Colombo, April 18 Balochistan's enforced disappearances are not merely a humanitarian record but a stark reflection of Pakistani military control failing in plain sight.
While a state can compel silence for a time by denying custody, delaying hearings, dispersing protests, and reducing the missing to entries on a spreadsheet — once disappearance becomes routine, it no longer projects authority but instead reveals its own fear, a report said on Saturday.
According to the Sri Lanka Guardian, the stark reality in Balochistan is that Pakistan's harshest instrument of control increasingly reflects how much control it has already lost.
“In Balochistan, disappearance has become more than an allegation. It has become a method of rule, a language of fear, and, for many families, the most intimate face of the Pakistani state. A son leaves for college and does not return. A brother is picked up at a checkpoint and vanishes into an unmarked system," the report detailed.
"A body appears days later, bearing the marks of custody but not the burden of official acknowledgement. This is why the crisis in Balochistan can no longer be described as a peripheral human-rights issue. It now sits at the centre of the province’s politics, shaping how the state is seen, how dissent is expressed, and how the conflict itself reproduces," it added.
The report highlighted that Balochistan has long sat uneasily within Pakistan. Since its forcible annexation in 1948, the province has been governed less as an integral territory and more as an “occupied resource frontier", marked by repeated military operations; political suppression, with leaders jailed, exiled, or killed; and widespread poverty despite considerable natural wealth.
The Pakistani army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, and the civilian bureaucracy, it said, working in tandem, have built a system of control in the province that rests not on consent but on coercion.
“Enforced disappearance is its sharpest instrument. For years, Baloch families have spoken of men seized from hostels, lifted from homes in front of witnesses, or taken at security posts, only to disappear into a military and intelligence maze that rarely concedes it holds them. What follows has hardened into ritual: protests outside press clubs, sit-ins on national highways, petitions before courts that issue orders the deep state ignores, and mothers holding photographs that become, with time, the only official record they possess,” the report detailed.
The report cited Paank, the human-rights wing of the Baloch National Movement, which documented 1,355 enforced disappearances in 2025 and 225 extrajudicial killings.
“Its monthly tallies show the pattern continuing into 2026, with 82 disappearances in January and 109 in February. These are activist figures, but even if read conservatively, they describe something far larger than sporadic abuse. They describe a system that is persistent, province-wide, and increasingly willing to move from secret detention to what families and activists have long called ‘kill and dump', the report noted.
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor