January 23, 2024
By Mohammad Bilal Baseer Abbasi
ISLAMABAD
Outside Islamabad’s National Press Club one can hear the slogans in favour of the Pakistani and the military. These emerge from the protest by the Baloch Martyrs’ Foundation which has been set up exacltly opposite the protest camp by the Baloch Yekjehti Committee whose protesters have been out in the bitter cold for weeks demanding justice for their missing persons. Yet those from the Baloch Martyrs’ Forum say they have been traumatised by their lived ones who have died in terrorist incidents in Balochistan over the years.
Zaid Muhammad Hosni, the Co-organizer of the Martyrs Forum sit in talks about what he went through.
“When Abbu was martyred, all my brothers and sisters were young,” he says.”At that time this thing was new in Balochistan, that is target killing, etc. but then we became orphans and there was no one to place their hand over our heads. Even our relatives were afraid.”
However the Baloch Shuhada (Martyrs) Forum has also been openly accusing the BYC and are also directly applauding the military and state – whom the BYC claims have been the ones to be involved in these disappearances and extrajudicial killings.
Sammi Deen Baloch the organizer of the BYC protest and whose own father has been missing spoke to Voicepk.net.
“Every citizen has the right to protest outside the Press Club,” she said. “All the oppressed people should come and raise their voice. But there are a few things that make us question things like where were these people for so many years when we were shouting about the issue? And they have suddenly appeared after we came here.
“First there was a crackdown on our people, arrests were made, they were baton-charged, and after that, we were harassed by the police here, our protesters faced ethnic profiling, our food routes were blocked,” she went on. “We were only allowed to stay after we went to court against all these tactics and the court ordered that we should not be harassed. They were nowhere to be seen. How did these people suddenly remember their protest now?”
Representing the Baloch martyrs, Nawabzada Jamal Khan Raisani, a politician, says that he also belongs to the family of martyrs…
“We have three demands. The first demand is justice and security,” he says. “We must be assured of security, the organizations that have been identified should be brought to book. The families of our martyrs have no support from us. We want a quota for children’s education, financial aid, and private and government opportunities. The third demand is that there is propaganda against us that we are involved in death squads, our families are fake and our family members have been killed because of caste enmities but this is not true.”
Jamal complains that when an innocent civilian is martyred, no one raises a voice and neither condemns militancy.
“Until today, you show me who has talked about martyrs in the parliament,” he demands. “They all talk about missing persons, no one has the moral courage to say that 60 people are martyred in an explosion, who does it, who are the accused, who is responsible? Is our blood cheap?”
Protesters from both protest camps are from Balochistan, but Sammi Baloch says this is another attempt by the state to sabotage their protest.
“The people who are sitting in this camp have a long criminal record of being involved in killing people in Balochistan,” she said. “Because of these things, we have security concerns about them. They are trying to provoke us again and again by shouting slogans all night, and raising the volume of their loudspeaker when our elderly women and little children are sleeping. We understand from these things that these people have come here only to spoil our protest and to make it controversial (by accusing us of being funded.)”
Human rights organizations are demanding that the government solve the problems through negotiations with the protesters and fulfill the demands to ensure the protection of basic human rights.