Pakistan- the Balochistan Conundrum

by Tilak Devasher

  Mass Graves

  There was a staggering rise in recoveries of tortured bodies in 2014, primarily accounted for by the discovery of three mass graves in the Totak area of Khuzdar District. Between 25 January 2014 and 2 April 2014 a total of at least 103 bodies were recovered from these graves (local sources claimed that 169 bodies were found). The bodies were too decomposed for identification.61

  The Frontier Corps reportedly cordoned off the area surrounding the graves soon after their discovery, preventing civil society and the local community from monitoring activity at the gravesites. The Frontier Corps also prevented some relatives of enforced disappearance victims from visiting a local hospital to inspect the recovered bodies to see if they could identify their missing relatives.

  14

  The Judiciary

  THE SUPREME COURT OF PAKISTAN started seeking explanations from the Musharraf government at the end of 2005 and made rigorous efforts to find the whereabouts of the ‘missing persons’. The court summoned representatives of the government, military and intelligence agencies but they simply denied any knowledge of either the whereabouts of missing persons or the name of the detaining authority. Gen. Musharraf, on the other hand, tried to pressurize the judiciary into dropping these investigations. He even attempted to blackmail the judges. In March 2007 Musharraf ousted the chief justice of the Supreme Court Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry for making efforts to look into the ‘missing persons’ cases. Though Justice Chaudhry was reinstated and the court hearings on the ‘missing persons’ or ‘enforced disappearances’ continued, it was clear that the government was doing all it could to stop the judiciary from meddling into its affairs.

  In a constitutional petition filed before the Supreme Court of Pakistan in March 2007 the HRCP submitted a verified list of 148 missing persons, the overwhelming majority from Balochistan, and asserted that the law enforcement and intelligence agencies were responsible. The petition stated that some who had disappeared but were subsequently released had told the HRCP that they were held incommunicado and physically and mentally tortured by intelligence personnel to extract confessions and other evidence against themselves, their family or friends. Some were allegedly coerced into spying for the intelligence agencies. The mistreatment was said to have included sleep deprivation, severe beatings, electric shocks and humiliations such as being stripped naked.1

  The Supreme Court set up a commission to investigate these cases. By November 2007 about half of the persons listed as missing by HRCP had been traced. The hearings stopped in November 2007 and were revived after the chief justice was restored to his office.2

  Initially, the commission recorded only ninety cases from Balochistan even though the number was far higher. However, gradually it started receiving new complaints. The number of cases of missing persons it was dealing with went up in 2013 to 122—many of these people had gone missing in earlier years. The figure had jumped to 265 by July 2016.3 Even so, the VBMP held that the official figures did not reflect the actual number of missing persons—the total standing at 3,700 in their reckoning at that time. The HRCP too has questioned the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances reports that claimed there were 2,116 unresolved cases of forcible disappearances as of 30 November 2018, saying the number was far higher.4 This discrepancy was possibly due to relatives not reporting the disappearance of their family members.

  As the Amnesty International had noted earlier, it was difficult to determine how many people the government had subjected to enforced disappearance. Many remained silent about their relatives’ disappearance for fear of repercussions for the ‘disappeared’ or themselves. Despite a civilian government taking office after the general elections of 2008, there was very little impact on the continuing enforced disappearance and kill-and-dump policy in Balochistan.

  While the Supreme Court has heard cases about the ‘enforced disappearances’ and formed several commissions, it has been unsuccessful in pushing the authorities to either release the victims or hold a transparent investigation into the issue.5 The Supreme Court has also been unable to enforce its decisions. For example, it had ordered the return of more than 178,000 persons who had been displaced from the Dera Bugti area as a result of military action in 2005, but they were not allowed to return home by the Frontier Corps.6

  The Supreme Court has repeatedly warned that it would initiate legal action against persons responsible for enforced disappearances. Fearful of being held to account, intelligence agencies sought to prevent the truth emerging by threatening relatives of the ‘disappeared’ to withdraw petitions and to silence people being released. Such threats may also account for the fact that only a few of the released persons have submitted affidavits to the Supreme Court. ‘It is believed that families of “disappeared” persons were contacted by intelligence agencies with assurances that their relatives would be returned, if they kept quiet. Consequently, many people might have preferred silence to coming out in the open about a “disappearance” and risk upsetting a government agency holding a missing relative.’

