By taking control of a train transporting the military, the armed Baloch groups engaged in a struggle for independence have shown they have crossed from the stage of insurgency into rebellion. The unified Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) has shown they are not terrorists as described by GHQ Rawalpindi but freedom fighters. Terrorists would have taken women and children prisoner in the way Hamas did on 7 October 2023 when its military wing in effect declared war on the State of Israel. Instead, the Baloch released the women and children, as well as the few elderly males who were there in the train that was captured by them. What the Baloch freedom fighters are requesting of the international community is to conduct an independent fact-finding inquiry into the incident. It is a fact that such an inquiry would be impossible in Pakistan, “a country run by the army” since the 1950s. However, by not even making an effort to put together such an inquiry committee, the West is only reinforcing the canard that only those of European ethnicity matter to the Atlantic Alliance, an untruth that any non-European visitor to Europe would nail in days. Barring a few stray voices, overall Europeans are friendly and hospitable to visitors not of European ethnicity. Unless of course such visitors dislike Europe to such a degree that they consider committing acts of violence against the local population. Europe needs to take much more seriously the suppression of the Pashtun, Baloch and Sindhi populations by the military in Pakistan. Freedom fighters from Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa are having second-class citizenship or worse at the hands of GHQ Rawalpindi, to silence from the international community. The way the European establishment has ignored an advocate of the rights of the Pashtun women such as Levsa Bayankhail is in need of change. The way Baloch lady activist Mahram Baloch is being treated by the Pakistan military is a horror story. So far even mass graves shown on social media of Baloch martyrs in Pakistan have failed to get the attention of the European establishment.
The flowering into a rebellion of the Baloch insurgency against the Pakistan military that has been going on since independence has all the ingredients needed to cause a chain reaction among the Pashtun and Sindhi communities in Pakistan. Since Partition, the Hindu and Christian communities in Pakistan have reached the stage of near extinction at the hands of the military. History that is rewritten to hide facts cannot do so for very long. There will be accounts, usually within families, of the oppression faced by their grandparents. The effort to erase both the role of the Indian armed forces and the atrocities suffered by target groups in Bangladesh will fail. The Bangladesh military, whose chief had initially backed the takeover from an admittedly unpopular regime under Sheikh Hasina, was himself sought to be deposed by a cabal of army star rank officers in the military who are being remote controlled by GHQ Rawalpindi. It is only a matter of time before the general populace of the neighbouring country understand the threat posed by such elements to their way of life, and go on the streets against them. The only way Bangladesh can resume its growth trajectory is to return to the semi-secular regime that was in place for the first two terms of Sheikh Hasina before power went to her head, and among the effects of which was a flirtation with the extremists who took over the popular revolt against her that began with her quest for a fourth term in 2024.
MDN