Balochistan killing field forces newsman, singer to flee

 Balochistan presents the look of a bloody killing field as Pakistan army is desperately trying to crush all resistance to President Xi Jinping’s Maritime Silk Road to connect Gwadar with Kashgar.

Those who fled recently include prominent Baloch journalist, blogger and documentary filmmaker Razzaq Sarbazi and famous singer Hafeez Ali Baloch fled Pakistan and are now seeking asylum in Sweden. However, agents of Pakistan are trying to make life miserable for them even in Sweden.

Earlier this month, Pakistan security and intelligence services abducted and forcibly disappeared famous Baloch poet and playwright Anwar Khan Sahib and his son Wasim Anwar after raiding their home and beating up women folks. Last month, a prominent doctor who was a Grade 19 officer, Dr Amir Bakhsh, was kidnapped from Quetta and his whereabouts is still unknown. Baloch nationalists accuse chief minister Abdul malik and his mentor Senator Hasil Bizenjo of being complicit with the army establishment in the brutalities being perpetrated all across Balochistan. Some senior leaders of their National Party, who are critical of the duo’s politics, agree.

Pakistan, the seventh largest in the world, is committing war crimes in France-sized Balochistan, Baloch nationalists allege. Thousands of journalists, singers, teachers, lawyers have been forcibly disappeared, tortured and killed execution style and their bodies dumped by the the non-Baloch Pakistani officers and soldiers. Last year alone, as many as 455 people were killed and dumped in Balochistan, according to the premier Voice for Baloch Missing Persons– the government officially acknowledged one third of those cases.

Sarbazi, talking to this correspondent Monday said agents of Pakistan were trying to tell lies to the Swedish authorties. He said his life was in danger as he was on the radar of the Pakistani security and intelligence services after he aired an interview of Baloch Liberation Front chief Dr Allah Nazar Baloch, a gold medalist gynecologist turned guerrilla leader. The secular journalist had exclusively covered the war in Balochistan against Pakistan’s military occupation, enforced disappearances and kill-and-dump policy and hosted talks on these burning issues on the only Balochi language television channel called VSH television. His shows and blogs were quite popular among viewers and readers, but led to immense difficulties for him.

Sarbazi’s brother Abdul Jalil Sarbazi and his friend Abdus Saboor were abducted by the Pakistani intelligence services two years ago and were brutally tortured. 

In addition to Sarbazi, famous singer Hafeez Ali Baloch, 40, who ranks among top 10 Baloch singers in the world, has also applied for asylum in Sweden. Mr Baloch’s songs also praised the very secular Zikris, a minority sect of Muslims who do not believe in going to hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca but who are actually the masters of the 600 miles long coast of Balochistan in Pakistan and Iran, which is now being greedily eyed by the communist rulers of China.

 

Hafeez Baloch, who was active in nationalist politics when he was a student in Hub in Balochistan, later became a popular singer and had been singing Balochi patriotic songs to tell his people’s woes. He was asked to come sing at an event in Hub. When he went there, there was no musical evening but plainclothesmen of the Pakistani intelligence services, who roughed him up and threatened the singer to stop singing Balochi patriotic songs. A musical club Mr Baloch headed in Karachi, commercial capital of Pakistan, was also reportedly raided by the intelligence agencies.

 

“Journalism in Pakistan was an unending nightmare for me,” Sarbazi said. Per capita, the baloch people have lost more writers and journalists than any other nation on the face of earth in the last decade of popular uprising against Islamabad. Even in Europe, Sarbazi thinks the threats are not over. He pointed out at reports that said Pakistan’s ISI was busy in European nations to silence political opponents.

 

The secular journalist regretted that Islamists have arrived in the thousands in Europe -- some of them card-holding members of the ISIS--, bringing a bad name for the genuine refugees like him and Hafeez Baloch.