The Islamabad Police acted with sufficient brutality in breaking up the Long March from Balochistan, which collected support along the way, as its participants tried to reach their final destination, outside the Lahore Press Club, on Wednesday. Three caretaker ministers announced on Thursday that all women and children were being released, as well as all the men had been identified. The ministers claimed that the crowd was made to clash with the police by certain miscreants who were following their own agenda. However, looking past the ministerial magnanimity of the releases, the problems have not been solved that motivated the marchers— missing persons, extrajudicial custodial killings and undue interference in the province.
The missing persons issue has been a running sore on the body politic. It focused on Balochistan, where it became a bigger issue than in the rest of the country, because this tool of the War on Terror was applied also to Baloch nationalists and other so-called enemies of the state.’ There was greater impunity in the province, where there was both a sectarian militant presence in Pashtun areas as well as a nationalist insurgency. To this explosive mix was added the interest in the province shown by China because of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, as well as that shown in it by those powers trying to sabotage CPEC. A section of Baloch opinion resents CPEC because it does not provide the province jobs or development. It is no coincidence that opposition to CPEC is centred in the same place as the March on Islamabad started: Turbat, on the Makran Coast.
Enforced disappearances predate the USA’s War on Terror, going back to the 1970s, when it was a Latin American phenomenon, used in Argentina’s Dirty War by the Videla regime against its opponents, under the cover of anti-communism. However, there were no enforced disappearances during the Zia era, though the regime fought the USA’s war in Afghanistan. They only began in Pakistan after Musharraf joined the War on Terror, and now are used not just against militants, but Baloch nationalists. Enforced disappearances have been challenged by the families of the disappeared from the beginning, but they are unacceptable in a society that claims it is subject to the rule of law. It is wrong that those disappearing are not recovered solely to spare the blushes of powerful individuals. It is also unacceptable that the country’s future is put at stake by those individuals.
