The issue of enforced disappearances is now seen as one of the biggest hurdles to Islamabad’s efforts to make peace with the Baloch people.
Since December 30 last, a group of two dozen boys and girls, accompanied by a few adult women, has been squatting outside the Quetta Press Club, braving the biting cold that sweeps through Pakistan’s Baluchistan province at this time of the year. The group is on a daily hunger-strike, protesting the disappearance of a father or a brother, allegedly after he was taken away by state intelligence agencies.
Holding photographs of their missing family members, these children say they will sit there indefinitely — until they get some news of their family members.
In the group are the young sons and daughters of Ali Asghar Bungalzai, a 38-year-old Quetta tailor. For months after he was picked up in October 2001, military and intelligence officials reportedly kept assuring his family that he would be released soon. Between 2006 and 2007, the children — all of them then under 20 — stood outside the press club for a full 371 days, demanding that their father be restored to them. They were persuaded to leave only after the Governor assured them that he would take a personal interest in tracking down their father. But Bunglazai remains missing to this day.
http://newageislam.com/the-mess-over-the-missing-in-baluchistan/current-affairs/d/2348
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10:27 PM
Moderate Islamist here
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