It has been happening for years, the ‘involuntary disappearance’ of persons in Balochistan and their detention against every writ of habeas corpus. The Baloch Who is Not Missing & Others Who Are is about attempts by the relatives and friends of these people to get their loved ones recovered. After years of absence, many families are at a stage where even news of their relatives’ death would be welcome, because then they could mourn and bring some closure to the episode and move on with their lives.
Allah Baksh, looking for his missing son Saeed for the past many years, says that he secretly envies people who have found the bodies of their loved ones. ‘They have buried them and now they mourn them,’ he says. ‘All I can do is wait.’
Many never return. Of those who are returned dead, Lango’s body was full of head wounds inflicted with a blunt weapon. Sana’s body, found three years after his disappearance was riddled with twenty eight bullets. The body of another man had its throat slit, and yet another’s legs cut off just below the knees.
Farzana, whose brother Zakir disappeared years ago, spends much of her time in protest camps. From these camps she and others like her protest against the continued disappearances, and against official stonewalling concerning missing persons.
While at these camps, Farzana reads books about politics and revolutionaries.
‘I have read Che Guevara’s biography. I have read Spartacus. I am currently reading Musa Se Marx Tak. I am learning about revolutions and other people’s struggles.’
Obviously, apart from dealing with the tragedy of missing persons, Mohammed Hanif’s new book offers an explanation of the violence and unrest in Pakistan. These factors will naturally be present in a society where citizens are spirited away without explanation, and where their relatives run from pillar to post for answers without success.
Farzana has given up on the State of Pakistan and its people. ‘Look at me, I am twenty seven years old. What kind of life is this?’ she says. ‘I am spending all my life at protest camps.’
If it were your child/brother, this could be you. I knew the situation with regards to missing persons in Balochistan was bad, but not this bad. The provincial government of Balochistan puts the figure of missing persons at 950, while certain non government sources put the figure at over 14,000. In either case, it is the suffering that counts, so this book must be read by everyone, because only awareness can provide any hope of justice, the only thing that can end this suffering.
If there is a problem with this book, it is its size, which is woefully unrepresentative of the sheer magnitude of the problem it deals with. How can an issue of this scale be encapsulated within an almost pamphlet of less than forty six pages that include a foreword (by Zohra Yusuf, Chairperson of the HRCP) and an introduction (by I.A Rehman)? Yet the essence of the tragedy has been captured effectively by Mohammed Hanif, in these few pages.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has been paying special attention to human rights violations in Balochistan where an HRCP report has found that the role of military intelligence services in these disappearances cannot be denied. This book is one of its publications on the subject. Each of the book’s six chapters presents the profile of an actual single disappearance, based on interviews with the family of the missing person. Each tells a tale of non-cooperation on the part of government authorities, such as the police which are shown to be an accomplice in picking up victims. A refrain throughout the book is the registration of false FIRs (First Information Reports) regarding disappearances, or the victims’ inability to register FIRs at all.
Probably the scariest message in the book is that the government has no writ over its own armed forces. As a colonel in the army says, the Governor of Balochistan ‘cannot even summon my junior-most Captain,’ let alone the ISI commander to the Governor House. And again, in chapter six, that Pakistan’s supreme judiciary ‘can call in civilian bureaucrats and politicians in power, but when it comes to dealing with serving or even retired army officers, it gets cold feet.’
Is any single organisation supposed to possess such power, or to wield it in such a way in a democracy?
That and, ‘What would you do if your son disappeared?’ are the two most important questions raised by this book.
The writer is a journalist based in Lahore.
