The Pakistan army’s military operation in Dera Bugti against the Baloch community has been continuing for over a week now, terrorising women and children, raiding homes, abducting people and blocking roads and streets to prevent people from travelling. It is a conflict which no one is bothered about with the army targeting its own people in the most brutal and reckless manner.
The media has been blacked out, the internet has been shut down and the young Baloch men are being disappeared
in a brutal repetition of past assaults on the local population. The operation is led by XII Corps Commander Asif Ghafoor and IG Frontier Corps Balochistan.
Additional forces have been dispatched from Nasirabad to beef up the military operations in Zain Kow and other areas.
This military operation is not an isolated incident as is being made out. It follows a pattern of large-scale operations and brutal tactics employed by the Pakistani army to suppress voices of dissent and concerns raised against the continuing brutalities against the local community for years. In May this year, for instance, the army raided several houses in the Mohammad Colony of Sui, and harassed several women and children. In Rais Tokh also a large number of soldiers had raided several houses, abducted a few men.
The focus of the military operations is in Dera Bugti. Several houses in Sui Tehsil were subjected to search and seizure, with reports of homes set ablaze and residents coerced into migrating. Several areas in Dera Bugti remain under military lockdown with a growing list of individuals who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances. To name a few, five Baloch, including two employees of the Oil and Gas Development Company Limited (OGDCL), have been abducted. In Harnai district, forces have abducted several people. In Awaran, the soldiers have ransacked farms and locked up farmers in secret prisons.
The detained farmers included Rasool Bakhsh whose family went missing during a 2015 operation carried out by Pakistani forces in which several civilians were allegedly killed. In 2006, a similar operation was launched, using helicopter gunships and targeting camps of Baloch people.
According to residents of Dera Bugti, they were being targeted by the forces for their support to the cause of veteran Baloch leader, Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti who, along with several others, were brutally gunned by combat helicopters on the orders of General Pervez Musharraf. The soldiers are burning homes and detaining young men in hordes, many of them children of Baloch people who.people, burning homes, beating up children and women and taking way men to torture them.
The government of Pakistan claimed that the security operation was launched to recover six footballers who were abducted during the weekend while on their way from Sui Dera Bugti to Sibi. A Baloch militant group has claimed responsibility. However, the Baloch community in the region allege that the current wave of military actions was a ploy to intimidate and terrorise the local population. That is the reason why the media has been kept out, the internet has been shut down and several young men have been abducted and locked up in secret cells run by the army.