Volume 6, No. 11, November 2024
Editor: Rashed Rahman
Apathy or Sympathy Fatigue?
The possible and probable reason for the apathy towards and sympathy fatigue for the people’s resistance is illustrated by this experience of mine. On June 4, 2015, Dahir Dahesar, aka Raja Dahir, 40, the son of 80-year-old Ata Mohammad Bhambhro, a prominent writer and historian of Sindh with 40 books to his credit, was abducted from Bachal Bhambhro village, district Khairpur. The abductors came in more than 50 vehicles. Mr Bhambhro reported the illegal arrest but the police refused to register it. Then, addressing a press conference, he said that his son was a political worker but not a terrorist. Comrade Hussain Bakhsh Thebo, the veteran Sindhi nationalist, called for a protest against this illegal abduction outside the Karachi Press Club on June 26, 2015. I went there and sadly, when the protest was its peak, there were no more than 60 participants despite the fact that the protest was for a nationalist and was called by a respected veteran. A month later, on July 26, 2015, Raja Dahir was no longer missing as his body with two bullets in his skull had been found near Nooriabad. His fingerprints, sent to the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) by the police, confirmed his identity. Justice is no longer part of governance by the establishment. They commit these murders because they can get away with it. The day I was going to attend the protest called by Comrade Thebo, I travelled from Hyderabad to Karachi to join the protest and on the way saw plenty of buses loaded to the top with people carrying thousands to ‘Lahoot’ for the yearly Shah Noorani pilgrimage, while the protest only mustered the support of 60 persons.
I have also seen devotees going for Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and Shah Bhitai’s Urs. They come in droves with their families, even infants, undertake the hardships of the journey and stay at the shrines quite willingly in abominable conditions with lack of facilities. They pay homage to the respected dead but are oblivious to the problems of the living. As long as people here will live for the dead at the cost of the living (Necrocracy: to be ruled by the dead) the state’s desolating pestilence that affects all will remain invincible and lethal. The state here takes heart from the fact that the majority here refuses to see its real face under different excuses to console themselves for not supporting what is just and right and indulging in things that have nothing to do with the living and life. A society that does not awaken to the plight of the living but continues to revere the dead and undergo inconveniences for them will suffer from the state and its institutions continuing to oppress and kill people with impunity. Indignation at injustices by the state seems to have been relegated to a few affected souls, while for others it is business as usual. Those who resist are marked and incrementally eliminated with impunity.
The example I give is from Sindh but the situation would not be different in Balochistan except that the state’s oppression there has affected far more people directly or indirectly, therefore the response is always more forceful despite the threat of disappearances or target killings used to cow the population into submission and try to prove to the world that all is well in Balochistan. The disappearances and killings have forced Baloch women to the frontline and they are manning the barricades with valour, vision and wisdom.
If society’s apathy is compounded by the spineless and opportunist politicians who vie to appease the establishment to find a place in the power corridors, then the task becomes even more difficult. One cannot blame the Jams and the assortment of Sardars who have always sided with the state to preserve their own interests and skins. However, when so-called middle-class politicians too fall over each other in efforts to appease the state and when the so-called champions of the people too are willingly and voluntarily conned by false promises, one should feel that these long shadows of small men means that the sun is setting.
Those politicians who would love to see the sun of Baloch resistance set do not understand that whatever concessions they are being accorded is because the Baloch resistance is alive and threatens the designs of exploitation and blatant colonisation by massive demographic changes, for were it not for the resistance these politicians would not even be considered worth talking to by the state. The continuing resistance ensures that they are cajoled and appeased, but short-sighted as they are, they do not understand this. They demand jobs and privileged access to the resources of the Baloch but not the ownership by the people of the same.
An anecdote will illustrate my last assertion. A person found a magic lamp and on rubbing it, a genie appeared and said he would fulfill three wishes, whatever these may be. His first wish was a huge palatial place of untold splendour, his second was that it should be occupied by some people and his third wish was that he should be employed there as a watchman and valet. This exactly is the attitude of the Baloch politicians who fear becoming the owner but are very much content with being the valets and watchmen. Moreover, the state has successfully demonised the Baloch as anti-Pakistan, India-sponsored and terrorist, so people feel threatened and uneasy in supporting the Baloch, so much so the Long March event in Lahore was shamefully thinly attended. People fail to denounce injustices for fear of being labelled as supporters of terrorists. It is to the credit of those brave souls in Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab who continue to champion the Baloch cause and denounce the injustices against the Baloch.
