Karachi, July 9(ANI): Pakistan's armed forces and intelligence agencies are presently operating in Balochistan in the same brutal fashion as during the Musharraf-era, human rights campaigner Peter G Tatchell has said.
According to the Asian Human Rights Commission (ARCP), Pakistan's secret, dirty killings in the province of Balochistan are escalating.
"Despite Pakistan's transition from the military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf to a democratically-elected civilian government, the armed forces and state intelligence agencies are operating in Balochistan in the same brutal fashion as before: abducting peaceful, lawful campaigners, imprisoning them in secret detention centres in sub-human conditions and torturing them in a bid to force them to name others," Tatchell wrote in The Huffington Post.
"They [campaigners] are then shot, usually in the back of the head. Their bullet-riddled, mutilated bodies are dumped on roadsides in the middle of the night," he added.
Amnesty International says that enforced disappearances, illegal detention, torture, extrajudicial and in-custody killings have increased rapidly throughout Balochistan in recent months, with an almost total blackout on the gruesome incidents by the Pakistani media.
"Much of Balochistan is under military lock-down and quarantine. Journalists and human rights defenders from outside are usually denied access to the area by the Pakistani authorities," said Tatchell, who has been campaigning for human rights, democracy, LGBT freedom and global justice since 1967. Islamabad doesn't want the world to see evidence of its crimes against humanity, including the indiscriminate bombing and strafing of villages using US-supplied F-16 fighter aircraft and Cobra attack helicopters," he added.
He noted that ever since Balochistan was invaded and annexed by Pakistan in 1948 against the wishes of its people, the region has been subjected to military occupation, political domination, economic exploitation and cultural hegemony by Islamabad.
"There is widespread Baloch support for the restoration of independence. The recent wave of disappearances and assassinations is evidence of Pakistan's increasingly desperate attempts to crush the burgeoning Baloch self-determination movement," he stated. (ANI)
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