August 31, 2024
By Shaukat Korai
KARACHI
August 30, observed as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, was marked by the Human Right Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP), Voice For Missing Persons of Sindh (VMP Sindh), trade unions, and families of missing persons with a mass rally from Teen Talwar to the Karachi Press Club.
Demonstrators carried banners and posters bearing photographs of missing persons, and chanted slogans for their immediate recovery.
Among the demonstrators was the wife and children of twice disappeared Pathan Zohrani, who was last seen in 2019. His wife, Bashiran, stated that Zohrani’s son was also abducted and remained missing for months.
“My husband was first picked up in 2017, and the second time was in 2019. We have no idea of his whereabouts,” she said. “My son was also disappeared, and he was kept in a torture cell for four to five months. After that, he was framed in a fake drugs case and sent to a prison in Punjab.”
Sammi Deen Baloch, the daughter of the missing Dr. Deen Muhammad Baloch, termed forced disappearances a tool of state oppression, and vowed that she would not remain silent against this practice.
“We demand the world to hold Pakistan accountable,” she asserted, adding that the practice of disappearing anyone raising their voice against oppression and force is just one tool in the state’s arsenal to stifle them.
HRCP Chairperson Asad Iqbal Butt opined that a state that has lost its writ resorts to this kind of abuse against its citizens, pushing the country toward civil war.
“Weak states that have lost their moral compass resort to despicable acts such as abducting, disappearing and torturing people,” Butt held. “If the state continues to tread this path, it will plunge the country into anarchy.”
Butt himself was temporarily detained by police in July for supporting the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), an ethno-nationalist movement who has been at the forefront of several women-led protest camps demanding the recovery of missing persons.
Artiste, Aurat March Karachi organizer and founder of the Tehrik-e-Niswan Cultural Action Group, Sheema Kermani, posited that enforced disappearances are detrimental to the state.
“Mothers, daughters and wives are kept in the dark whether their abducted loved ones are even alive or not. This needs to end, it is a grave human rights issue,” she said. “How long will they force people to bear this suffering? There will come a time when all this anger will boil over, and it will be directed against the state.”
Demonstrators at the rally demanded that the UN Working Group against Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances be allowed on an official visit to Pakistan, that a new chairperson be appointed to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED) and that legislation criminalizing enforced disappearances be enacted on priority.
It is to be noted that Pakistan has refused to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.