Baloch separatist campaigner, backers draw threats for trumpeting plight of missing insurgents.
Playing host to Mama Qadeer Baloch is a dangerous act in Pakistan.
The 73-year-old human-rights campaigner routinely receives death threats; his hosts at public appearances have been targeted for assassination; and on Wednesday, the administration of Karachi University shut a planned lecture to avoid the wrath of the country’s powerful military establishment.
Since 2009, Mr. Baloch, a retired bank worker, has kept a solitary vigil on a sidewalk outside the press club in this southern megacity, surrounded by pictures of people he alleges the military abducted from his native Balochistan province, a sparsely populated western province that is rich in minerals.
Although Pakistan is better known for fighting a militant Islamist movement, the country’s 600,000-strong armed forces, equipped with modern weaponry and nuclear arms, since 2006 have battled a secular separatist insurgency in the province, which the military claims is supported by archenemy India.
As with other security issues, the military runs the Balochistan campaign with little input from the elected civilian administration. Human-rights groups say the conflict has seen security forces abduct suspected insurgents and their political supporters, often dumping their tortured corpses. Independent rights groups also accuse the separatists of killing settlers in Balochistan from other provinces, especially teachers and laborers.
Mr. Baloch’s campaign shows the shrinking public space for discussion about Balochistan and other issues as the military increasingly asserts itself.
“Mama Qadeer gives a human face to whatever is going on in Balochistan and I think that’s why they are trying to make sure that he must not be heard,” said Mohammad Hanif, a leading Pakistani novelist.
On Wednesday, the arts auditorium where Mr. Baloch and two other speakers from Balochistan were scheduled to speak was locked. Faculty who organized the discussion received a letter from the university on Tuesday that read: “Seminars related to sensitive issues are not allowed in the university premises.”
Students and some faculty defied the ban, however. Mr. Baloch was smuggled onto the campus overnight, faculty members said, and around 200 people gathered outside the auditorium and listened to him speak on Wednesday.
The pro-military anchors of political talk shows regularly brand Mr. Baloch a traitor and foreign agent. He said he often receives personal threats from men who identify themselves as Pakistani intelligence agents, adding that he believes the military is weighing whether killing him would add to their Balochistan problem.
Mr. Baloch, who openly advocates independence for his home province, said he isn’t deterred.
“When I come here and put up pictures of our martyrs, of our missing, and I look at their youthful faces, my spirits rise so much,” he said in a recent interview outside the Karachi press club. “Sometimes I sit here all day alone, but I don’t feel lonely.”
He began his protest when Pakistani security forces detained his son, Jalil Reki, an activist with a separatist political party, at the family home in Balochistan’s provincial capital Quetta in February 2009.
Mr. Baloch said intelligence agents in 2011 warned him to end his protest “or receive your son’s body.” Mr. Reki’s battered corpse was found near Balochistan’s border with Iran 20 days later, he said.
Mr. Baloch was the main speaker at a talk on human rights in Balochistan at a small arts center in Karachi in April. The host of the event, Sabeen Mahmud, a 40-year-old peace activist, was assassinated by gunmen as she drove away after the event.
She had previously received threats over Mr. Baloch’s talk, her colleagues said. The military denied involvement. Karachi police said they are focusing on two likely culprits in their investigation: a foreign intelligence agency or a local Islamist militant group.
Ms. Mahmud organized the appearance after a planned talk by Mr. Baloch at a prestigious private university, the Lahore University of Management Sciences in eastern Pakistan, was abruptly canceled.
The university said this was “on orders from the government.” Some faculty members said the order came from the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency. The government and the military declined to comment.
In March, Mr. Baloch said officials at Karachi Airport stopped him from leaving Pakistan for a talk in New York organized by expatriate Pakistanis on the situation in Balochistan, saying he is on the Exit Control List, a roster of people barred by the government from leaving the country.
Two Pakistani government officials confirmed that Mr. Baloch was prevented from boarding the flight, but said they couldn’t confirm that he is on the Exit Control List.
Last year, Pakistan’s most famous news anchor, Hamid Mir, was shot in Karachi, after he ran a show that featured Mr. Baloch and other activists from Balochistan.
Mr. Mir, who barely survived and still has two bullets lodged in him, said military personnel had warned him against airing the program. The military denied involvement in the attack.
“The state is after these 10, 15 activists, headed by an elderly man, Mama Qadeer,” said Mr. Mir. “Is this really a nuclear power? It doesn’t act like it.”
The military didn’t respond to requests for comment on Mr. Baloch’s allegations. In April, Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Raheel Sharif, vowed to “unearth terrorists, abettors, sympathizers, financiers” of the Baloch insurgency.
According to Mr. Baloch’s Voice for Baloch Missing Persons organization, more than 21,000 Baloch have disappeared and 6,000 bodies have turned up since 2000. Other human-rights groups put the tally much lower, in the several hundred.
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization, said, for instance, that it was able to document 109 disappearances and 67 dumped bodies found in Balochistan during 2014, and added that no inquiry or prosecution took place over any of these cases. Information on Balochistan is murky outside Quetta. Because of danger of attack by jihadists, separatists or the military, Balochistan is hazardous place for human rights activists or media to work.
Last year, Mr. Baloch walked more than half the length of the country—to Islamabad from Karachi—over a three-month period to highlight Baloch human rights, heading a small band of followers, including children whose fathers have disappeared.
“I ask for our children back,” said Mr. Baloch. “I ask for a solution to the dumped bodies.”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistan-separatist-faces-militarys-wrath-1430931582
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