  The active connivance of the state intelligence and security agencies, including the local police, in enforced disappearances is undeniable. Whenever a court was petitioned in a missing person’s case, it issued notices through the Quetta capital city police officer (CCPO), the top police officer in the provincial capital, to the security and intelligence agencies. Subsequently on the court’s query, the CCPO would inform the court that no reply had been received from the agencies. In a stereotype reply the investigating officer would submit that military officials had verbally refused to join the investigation and the police lacked the capacity to force them to comply.7

  The clout of the intelligence agencies can be gauged from an interesting case in July 2006, during a habeas corpus petition at the Sindh High Court. The defence secretary stated that the ministry had only administrative, not operational, control over its own intelligence agencies, including the Inter-Services Intelligence and Military Intelligence (MI), so could not enforce their compliance with

  court directions.8

  Not surprisingly, there is growing frustration with the judiciary. In the words of Mohammad Sadiq Reesani, the then president of Balochistan Bar Association: ‘In the past four years, the Balochistan Bar Association has filed more than 500 petitions in the Balochistan High Court for disappeared persons, but the judges have not taken them seriously. Baloch people have lost confidence in the legislature and judiciary and are indifferent to these institutions.’9

  The lawyers in Balochistan told the HRCP that the courts had abdicated their responsibility and jurisdiction by failing to ensure compliance with their orders. They stated that the military and paramilitary forces ignored the orders of the court and that was responsible for the spread of ‘blatant anarchy’. They said that throwing dead bodies of the disappeared persons in deserted areas was a vile method of making the habeas corpus petitions seeking their recovery infructuous. They said that the disappeared youth now ‘reappeared’ as dead bodies within days of their abduction.10

  Moreover, a recurring problem is that perpetrators have been rarely caught. Even when they are, no prosecution has resulted from it. The HRCP mission noted that in fifty-two cases decided by the anti-terrorism court (ATC), all the accused had been set free due to lack of witnesses.11

  While judicial action on the ground has been wanting, verbally the courts have repeatedly admonished the state agencies. For example, on 1 March 2012 the Supreme Court reprimanded the intelligence agencies by telling them that they were not above the law.12 The then chief justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry also termed them as the biggest violators of the law of the country. While commenting on the role of the intelligence agencies in Balochistan he said, ‘You are an arsonist. You have set Balochistan on fire.’13

  Irked by the apathy of the government towards preventing Balochistan from sliding into chaos, the chief justice, while heading a three-judge bench of the apex court hearing a case on the volatility o
f the security situation in Balochistan, issued an ominous warning: if the prime minister doesn’t take steps to improve the law and order, the Constitution will declare a state of emergency. He added, ‘The judiciary is an organ of the state. It’ll not allow violation of the Constitution. We want to save Pakistan.’ He cautioned, ‘Why don’t we implement the Constitution before the Army imposes martial law?’14

  According to the HRCP, while the law provides sufficient guarantees from arbitrary arrest, these have become meaningless in the absence of an effective judicial mechanism. In addition, it noted the absence of specific legal machinery—including laws and oversight bodies—for the effective accountability of law and security agencies, including penal sanctions and stopping the culture of impunity. Its lament was that superior courts in the country had not been able to uphold the principles of the rule of law.15

  While the Supreme Court has not really been successful in making the security forces respect the law, it cannot be denied, as Frederic Grare notes, it ‘… has been instrumental in shedding light on the Balochistan issue’.16 It has held a large number of hearings on the situation and also issued orders for the implementation of the law and the Constitution.’17 Though it has exposed its own impotency due to lack of implementation of its orders, but in the process it has underlined the total absence of accountability of the security establishment and the impunity with which they operate in Balochistan. The hearings, therefore, ‘… have contributed more than any other official body to informing the Pakistani press, public opinion, and the international community about the situation in Balochistan’.18

