In Pakistan, anyone can be forcibly disappeared
The govt accuses them of terrorism but many of the missing have no connection to politics
February 28, 2024 — In Pakistan, people disappear. Sometimes forever. For their families, time freezes as they don’t know if they should grieve and move on, or live with the hope that their relatives will one day come home. The government links the missing to terrorism, insurgency and ethnicity, but decades of effort by activists and bereft relatives has raised awareness that anyone, anywhere in Pakistan can disappear without trace.
Thousands of people have been reported as forcibly disappeared to the Commission of Inquiry into Enforced Disappearances, a quasi-governmental body that does little more than keep the numbers updated. Anwaarul Haq Kakar, caretaker prime minister until the newly-elected coalition government was sworn in at the end of February, used a New Year’s Day speech to blame the disappeared for their own plight, branding them terrorists. Weeks later, he was threatened with legal action by a judge of the Islamabad High Court for not responding to multiple orders to explain his failure to trace missing students from Balochistan province.
Justice Mohsin Akhtar Kayani said the reason for summoning Kakar to appear was so the court could “inquire why the state’s premier is failing in his duties”. For the relatives of the disappeared, the judge’s withering indictment of the prime minister just restated the obvious. Since 2011, more than 10,000 people have been forcibly disappeared across Pakistan; as of January, according to commission figures, 2,311 remained unaccounted for.
Amnesty International said the commission likely under-estimates the true figure. The rights watchdog has called enforced disappearance a “cruel” and “abhorrent” practice that causes anguish for families, as well as financial stress and long-term ill health. In its 2022 annual report on Pakistan, it said that “state officials continued to use enforced disappearances to target human rights defenders, journalists and people voicing criticism of the authorities”.
Many of the disappeared were from resource-rich Balochistan, where anti-government sentiment going back decades has burgeoned into a full-blown insurgency with roots in development of the province’s natural resources, growing Chinese investment, and what activists say is the marginalisation of local people from jobs and revenue.
A large number of the disappeared, however, have no apparent connection to political activism that their relatives can determine. That’s the case for Amina Masood Janjua, who with her daughter, Aishah, runs Defence of Human Rights, which she set up after her husband, Masood, disappeared on July 30th, 2005.
Since then, her organisation has traced 1,800 disappeared people, she said, but not her husband, a businessman from a military family. He vanished after boarding a bus in Rawalpindi, a garrison town not far from the capital, Islamabad, for a business trip to Peshawar. There were sightings, she said–-a couple of people told her they’d seen him in a prison, but wouldn’t go on the record, fearing for their own safety.
The authorities, she said, have consistently denied knowing his whereabouts, even after former strongman, Army Gen. Pervez Sharif, who knew her husband through family and Army connections, told her that he was alive. She raised three children alone, not knowing if she’s widowed, abandoned, or a victim of state repression.
Forced disappearances, Janjua told Foreign Policy, are a direct result of the “war on terror” declared by former U.S. President George W. Bush after the big al-Qaeda attacks on the United States on Sept. 11th, 2001. These led to the retaliatory U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, where the Taliban, then in control, had protected Osama bin Laden as he planned the operation. He fled to Pakistan to avoid capture, and was soon joined by Taliban leaders when they were bombed out of power. There, they were protected, funded and armed by the Pakistani military spy wing, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
Musharaff, who had seized power in a 1999 coup, is believed to have used extra-judicial detentions to comply with U.S. expectations of Pakistan as an active ally in eradicating enemy combatants, notably in the north-western tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. What started as operations against suspected militants morphed into accepted practice by the Army and ISI “to silence opposition to military intervention in politics and media” and “its narratives on security, terrorism, foreign policy and counterinsurgency campaigns,” Pakistani academic Salman Hussein wrote in e-legal, an online journal published by the Faculty of Law and Criminology at the Free University of Brussels.
The intelligence services “extended disappearances as a tactic of fear, intimidation, and censorship to their public critics as well, many of whom are political and rights activists, students, journalists, teachers, and intellectuals,” he wrote. Many of the left-behind strain to recall what transgressions could have led to their family members being targeted by the security services.
In Balochistan, however, there’s little doubt that anti-state activism, no matter how benign or overt, can lead to disappearance. The commission has recorded 2,708 disappearances of Baloch people. Lawyer Faisal Siddiqi accused the commission of acting as a clearing house for state policy as no official has been held responsible for a single disappearance.
Sammi Baloch, 25, believes her father, Deen Mohammad Baloch, a political activist and doctor who worked in public hospitals across Balochistan, was detained by the military in June, 2009, for speaking out against the deprivation he saw amongst his patients. She has been campaigning for her father’s return for most of her life, and has joined or organised numerous marches to Islamabad, with relatives of other Baloch disappeared to demand accountability.
“Our only demand is that our people are brought to court, and if they are not guilty, then release them, and release their families from collective punishment,” she said, speaking on the periphery of the Karachi Literature Festival. “We have been peacefully protesting according to the law and the constitution. So bring our people to court according to your constitution and your law. End this cruelty and pain.”
Balochistan is the poorest and least developed region of Pakistan though it has most of the country’s natural gas reserves, with a reported 19 trillion cubic feet of a national total of 25.1 trillion cubic feet. It also has oil, copper, gold and other mineral resources. It borders Afghanistan and Iran, and faces the Arabian Sea. Its deep-water port of Gwadar is a strategic asset in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).
CPEC is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative global infrastructure development project, with $65 billion invested in road, rail, pipelines and the port to link China to the Arabian Sea, and markets beyond. Pakistan’s relationship with China is vital to the development of a moribund economy mired in double-digit inflation and unemployment, reliant on loans just to pay the interest on previous multi-lateral loans.
Yet activists like Sammi Baloch and Amina Janjua say local people are forced to gather firewood for fuel as the CPEC jobs go to workers from elsewhere in Pakistan, and from China. The gas, meanwhile, is pumped to wealthier areas of the country, and exported mainly to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The growing anger has led to the rise of anti-state groups including the Baloch Liberation Army and the Balochi Nationalist Army, which regularly attack Pakistani state and Chinese targets in pursuit of greater autonomy for Balochistan and less foreign involvement in regional development. Pakistan has just approved the start of work on a section of the Iran-Pakistan pipeline, despite U.S. sanctions on Iran and in order to avoid financial penalities, from the Iran border to Gwadar, another major project that could further inflame tensions.
The separatist violence reached a nadir in April, 2022, when Shari Hayat Baloch—30 years old, well educated, married with children--blew herself up to kill three Chinese people in Karachi. The attack shocked the country, focussing attention on the desperation of Baloch people and raising awareness of their treatment by the state apparatus, activists said.
Sammi Baloch said the most recent march she led to Islamabad, was welcomed as it passed through towns and cities on the 2,000-km journey, as many people now realise that enforced disappearances are not an ethnic issue, but a symptom of state brutality and impunity. When the marchers, who included elderly women and young children, reached the capital outskirts, the authorities were waiting, and tried to force them onto buses back to Balochistan, she said.
When that didn’t work, they used batons to beat them and water to freeze them, and tried to prevent supporters giving them food and blankets. Some were imprisoned, many became ill yet they stayed in Islamabad, camped on open ground, for 32 days. No official came to meet with them, she said.
“We came empty-handed and we left empty-handed,” she said. Kakar, the caretaker prime minister, accused supporters of terrorism. “We had hoped that the government would tell us about our loved ones, our husbands, fathers, brothers missing for 20 years, 10 years, but the government just ignored us, again,” she said.