Remarks by Wendy Johnson
Delivered at the Baluchistan
International Conference, Washington, D.C., Nov. 21,
2009
Until I traveled to Balochistan, I had never made friends
with people who were later arrested, disappeared or killed,
so getting to know the Baloch has been both a joyful
and painful experience.
Baloch hospitality is legendary. Annie Nocenti, Daisann
McLane and I experienced this graciousness first-hand
when we traveled to Pakistan to make a short documentary
about falconry. Like journalists who try to travel to
Pakistan’s tribal areas, the falcons were delayed
by passport troubles, so my longtime friend Khan Suleiman
Daud, learning that we were in Karachi with nothing to
film, invited us to Balochistan province.
There, one afternoon on the outskirts of the town of
Kalat, we met political activist Prince Musa. Prince
Musa was planning to participate in what was called ‘The
Long March,’ a peaceful protest that would take
Baloch marchers from Gwadar to a final political rally
in Quetta. Prince Musa never completed this march. He
was arrested soon after it began and spent several months
in a Pakistani jail. He never was able to defend himself
in a trial. When he fell gravely ill in prison, his family
was able to lobby the right people to secure his release.
Prince Musa was one of the lucky ones. His son, Agha
Nauroz, the soft-spoken young man who escorted us around
Kalat the day we met his father, was shot dead on July
15, 2008, the day the Baloch observe as Balochistan Martyrs
Day.
Through the website my husband and I built following
our trip, I receive a steady drumbeat of news that reflects
what has been described by South Asia expert Selig Harrison
as a slow-motion genocide. This drumbeat is so relentless
that I can’t begin to fully document on the site
all those Baloch who are arrested, disappeared or killed.
When Balach Marri was reported killed somewhere in the
no man’s land between Afghanistan and Pakistan,
I started to scour the Baloch websites for news, as the
circumstances surrounding his death were unclear.
The first site I went to for an inside angle on the story
was balochvoice.com, a site that seemed to have its finger
on military actions in Balochistan. It had posted no
updates, however. There were no updates that day, or
the following day, or the day after that. In fact, after
Nov 20, this site remained inexplicably frozen in time.
On my daily visits, I started
to look at the site a little more closely. In addition
to news items, there was a section devoted to the art
of warfare, law and ethics. It included links to texts
and quotes by an incredible variety of thinkers: Che
Guevara, Leon Trotsky, Sun Tzu, Karl Marx, T.E. Lawrence,
Clausewitz, Einstein, Shakespeare, Lao-Tsu, Machiavelli,
St Thomas Aquinas, the African National Congress, and
George Patton. Clearly, this webmaster was thinking long
and hard about war, politics and ethics. There were also
photos of of Balochistan. Accompanying these photos was
the following text: “These pictures speak for
themselves…These
are the living conditions of a Baloch family -- a very
common sight throughout Balochistan. The Government is
doing nothing to bring them any relief from this suffering
and hardship.”
Finally,
I did what is called a ‘who is’ search
to find the owner of the website. Balach Marri. The site
was registered to Balach Marri. Address: London. Balach
had not even bothered to cloak his name. This young man
had given up what no doubt was a good life in London
to return to Balochistan to lead a campaign for the rights
of his people. The content of this website made it clear
that his motivations were not personal glory, but rather
the wellbeing of the Baloch people.
For some days I checked the site, hoping that perhaps
Balach had actually escaped this attack and that one
day the site would suddenly reflect his updates, Balach
having found a data signal on his laptop somewhere out
in the mountains, but this was not to be. Eventually
someone was able to resume managing the site, but Balach
and his musings, his posts, his recommended reading list--it
all came to a far too early and abrupt end.
While I never met Balach, I
did, however, correspond with another webmaster. When
we built thebaluch.com, I received a friend request on
Orkut from a young man named Imran. Imran’s first
email read: “I'm
really glad to know that you've recently visited my motherland
(Balochistan), and even launched a site www.thebaluch.com
Just wanted to say thanks for what you're doing to help
our people. You can find many other documentaries on
balochwarna.org and you're more then welcome to download
any of those documentaries. Meantime, if I can be of
any help, please do not hesitate to contact me.”
One day in late 2007 Imran’s emails stopped arriving.
At the time, many of us were keeping a low profile and
didn’t publish our real names, so I didn’t
know Imran’s friends. I wasn’t overly concerned—I
thought perhaps he had become busy with a job or travel.
And then I became preoccupied with the shocking news
of the arrest of Baloch activists Hairbyar Marri and
Faiz Baluch in London on terrorism charges in Dec 2007.
8 months after Imran stopped writing, I received a call
from a defense lawyer in London named Sajida Malik. Sajida
said ‘I am representing someone you know on terrorism
charges.’ Pardon me? Terrorism charges? ‘Yes,
you know him as Imran.’ Imran, my email buddy,
was Faiz Baluch. Only this time a Baloch had not disappeared
into the Pakistani security system, but rather the British
prison system, at the behest of the Pakistani govt.
My young friend, who had never done anything but express
his concern for the welfare of his people, had never
advocated violence, only protested it, had been held
in an English prison for 8 months. Faiz spent a total
of 10 months in Belmarsh Prison. Faiz and Hiarbyar were
two of the lucky ones.
My new friend has not been so fortunate, thus far. In
late July of this year, I received a friend request on
facebook from a Norwegian Baloch, Ehsan Arjemandi. On
Aug. 8, while checking Baloch websites for news, I found
a photo of Ehsan staring back at me. Plucked from a bus
in Balochistan and blindfolded, Ehsan was whisked away
by Pakistani security forces. Today, over 3 months later,
Ehsan remains disappeared. Despite all the efforts of
the Norwegian govt., the lawyer they retained, family
and friends around the world, the Pak government and
its military will not acknowledge his whereabouts, or
news of his wellbeing.
In 2009 Pakistani security agencies are still above
the law. They are free to disappear and torture people
at will and they do so with impunity. It is imperative
for those governments, like the US, who come to the aid
of Pakistan, to demand that the Pakistani government
and its military to stop the arrests, disappearances,
and the torture--the human rights abuses--of its citizens.
On April 17, 2008, Pakistan finally became a signatory
to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. It
has not, however, ratified the convention.
The Asian Human Rights Commission writes this: “Torture
in custody is a serious problem affecting the rule of
law in Pakistan. It is used as the most common means
to obtain confession statements. As yet, there has been
no serious effort by the government to make torture a
crime in the country. It provides impunity to the perpetrators
who are mostly either policemen or members of the armed
forces. Furthermore, there is no means for the protection
of witnesses. This discourages victims from making complaints.
While the international jurisprudence on the issue has
evolved into very high standards, the situation in Pakistan
resembles the stone ages.”*
In closing, I want to borrow the words of a British juror.
Following his not-guilty verdict, Faiz Baluch was standing
outside the courthouse. Perhaps he was reveling in how
blue the sky was, how great it was to be alive. I’m
not sure. But as he stood there, no doubt elated to be
free, one of the jurors walked up to him, a big smile
on his face, and exclaimed, ‘Long Live Balochistan.’
Long Live Balochistan.
*http://notorture.ahrchk.net/profile/pakistan/ |
