#Baloch seek answers from #Pakistan as more disappear in conflict

Balochistan separatists say more than 5,000 people have gone missing in decades of conflict in southwestern Pakistan.

For more than 11 years, relatives of people who disappeared in the murk of a separatist movement in southwestern Pakistan have gathered outside the Press Club of Quetta wanting to know who took their fathers, husbands and sons.

The daily sit-in protest in the provincial capital of Balochistan began on June 28, 2009, after a doctor, Deen Muhammad, was abducted by "unknown men".

Relatives suspect Muhammad, like many other missing ethnic Baloch, was snatched by Pakistani security forces hunting separatists, who for decades have waged a campaign for greater autonomy or independence.

Sometimes less than a dozen join the daily protest, other days many more, but Muhammad's two daughters have been among the regulars since they were eight and 10 years old.

"Our little hands were holding pictures of our father back then; now we have grown up and we still have no clue if he is alive," Sammi Baloch, now 21, told Reuters news agency by telephone from Quetta.

When the weather is too extreme in Quetta to hold protest, a sit-in is observed by Baloch in front of the press club in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and a melting pot for different ethnic groups.

'Stop disappearing people'

The separatist movement in Balochistan, a sparsely populated, mountainous, desert region bordering Afghanistan and Iran, has both waned and intensified over the years.

Last month, the Balochistan National Party (BNP) quit Prime Minister Imran Khan's parliamentary bloc, frustrated by unfulfilled promises to address Baloch grievances including the festering issue of the disappeared.

When he led the BNP into an alliance with Khan's coalition two years ago, Akhtar Mengal gave the government a list of 5,128 missing people.

Since then, more than 450 of the people on the list have been found or returned to their families, but during the same period, Mengal says another 1,800 were reported to have disappeared.

"If you cannot recover people, at least stop disappearing more people," said Mengal.

Another Baloch party - set up in the months prior to the 2018 elections with backing from the military establishment, according to political analysts - is in a coalition with Prime Minister Khan's party at federal and provincial levels.

Balochistan Awami Party Senator Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar told Reuters the numbers of the missing are "exaggerated".

But Mama Qadeer, who heads a group called Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, keeps his own count.

"In the last six months, the number of Baloch missing persons has risen," he told Reuters by telephone. His son disappeared 10 years ago.

In February last year, Qadeer's group handed a list of 500 missing people to provincial officials. Since then, nearly 300 have been returned to their homes but 87 others disappeared in the first half of this year, according to the group.