Business Recorder editorial Nov 4, 2017

A dubious cover-up The recent episode of the arrest/abduction of the wife of Dr Allah Nazar, leader of the Balochistan Liberation Front, along with his daughter, three other women and two children, first revealed on the social media, became a hot potato for the Balochistan government. Initial reports said the women and children had been abducted/disappeared from a hospital in Quetta. The Balochistan government did not respond until the uproar around the affair reached the hallowed halls of the Senate and National Assembly, where protests by some members at this treatment of women and children led to walkouts by opposition members. The Balochistan government took three days to respond, and when it did, the reasons for the delay became obvious. Such disappearances have become the norm in Balochistan for many years, often ending with tortured dead bodies being dumped all over the province. But even for the troubled province, this kind of action against women and children appeared to be a horrible first. Given the sensitivity of the honour of women and families in Balochistan’s culture (nang in Balochi), the government seems to have pulled out all the stops to recover the women from the clutches of the security agencies and free them with manifestations of respect, gifts, and facilitation for medical treatment in Karachi. At a release ‘ceremony’, Balochistan Chief Minister Sanaullah Zehri asked Dr Allah Nazir’s wife to convey a message to him that the “killing of brothers” was not the right way and that “he should not use women and children in the war”. Further light was thrown on this cryptic message during a press conference by Balochistan Home Minister Sarfaraz Bugti. The Home Minister claimed that contrary to the earlier reports, the women and children were not disappeared from a hospital in Quetta but were arrested by security forces at Chaman when they illegally crossed the Pak-Afghan border on October 30, 2017. He displayed CCTV footage purportedly showing the women and children crossing the zero point at the Chaman border. He said during investigation it was revealed that the women were involved in delivering funds to the Balochistan Liberation Front and the Balochistan Army, two insurgent nationalist groups. He then went on to conflate the incident in support of his argument that Afghanistan was hosting inimical forces on its soil, from where unrest was being created in Pakistan. The story spun by the Balochistan government raises more questions than it answers. First and foremost, Dr Allah Nawaz’s wife is reportedly very ill because of injuries sustained during heavy bombardment of her home in 2010 and is said to have difficulty walking. An unlikely candidate for the task of delivering funds to insurgent nationalist groups if ever there was one. Second, is it likely that the women would have risked the lives of their children on such a perilous mission? Third, if they were indeed on such a mission, would they have chosen zero point at Chaman to enter the country? These holes in the officially certified truth can only be explained by a more rational version. If the wife of Dr Allah Nazar was not seriously ill, why would the Chief Minister shower his largesse on the group and send her to Karachi for medical treatment after releasing her to her brother-in-law? The probable, and more believable sequence of events seems to be that the security forces, as is their wont in Balochistan and increasingly in the rest of the country, disappeared the women and children after discovering their presence in a Quetta hospital, but the uproar and threatened rise in anger, resentment, and worse, forced the provincial government to persuade the security agencies that the disappearance of these women and children would prove detrimental to the Balochistan government because of the province’s traditions of nang, and therefore it would be more politic to have them released. In principle, if this reading of the incident is correct, the perpetrators, like so many others of their disappearance brigade, should be brought to justice for their illegal and inappropriate action. However, given the Balochistan government’s spin on the incident, this appears to be wishing for the moon. The only silver lining is that the women and children have been safely recovered and sent to the relative safety of Karachi where Dr Allah Nazar’s wife’s treatment can be better handled. The pattern of disappearances in Balochistan is part of the long standing approach of handling Balochistan’s issues through the use of force. It has yielded little positive in the last 70 years and is unlikely to yield anything different in the foreseeable future. Balochistan needs a process of political negotiation and resolution, not the heavy handed tactics of which this incident is only the latest alarming manifestation.