A letter to Sajid Hussain Hello Guru! Let’s make one thing clear. If you are expecting that I will write an eulogy or another emotional piece, you are wrong. I think you remember very well once I told you: “Nothing excites me anymore”. Honestly, when I said that, I was imagining becoming as cold as ...
I first met Sajid Hussain in my hometown of Tump, a small insignificant place in the middle of nowhere in Balochistan. I can’t remember the year, but it was sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. His cousin Asif Baloch, who was a student political activist, proudly introduced him: “Meet Sajid. He is a ...
What I’m doing here is not right. How could I be writing about the disappearance of the man who took special interest in how best to portray the Baloch missing persons’ cases? About the man who once said the dead did not haunt him as much as the missing did? That too on his own ...
The once-famous 11-year-old boy carrying a single-wheel trolley during the historic Long March to find his missing father is now a 16-year-old young man – an age which makes him almost eligible to go missing himself. And he did. On Sunday. Ali Haider –the remarkably poised boy usually wearing an intense look and a flat ...
On Feb 18, 2019, online Baloch activists shared a picture of a smiling eight-year-old child with a caption that read that Bohair was an eight-month-old infant when his father, Atiq Ur Rahman, was abducted by Pakistan military and he is still missing. Atiq was taken away during a late-night raid on his house in Khuzda’r ...
This report, by Riaz Sohail, was published by the BBC Urdu service on March 13, 2019. Yousuf Murad has translated it from Urdu. In a remote uninhabited area about 30 km from the Pakistani city of Quetta, a new – two-and-half-year-old — settlement is sprawling. This settlement belongs to unidentified bodies. It is the ...
By definition, enforced disappearance occurs when a person is, “arrested, detained or abducted against their will by or with the support of government officials, followed by a refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the persons concerned, which places such persons outside the protection of the law”. The victims in most cases are made ...
Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) leader Manzoor Pashteen was blocked by security officials on Monday when he reached the Quetta airport to visit the protest camp of families of Baloch missing persons. FIA officials stopped the PTM leader at the airport and forced him to return on the next flight. Pashteen had arrived in the city ...
A mass grave was found in Balochistan’s Panjgur district on 17 July, 2018, containing four bodies decomposed beyond recognition. Relatives of missing persons, a term used for victims of enforced disappearances in Balochistan, flocked to the site of the mass grave fearing the bodies might belong to their loved ones. However, there was no way ...
In the Tales from the Dungeon series of Balochistan Times, former victims of enforced disappearance recount their ordeal. Haji Naseer was one of the first political activists to be whisked away by Pakistan military from Balochistan in 2004. He now lives in Germany as a refugee. My name is Haji Naseer, and I am ...
