BSO office-bearer lamented that we had come too late, wondering if all Baloch were now separatists, wondering at the cruelty of the Army operations and the mental health of the soldiers, officers and technicians involved, wondering if 30 years from now, the HRCP would organise a seminar on the third partition - its violence, its literature, marvelling at the hospitality and warmth with which our hosts and interviewees treated us…

Just now, a friend asked me about the trip. Thinking about the effects of the trip on myself, about my mental state during the journey, I replied, “freedom, fear, hope”. His answer was, “I see, is the situation that bad?” At which point I realised that he thought I was describing the situation in Balochistan. Eerily enough, the same three words apply to significant aspects of the daily lived reality of the Baloch we met: yes, they want freedom, an idea which gives them hope of a dignified future outside Pakistani/Punjabi domination and yes they experience fear on a daily basis.
Perhaps it is best take our cue from Ahmad Bashir and stick to the plain facts, leaving the task of interpretation to the ten million.

As previously mentioned, we are a group of four young people from very different backgrounds, with very divergent ideological and philosophical perspectives all of whom nevertheless believe strongly in the primacy of human rights, in human dignity. We had all been involved to some extent in the organisation of the series of seminars on missing persons. The most striking fact to emerge from that exercise was that not only did Baloch citizens comprise close to half of the 500+ recorded cases of abductions by state agencies, but that the total number of missing Baloch was in the thousands - estimates ranged from 2,000 to 8,000! And yet, there was complete silence on this issue - not just state-controlled media channels like PTV and Radio Pakistan but also the supposedly free private electronic media channels. When it comes to Balochistan, it seems, the Establishment interpretation of the higher national interest trumps all other considerations.
The second event that acted as the catalyst that pushed us to visit Balochistan as soon as possible was the publication of a report on BBC Urdu, describing the shocking condition of our fellow Baloch citizens. The condition of the refugees was truly desperate and we resolved to find out how we could help.
However, it proved impossible in our meetings with Baloch nationalists (whether separatists or not) to maintain the convenient compartmentalisation of issues. As soon as we had introduced ourselves and explained that we were there to collect documentary evidence of missing Baloch, that we were there on humanitarian grounds, and that we wanted to know how we could help relief efforts for the internally displaced persons, our interlocutors would seek to enrich the discussion, placing the current scenario in its cultural, historical, geo-political and strategic context.
We realised that a true appreciation of the current situation was not possible without this background, that what was missing from our state-approved history books and our censored media was not just the tales of human rights abuses but a whole history of annexation, oppression and denial. Now there may be exaggerations, inaccuracies and even downright propaganda lies in the multiple versions of the tale we heard, but we can note two things:

the internal consistency of the overall story, and,the fact that even if their version suffers from inaccuracies, it needs to be told, to be heard in order for debate to occur, for the inaccuracies on both sides to be identified and corrected, for us to finally learn our true history

We are currently in the process of organising the material we have collected so far: transcribing interviews, checking the data on missing persons, writing down our own experiences. Armed with this material, we intend to produce a set of documents that will allow us to effectively communicate the facts and impressions we collected to a wider audience in Lahore and more broadly to fellow citizens wherever they may reside.
In addition to producing these documents, we intend to do the following:

Hold awareness-raising seminars on the issue of missing Baloch, with representatives of the families of the missing people addressing audiences in Lahore, Islamabad and other cities in Punjab
Raise funds and recruit voluntary medical personnel for a medical camp to assist the internally displaced persons referred to earlier
Organise more visits of larger groups of common citizens to Balochistan so that a channel of communication between citizens may be established - the only way to un-learn our dependence on state and media
Produce a documentary, working title: “Missing in Balochistan”

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Tags: Balouchistan, connotations, Development, education, perceived capacity, Punjabis, target-killed