The Fight To Find The Disappeared In Restive Balochistan.

https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/pakistan-the-fight-to-find-the-disappeared-in-restive-balochistan/29648415.html?fbclid=IwAR1MOQdggWsFBRWSNq1LX8WCMYP1WBYxQ1HjFNCo8cKSnYN__93wfQoXdC8

Life was always tough for Seema Baloch. As an ethnic Baluch woman, her family endured insecurity, neglect, and extreme poverty in their homeland in Pakistan's southwestern province of Balochistan.

But it was the sudden disappearance of her brother, Shabbir Baloch, two years ago that forced Seema to abandon her rural home in Balochistan's remote Turbat district and join the protests in Pakistan’s major cities.

Seema, in her 20s, and her sister-in-law, Zarina Baloch, have helped organize rallies on the bustling roads of the southern port city of Karachi. The family has knocked on the doors of courts, police stations, and a government office tasked with finding disappeared people.

But nothing helped to locate Shabbir, who was 24 when he was detained by the security forces in the town of Gwarkop in October 2016, according to global rights watchdog Amnesty International. In November Seema joined other Baluch families in a protest outside the press club in Quetta, the dusty teeming capital of Balochistan. Seema says she is on an indefinite hunger strike to force authorities to find or release her brother.

“Our family is devastated," she says. "Shabbir was the eldest among our siblings, and he was the hope of my parents. Now my elderly parents and his wife are broken without him.”

Seema's mother is bedridden with a protracted illness while her father has been hospitalized for surgery.

Zarina Baloch says her husband's only crime appears to be his role as a leader of the pro-separatist Baloch Students Organization (BSO Azad faction). "He was blindfolded and whisked away by force along with 26 other people," she said of his disappearance in 2016. "After a few days most of them were released, but Shabbir never returned."

Seema and Zarina's family is prominent among the relatives of alleged victims of enforced disappearances that are engaged in a new protest campaign to prompt authorities to locate disappeared persons in Balochistan, where thousands have died and disappeared amid a simmering separatist insurgency.