The civilians (read politicians) even apart from the Baloch variety are powerless because they are spineless and more concerned with staying in power than in challenging the Army’s highhandedness and atrocities against the Baloch, or for that matter the Pashtuns, Sindhis or Punjabis. This example will illustrate it well. The newly appointed Defence Minister Khawaja Asif appeared before a four-member larger bench – headed by Chief Justice of Pakistan (CJP) Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry – in Karachi on November 27, 2013 along with the Attorney General of Pakistan (AGP) and leaders from Balochistan and said that 738 people missing from Balochistan will be recovered before December 10. CJP Chaudhry also mentioned the group of relatives of the Baloch missing persons who walked from Karachi to Quetta on foot and said it was embarrassing that women and children had to come all the way here to seek justice. Mama Qadeer and other marchers had reached Karachi a few days before. The same day the Defence Minister visited Mama Qadeer, Farzana Majeed and others outside the Karachi Press Club and assured them of recovery of the missing persons. While talking to Dawn he had said: “Rights groups and organisations working on the issue, including those who are part of the government, need to reach a definitive figure to ensure proper work on it.” He said if the men were in “illegal custody, they need to be brought out and if there are cases against them, they should be heard in court.” Explaining, he said the AGP had presented a list of 738 men who have been “located in various detention camps”, which he said was a positive sign.
The Defence Minister it appears had not consulted his masters before he said these words. Not a single person was released. It was not that there were no missing persons for as far back as December 8, 2005, the then Interior Minister Sherpao admitted that some 4,000 people had been arrested in Balochistan since early in that year. Not only that, in September 2015 the Home Secretary of Balochistan, Akbar Hussain Durrani, in a report presenting details of the implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) in the province said that 204 suspected terrorists had been killed, 29 injured and a total of 8,326 suspects arrested in 1,863 operations from December 16, 2014 to September 15, 2015. Again, in August 2016 Sarfaraz Bugti and the Home Department stated that 13,575 terrorists were arrested while 337 killed in around 2,825 operations in the province in 2015-16. But these arrested persons have never been brought to the courts. One wonders where they are and how does the state deny the existence of missing persons in Balochistan. Even the state authorities admit that nearly 22,000 persons are in their custody and languish without trial or charge. No one is punished for these illegal acts.
From all this evidence it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that if ever any meaningful negotiations are to take place, these will have to be between the Baloch and the army for civilians as well as their voters are quite powerless in front of the military machine that they have willy-nilly fed and nurtured to a position where it has developed an insatiable appetite for power and pelf and is capable of doing away with any dissenting politician either through direct force or through political manipulation and shenanigans. Ultimate power rests with the army and here all power comes from the barrel of the gun.
The enforced disappearances of the Baloch have been going on so long and are so severe that people in general have come to accept it as something quite normal and there hardly is a murmur against these as compared to when the journalist Matiullah Jan was disappeared for 12 hours on July 21, 2020. It is not just ‘sympathy fatigue’ where Baloch abductions are concerned; the same are just ignored because the discourse against the Baloch has been weaponised by the state through allegations of them being agents of foreign powers.
The attitude that is displayed towards disappearances of the Baloch generally is well illustrated by Bertolt Brecht’s 1935 poem “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain”:
“Like one who brings an important letter to the counter after office hours: the counter is already closed.
Like one who seeks to warn the city of an impending flood, but speaks another language. They do not understand him.
Like a beggar who knocks for the fifth time at the door where he has four times been given something: the fifth time he is hungry.
Like one whose blood flows from a wound and who awaits the doctor: his blood goes on flowing.
So, do we come forward and report that evil has been done us.
The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror.
Then a hundred were butchered.
But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.
When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out ‘stop!’
When crimes begin to pile up, they become invisible.
When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard.
The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.”
(To be continued)