Balochistan activists: Treat us as human and give us independence

Illusive

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In Focus: Balochistan activists urge Pakistan to 'treat us as human beings and give us independence'

The Baloch Republican Party (BRP) has been organising protests in several European capitals to shed light on alleged human rights abuses in the Balochistan province, in western Pakistan.

IBTimes UK spoke with the president of the party's UK chapter, Mansoor Baluch, who alleged that dozens of Baloch people are abducted and executed by Pakistani security agencies and the Pakistani Army.

Human Rights Watch released several reports on abducted people in Balochistan. In 2011, the rights group documented rights abuses allegedly committed by the Pakistani government against people in Balochistan.

The NGO urged Pakistan to end "widespread disappearances of suspected militants and activists by the military, intelligence agencies, and the paramilitary Frontier Corps".

The report detailed 45 alleged cases of enforced disappearances – the majority of which occurred in 2009 and 2010 – and warned that some of the people who were abducted were also executed.

In a February 2015 report, HRW said that according to official statistics, since 2009 authorities have recovered the bodies of 4,557 suspected victims of enforced disappearance and subsequent extrajudicial execution, of which 266 remain unidentified.

"Those figures reflect the brutal toll of government agencies' deplorable practice of abducting people and then denying holding them, or not providing information about their fate or whereabouts," the report read.

"Such enforced disappearances – most often of men and boys – occur regularly throughout Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan and north-western Pakistan, but also in Punjab and Sindh provinces. Under international law, an enforced disappearance is a 'continuous' crime: it persists, and continues to inflict suffering on the victim's family, as long as the fate of the missing person is unknown or concealed."

In a separate interview with IBTimes UK, Ashraf Sherjan, president of the BRP Germany Chapter, warned that Balochs are haunted by what he calls a "Pakistani kill-and-dump-policy by intelligence agencies and armed forces."

"Since Balochistan was forcefully occupied by Pakistan, Baloch people have been living as guests of death. It has never been considered, even outside Pakistan, that Balochistan belongs to the Baloch people who are now haunted. Baloch leaders are being deliberately assassinated by the occupying state of Pakistan for demanding rights to their own land," said Sherjan.


Such atrocities can be expected from pakistan, but ignoring their pleas and not helping them is not expected from India.
 

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