  15

  The Media

  Not being dead is a victory in today’s Balochistan if you are a journalist. Worse, there is little or no hope of prosecuting the killers, let along sentencing them. Most deaths of journalists go unpunished as a norm. This is the price our media has to pay for keeping the torch alive.1

  THESE CHILLING WORDS PENNED BY analyst Raza Rumi encapsulates what the media is going through in Balochistan. Despite being Pakistan’s largest province, Balochistan receives the least amount of editorial space in the mainstream national media. Editors routinely censor stories filed by Balochistan-based correspondents under the pretext of ‘national security’. ‘For a reporter covering Balochistan, it is often frustrating that your editors and publishers censor so much of your reporting that the government no longer needs officials to perform this job [of censorship],’ says Malik Siraj Akbar.2

  There are two major reasons for such strong censorship and the targeting of journalists and newspapers in Balochistan. For one, the army wants to put a lid on what it is doing and ensure that its brutal suppression of Baloch activists and massive violations of human rights are not reported, especially in the international media. The second is that the army wants to continue to manipulate the national narrative on Balochistan. The narrative that they have developed over the decades depicts that a small minority of ‘miscreant’ Baloch, by trying to seek ‘provincial autonomy’ and ownership of their natural resources, are playing into the hands of the ‘enemies of Pakistan’ and are ‘foreign agents’. The linked argument is that Pakistan is in Balochistan to ‘modernize’ and ‘develop’ the Baloch. This is contrary to the Baloch narrative that sees Pakistan’s policy as one of trying to plunder Balochistan’s mineral wealth and treat the province as a Punjabi colony. A relatively free media would expose the fact that the army’s narrative is unacceptable to the Baloch, and hence the crackdown on the media.3

  Not surprisingly, critical media reports have been frowned upon. Scores of local journalists who exposed enforced disappearance, torture, extra-judicial executions and other human rights violations by Pakistan security forces have been threatened, assassinated or have just disappeared themselves.

  As the examples of Sabeen Mahmud and Hamid Mir mentioned in a previous chapter showed, even discussing Balochistan is not tolerated. Journalists and columnists outside Balochistan writing about Balochistan face pressures, so the conditions in Balochistan can well be imagined.4 As a result, the Pakistan media fears to openly and fully report what is really happening in Balochistan. The net effect has been blanketing of the seven-decade old Baloch tragedy.

  The figures speak for themselves. Twenty-two journalists were killed in Balochistan in four years (2008–12).5 In February 2014 the annual report of Reporters Without Borders stated that of the seven reporters killed in Pakistan in 2013, four were from Balochistan. According to an article in November 2017 quoting Khalil Ahmed, president of the Balochistan Union of Journalists, forty-three journalists have been killed in Balochistan, including by bomb blasts and targeted killings.6

  Some examples of what the media and journalists have to endure is enumerated in the following paragraphs.

  In 2009, the FC laid siege to three newspaper offices in Quetta—Daily Asaap, Azadi and Balochistan Express. The FC personnel posted outside Asaap’s offices eventually forced it to stop publication.

  In November 2011 the body of Javed Naseer Rind, a Daily Tawar editor and columnist, was found two months after he disappeared in his home town of Hub in Baluchistan.

