Relentless Pain
By Abbas Nasir
Pakistan

 

Can there be anything approaching the torture and trauma of not knowing the whereabouts of a loved one taken from you by force, and disappeared without trace not for days, weeks or even months, but for years?

To me there can’t be anything more challenging or more demanding of your nerves, emotions and sanity. In brief, your entire being. All of us claim to have empathy but even then it would be impossible to imagine what someone goes through in such a state of limbo not knowing where a loved one is or in what condition.

Sammi Deen Baloch was 10 when her father, Dr Deen Mohammed, from Mashkay Awaran, working in various parts of Balochistan with some 10 years standing, was taken away from Khuzdar where he was posted in a hospital.

“A little after midnight on 28/29 June 2009, the personnel of state intelligence agencies entered the official residence of Dr Deen Muhammad, they beat him up, handcuffed and blindfolded him, then threw him into a vehicle, and drove away. This statement was given by Ramzan Baloch who was the peon and cook of that residence,” Sammi Deen Baloch told me when I asked her for details of what happened.

In the years since his abduction, she says, she has been continuously struggling to demand the safe return of her father, having campaigned on the roads, at press clubs across the country and moved courts. She has even participated in a 118-day walk from Quetta to Islamabad to seek news of her father but is yet to get anywhere with her demand, let alone obtain justice.

“I met with Imran Khan who was the prime minister at that time, and Maryam Nawaz met us, and assured us of playing a role in my father’s release. Last year, at a sit-in in Quetta lasting 50 days, a cabinet committee including [Interior Minister] Rana Sanaullah and [Law Minister] Azam Nazeer Tarar assured us they would talk with the ‘authorities’ about this issue but that was the last we heard of that. All were fake promises. This month, June 28, it will be exactly 14 years since my father’s abduction.”

Having knocked on the doors of the courts and elected civilian politicians on her journey where she has grown from a 10-year-old girl into a 24-year-old resolute campaigner, an advocate, for the victims of enforced disappearances, she vows to carry on. This, despite often confronting a brick wall.

A commission set up under the chairmanship of a former Supreme Court judge that was mandated to look into the issue of enforced disappearances in 2011 seems to have made little headway and the chairman’s reported attitude has dampened the appetite of the victims’ families to even approach it.

The wife of one victim of enforced disappearance told a respected human rights campaigner that when she appeared before the chairman, some inappropriate remarks made the petitioner so uncomfortable she decided to abandon her efforts to seek justice and relief from the commission.

The same individual, with his other hat on (the NAB chairman’s), was also believed to have  behaved appallingly  with a woman whose husband was in NAB custody, making inappropriate remarks. The video shot by the woman was said to have fallen into the hands of the then Imran Khan government.

The PTI government, in turn, is understood to have used it to twist the chairman’s arm into persecuting the opposition leaders, some of whom were incarcerated by NAB for months on end without evidence. They were never tried in a court of law and were eventually freed.

Having talked to family members of some of the ‘missing’ in Balochistan, one can totally sympathize with their demand. Many of them aren’t even asking for the release of their loved ones. All they want is to be told which prison they are in and if they are well; some of them say if their missing relatives have committed a crime they should be tried in open court and punished.

Either this or ‘we should be told he is no more’. This, as one mother said, won’t be half as bad as not knowing whether her son is dead or alive. Everything will be out in the open and she will have the information she so longingly seeks, even closure if the son is no more.

So far those in charge of running security policy have not done this. At a time when the army is said to be reorienting itself under its new chief, perhaps a shift in the policy governing the province can also be considered where at least the families are informed of the whereabouts of their missing loved ones and whether they’re OK.

When you face a huge, painful loss, closure is of paramount importance as it marks the start of the healing process and enables one to start reconciling with the new reality, no matter how excruciating that may be on account of the irreparable damage you have suffered.

Don’t get me wrong. As someone who sees himself as a mere hack, having neither desire nor pretensions of being some kind of a psychologist, the thoughts shared in the paragraph above are wholly based on personal experience and not rooted in a course of study or in expertise.

It is difficult to fathom the anguish, the life of someone who has to live for years and years not knowing whether a loved one is dead or alive, or if they will ever see them again. It will be hoping for too much to ask our state for an end to enforced disappearances.

But appealing for a little humanity won’t be out of place. I so earnestly hope Sammi Deen Baloch and others who share her predicament are soon reunited with their loved ones. Or at least are told where and in what state their missing family members are.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.