Increasing ‘Disappearances’
 

While it is difficult to verify the claim of the Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz that more than 7,000 Baloch and Sindhi nationalists have been arbitrarily detained by the intelligence agencies, there is no doubt that the figure for involuntary disappearances in the country runs into the hundreds if not more. HRCP office-bearers recently noted that there had been no let-up in the number of such cases and that if some people were released by the agencies, many others were whisked away and held in custody. Unfortunately, in the midst of the current judicial crisis, and now the Lal Masjid episode, this issue is in danger of losing its urgency. This simply must not be allowed to happen. It affects hundreds of families, many of whom have actively tried to ascertain the whereabouts of missing relatives. Their prolonged agony is not the only reason for taking action; the whole concept of rule of law and citizens’ liberty becomes meaningless when the state ignores fundamental freedoms and allows its agencies to seize suspected militants and nationalists at will and make them ‘disappear’. The question is: if the defense ministry’s claim that it has no “operational control” over the agencies that are supposed to report to it is correct, then who has? It is the absence of any kind of supervision that has emboldened the intelligence services to resort to large-scale abuse of their power and authority.

The credibility of the government on this score has reached an all-time low. Few would be willing to buy Gen Musharraf’s and Interior Minister Aftab Sherpao’s assurances that the agencies have nothing to do with the ‘disappeared’ who, they say, are actually being recruited by extremist religious organizations. In fact, in the list of missing persons submitted by the HRCP to the Supreme Court, the majority are political activists. Moreover, the harrowing accounts of detention by those fortunate enough to have been released by the agencies point to the latter’s involvement. In this scenario, the pressure on the government to release information on the whereabouts of the missing and to rein in the relevant agencies must not be allowed to dwindle.