KARACHI: In the last week of November 2011, Qadeer Baloch, a retired UBL employee from Quetta did something that no grandfather should have to do. He held his four and a half year old grandson’s hand and took him to see his son Jalil Reki’s mutilated bullet-riddled body and made sure the kid got a good look at it. Qadeer Baloch also had a chat with the boy and told him who had killed his father and why.

For more than two and a half years Qadeer had been lying to the boy. “When Jalil was picked up he was only two,” says Qadeer Baloch. “He had a hole in his heart and the doctors told us not to put him under any stress. So I kept telling him that his daddy was away on business.”

The state is edgy and nervous about the intensity of resistance to its atrocities and is indiscriminately persecuting the Baloch people. On Tuesday, the house of Lal Khan Marri, a school teacher, was raided in Hub. His elder brother, Mazar Khan, and paternal uncle Jan Ali were picked up — what will be their fate is unknown

The increasing apathy witnessed here in all aspects of life is certainly most disturbing for all those who want this unfathomable space’s blue and white rotating ball to become an abode of peace and harmony for all its inhabitants. Apathy is the termite that eats away at the inner moral core of individuals, groups, nations and countries, leaving a hollow outside structure incapable of any good to humanity. Apathy gives a free rein to the perpetrators of violence.

by Mazhar Arif

The very unfortunate situation in Balochistan seems to have raised little concern in other parts of the country. The ethnic media appears more concerned about the ‘ghairat business’ or events occurred in Karachi or Islamabad. There are dozens of military detention centers in Balochistan, where people after their arrest, are detained and tortured to force confession statements about their alleged activities

“The bodies surface quietly, like corks bobbing up in the dark. They come in twos and threes, a few times a week, dumped on desolate mountains or empty city roads, bearing the scars of great cruelty. Arms and legs are snapped; faces are bruised and swollen. Flesh is sliced with knives or punctured with drills; genitals are singed with electric prods. In some cases the bodies are unrecognizable, sprinkled with lime or chewed by wild animals. All have a gunshot wound in the head.” This is not a description of a scene from some horror movie. This gruesome parade of corpses has been surfacing in Balochistan, Pakistan’s largest province, since last July.

The support for the Baloch is an anathema for all the parties and politicians because it antagonises the army and not a single political entity is ready to risk its neck. There has been no mentionable show or even sham support for their rights

“Brute force bereft of reason falls by its own weight. Power with counsel temper’d even the gods make greater. But might which in its soul is bent on all impiety, they hate” — Quintus Horatius Flaccus.

Recently the Punjab Assembly supported Nawaz Sharif’s stance on Balochistan after his meeting with Sardar Ataullah Mengal. He had pledged that he will fight the case of Balochistan at all forums and would resolve the issue in consultation with all defiant Baloch leaders and that Sardar Mengal’s concerns were legitimate and atrocities were being committed in Balochistan.

By Nobat Marri

The endless recovery of mutilated bodies of Baloch activists in the deserted areas of Baluchistan is the worse of its kind of the human rights violations by Pakistani forces. The disregarding behavior of Pakistani media toward Baluchistan issue is another unethical tactic of Punjabi army to hide their crimes from the international community, what is sometimes described as the “civilized World”.

One is compelled to ask the question: For how long they can hide their crimes against Baloch nation and mislead the International Human Rights Organisations? Maybe one year, two year or even several years but eventually the reality will come out – for nobody can hide the truth. A wrongdoer is a wrongdoer no matter how hard he/she tries to conceal its crimes, in the end the punishment of the wrong actions is inevitable.