  In September 2012 ARY TV reporter Abdul Haq Baloch was killed as he was leaving the Khuzdar Press Club in Khuzdar, Balochistan. Baloch was the secretary-general of the Khuzdar Press Club. In protest his fellow journalists stopped performing their professional duties and locked the Khuzdar Press Club. According to journalist Hamid Mir, the Baloch Musalah Diffa Army (BMDA or the Armed Baloch Defence) had threatened Baloch in 2011. Later, the BDMA released a hit list carrying the names of journalists, which also included that of Abdul Haq Baloch. The BDMA was reportedly being run under the patronage of a government-backed senator from Balochistan. Baloch had been killed because security forces were upset that he was working with the families of the missing Baloch on presenting cases before the Quetta bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.7

  In March 2013 Haji Abdul Razzaq Baloch, a copy editor for the Daily Tawar, a pro-Baloch nationalist paper acting as the voice of Baloch nationalists, was abducted in Karachi. His body was found in the Surjani Town area of Karachi on 21 August 2013. His face was mutilated and his body showed signs of strangulation and torture. The case was highlighted by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) whose Asia programme coordinator Bob Dietz said, ‘The pattern of violence directed against the Daily Tawar and its staff is undeniable. The government must act to protect the paper and its journalists even if they voice opinions that the government resists.’

  In April 2013 a large group of unidentified men entered the Karachi bureau of the Urdu-language Daily Tawar (headquartered in Quetta) in Lyari, Karachi and stole computers and other equipment, burned records and archives before leaving the premises.8

  Razzaq Sarbazi, blogger, senior TV news producer and documentary filmmaker, escaped to the West after his life came under constant threat in Pakistan. Later he said, ‘Journalism in Pakistan was like an unending nightmare for me. The price my colleagues and I paid for the written word is embedded in my memory like a deep wound.’ At least four of Sarbazi’s colleagues in Daily Tawar—Haji Razzaq Baloch, Razzaq Gul, Abdul Khaliq and Javed Naseer Rind—were killed by the Pakistani intelligence services since 2011. In his work as a journalist, he exclusively covered the war in Balochistan, including enforced disappearances. ‘The issue of enforced disappearances in Balochistan is such that before daring to highlight it, a journalist has to count his days on earth,’ Sarbazi said. ‘I remained faithful to my pen and paid a price for it.’9

  Other journalists who have been killed include senior journalist Irshad Mastoi, his trainee reporter Abdul Rasool Khajak, and accountant Mohammad Younus in their office in Quetta’s Jinnah Road area; Mumtaz Alam in April 2014; Abdul Qadir Hajizai, and Mohammad Afzal Khawaja, a reporter for The Balochistan Times and its sister publication Zamana in February 2014 along with his driver

  The Balochistan Union of Journalists (BUJ) has stated that ‘Balochistan has become a cemetery for jo
urnalists, who perform their journalistic duties honestly and bravely.’ Added a journalist, ‘Our voices are unheard in mainstream national media, and we (journalists) when faced (with) threats don’t get them published.’ Highlighting the tragedy, Saleem Shahid, the bureau chief of a leading daily English newspaper commented, ‘Those journalists in Balochistan, who have written and reported about injustices, have themselves become news.’10

  The foreign media has also been targeted. The Al Jazeera quoted an Irish journalist saying, ‘The Balochistan story is one of the most difficult to cover in Pakistan. The authorities don’t like foreign journalists entering the province unaccompanied and are rarely given permission to do so. They say this is for security reasons. But they also don’t want reporters snooping around in an area where so much militant activity is taking place—Taliban, sectarian and nationalist—and where the security agencies either lack control, or have historical ties with some of these groups.’11

  Carlotta Gall, who worked for the New York Times, was beaten up in Quetta in 2006 by men who identified themselves as members of a special branch of the Pakistan police and who accused her of ‘being in Quetta without permission’.12 Ahmed Rashid, writer and commentator told Al Jazeera that some journalists exercise ‘self-censorship’ and ‘tend not to report on the issue for sheer survival. And if it’s not in the Pakistani media, it will hardly reach the outside world, as Western media basically relies on Pakistani sources.’13

  As a result of the insecurity among journalists, the BBC in 2012 asked its Quetta correspondent Ayub Tarin to shift to Islamabad. A Quetta-based Voice of America (VOA) journalist Naseer Kakar left Balochistan after being threatened by security forces.14