Pakistan: Baloch human rights activist gives call for national gathering to protest against state brutality

Leading Baloch human rights activist and organiser of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), Mahrang Baloch gave a call on Thursday for a national gathering to be held at Dalbandin on January 25 to highlight the plight of Baloch people under Pakistan who are routinely subjected to barbarity, brutality, and violence.

In a post on X, she highlighted how the inhuman and horrific tortures being faced by Baloch people at the hands of the Pakistani Army.

She said, “Every passing day, a painful incident comes to light in which Pakistani army and death squad operatives raid the home of a Baloch family, torture the women and children and forcibly abduct the men. Under a well-thought-out and systematic plan, Balochistan is being forcibly made a place of mourning and torture on a daily basis so that the Baloch nation can be convinced that the decision of their life and death is in the hands of cruel and barbaric state institutions.”

She noted that the violence inflicted by Pakistan on Baloch people has resulted in several unmarked and abandoned graves across the region.

She further said, “Pakistani army and its death squads have been dismembering thousands of our loved ones for many years, disfiguring them, considering them abandoned and burying them in anonymous cemeteries in different parts of Balochistan in an inhuman, illegal, immoral and irreligious manner, is intended to send a message to the Baloch nation that they are not only abandoned in their own land, but also the decision of their life and death is in their own hands. This cruel act is actually an attempt to convince us that our status on this land is nothing more than animals.”

“Over the past several years, they have developed a systematic plan to assert their illegal power and ruthlessly exploit the resources of Baloch land, under which continuing the genocide of the Baloch nation is a key part of their plan”, she added.

She gave a call to people to, “fully participate in the national gathering to be held at Dalbandin on January 25th to prove that these abandoned bodies and graves are indeed our great martyrs.”

The BYC has declared January 25 as “Baloch Genocide Memorial Day” to honour those who have fallen victim to what the group describes as a genocidal campaign against the Baloch people, The Balochistan Post reported.

Mahrang Baloch explained that January 25 marks the 2014 discovery of over 100 mutilated bodies in the Tootak region of Balochistan. She said that these remains belonged to Baloch individuals forcibly disappeared by Pakistani military and intelligence agencies.