Balochistan is also the site of what historian Selig Harrison has called “a slow motion genocide” of the Baloch people.
Despite its strategic importance and harrowing human rights scandals, however, the region and its problems go virtually unreported because Pakistani authorities rarely grant journalists permission to travel beyond the capital of Quetta and its intelligence agencies routinely monitor and mistreat those journalists who do enter the province.
When Pakistan was carved out in 1947, British drew lines through tribal lands regardless of the indigenous people who lived there, and the centuries-old Balochistan was tucked into Pakistan with the coerced signing of an accession agreement. The Baloch have been struggling for decades to gain back their independence.
Deprived of education and their own country’s resources, Baloch resistance fighters are made up of youth, farmers, shepherds, traders, salesmen, doctors, and ordinary citizens. The Pakistani government often conflates them with the far more violent extremist Taliban, waging all-out war against the secular Baloch resistance, imprisoning dissidents, abducting not only suspected fighters or sympathisers, but uninvolved citizens and, often, killing them. In February 2011 Amnesty International wrote in a press release: “The Pakistan government must immediately provide accountability for the alarming number of killings and abductions in Balochistan attributed to government forces in recent months.”
Click the title to read the full article and an interview, though highly sanitized & apparently censored, with a leading freedom fighter from pakistan-occupied Balochistan.
Earlier: napaki.tumblr.com
Twitter handle: @napaki
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