Horrors in Balochistan

The world cannot afford to treat Balochistan as an internal affair of Pakistan. This is not simply a matter of provincial discontent—it is a human rights crisis unfolding in real time. If the United Nations can pass resolutions on Syria, Myanmar, and Ukraine, why not Balochistan? The Totak graves of 2014 are as grave a crime against humanity as any seen in the past decade.

- BHAAVNA ARORA The writer is a popular author whose latest work Nagrota Under Siege was published by Penguin

For decades, Balochistan has been a graveyard of silenced voices. Beneath the rugged hills and resource-rich soil lies a brutal story of disappearances, mass graves, and a people fighting for the simple dignity of being heard. Pakistan routinely thunders about human rights in Kashmir at the United Nations, but it has perfected a machinery of repression within its own borders, particularly in Balochistan, the country's largest yet most neglected province.

The pattern is chillingly consistent. People are abducted by security forces, detained in custody, and weeks or months later, their mutilated bodies appear dumped on roadsides or in mass graves. Families that protest are baton-charged, women-led marches are crushed, and those who survive live in fear of the next knock on the door. These are not allegations whispered in the dark. They are documented realities, reported by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, international media, and even acknowledged in Pakistan's own Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIED).

Balochistan's alienation began in 1948 when Pakistan annexed the Khanate of Kalat against the wishes of many Baloch leaders. The resentment simmered for decades, erupting into multiple insurgencies. But it was the killing of veteran leader Nawab Akbar Bugti in August 2006 during a Pakistan Army operation that re-ignited the fiercest cycle of violence. Since then, the state's counterinsurgency effort has relied less on dialogue and more on a "kill-and-dump" policy that the United Nations Working Group on Enforced Disappearances (WGEID) has repeatedly flagged.

On 1 April 2011, Pakistani newspapers reported a horrifying statistic: 121 bullet-riddled bodies had been recovered across Balochistan in just eight months. Most were young men, activists, and students, abducted earlier by security agencies. The message was clear—speak up, and you vanish.