Shattered lives, lost dreams

Fareeha (not her real name) introduced herself as a 28-year-old, but her haggard appearance made her look older than her years. “You start looking much older than you are when your life is a struggle every day,” she herself acknowledged.

She is from the Kech district in Balochistan. On the night of May 14-15, 2019, her 27-year-old fiance, then a final-year LLB student, was abducted on his way back from the Liaquat Memorial Library in Karachi. She was a third year MBBS student at Hamdard University, Karachi at the time. They were due to be married after 20 days.

After her fiance was picked up, his abductors came to her house looking for ‘evidence.’ When they did not find anything, they took her away as well for ‘investigation.’

After several days of interrogation, Fareeha was set free but she refused to leave without her fiancé. She insisted that the only way she would leave would be together with him, and so she stayed on for another three months. Eventually, either her abductors forced her to leave or she left of her own volition.

After this enforced disappearance, she went back to university but was rusticated because she had ‘failed to appear for her papers’ and eventually had to prematurely end her academic career. The university told her to ‘either attend university or spend your time fighting legal cases.’ She chose the latter.

Fareeha is only one of the several women that staged a week-long sit-in at D-chowk, Islamabad until a few days ago. Two sisters were at the sit-in for their 60-year-old father, a BPS-18 officer in the agriculture department, who has been missing for the last two and half years. They were both in their late twenties, married and one had brought along her seven-year-old daughter, who constantly smiled a shy toothless smile. The first time ever they traveled outside of Quetta was to Karachi to pursue their father’s case.

There were many more women with heartbreaking stories like these. There was a girl in her twenties with her mother whose brothers, breadwinners of the family, had been abducted. In the meantime, to support her family, she has become a polio worker.

There was another grandmother with her seventh-grader granddaughter, a mother with a missing son now supported by her nephew, and another mother searching for her 22-year-old son arrested in Dubai, flown to Pakistan and vanished thereafter. For almost all of them this was their first time in Islamabad, for some after taking a grueling 40-hour road trip on their own dime.

The people at the D-chowk sit-in represented 13 families of the 590 documented cases of enforced disappearances, some as far back as 10 years ago. One woman explained that many missing are not counted because their NIC details do not exist or their families lack the resources to register their cases. Some 320 persons have since been recovered which continues to keep hope alive.

According to an article that appeared in The Economist on July 24, 2017, “…In 2016 alone, 728 people across Pakistan suffered ‘enforced disappearance’, as counted by the commission of inquiry that investigates them. Some reappear alive and well, others as roadside corpses. The state flatly denies any unpleasantness.”

The lack of transparency is the main problem. I am no legal expert, but why does the state fail to bring charges, publicly arrest and prosecute these people in a court of law? Most of the women I saw at D-chowk were poor with little to no education, but even they understand that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure due process. Instead, they are being subjected to a perversion of justice that turns the presumption of innocence (‘innocent until proven guilty’) on its head.

The state’s level of seriousness in addressing this issue can be gauged by the fact that the list of missing persons on the website of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances remains a blank page.

As a human being, I am staggered by the collective lack of public interest, empathy and urgency to resolve this issue. I have seen coverage of current events far away (school / mass shootings in the US, the terrorist attack in New Zealand, President Biden’s national eulogy on the US crossing 500,000 Covid-19 deaths, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, Uyghurs in Western China, Palestinians, etc.), historical events (the holocaust, the Vietnam war), fictional movie and television drama characters, even machines (NASA landing the Perseverance rover on Mars last week), none of which have any direct bearing on the lives of Pakistanis, yet they evoke more tears and emotions than the sparse coverage of the enforced disappeared in our own country.

The popular culture content of my childhood described the Baloch and the Pashtuns as gun-wielding tribal people, and seldom ventured on to say anything deeper. In hindsight, these characterizations relegated them to lesser humans, as ‘others’ to be viewed with curiosity by city-dwellers. Their suffering is accorded a lower value than that of a family from mainstream urban Pakistan.

Perhaps, we can start by demanding humanizing coverage of the abductees and their families’ plight. Wide reaching mainstream media reporting on this issue can begin by focusing on the human cost of abductions on the entire extended family to counter the level of distrust these are stoking along ethnic lines.

I met a Baloch university student at the sit-in who recounted how his non-Baloch friends once expressed to him their surprise that he was little different from them. His Pashtun friends even came out to support him at the sit-in and he was thankful for it. He even empathized with those who did not show up on account of reasons ranging from ignorance, apathy, and even fear of being seen siding with the ‘troublemakers’.

For us ordinary people, perhaps all we need to do is show a little more empathy and a little less distrust for our fellow citizens.

The writer is an independent education researcher and consultant. She has a PhD in Education from Michigan State University.