by MOHAMED HANIF
Photo shows relatives of ‘missing persons’ sitting in a protest camp outside Quetta Press Club.
SIX years after Hafiz Saeed Rehman went missing from Sariab Road Quetta, the police dug up a grave to look for him. The High Court ordered that a body be exhumed because Quetta police, after giving half a dozen other explanations for his disappearance, had started saying that Hafiz Saeed had been killed. His father Allah Bakhsh Bangulzai who has been campaigning for his son’s release for nine years, didn’t believe the police. “I knew it wasn’t his grave, I knew my son wasn’t dead,” insists Allah Bakhsh, who runs a small grocery store near his house. Allah Baksh Bangulzai’s faith wasn’t just the faith of a father who can’t bring himself to believe that his eldest son might be dead. He had seen with his own eyes the body that was buried in that grave. Nine year earlier looking for his newly disappeared son Allah Baksh had done the rounds of the mortuaries. “They showed me two bodies,” says Allah Baksh. He had a really good look. “They were both my son’s age. One boy had his throat slit. Another one had his legs cut off just below his knees. I was relieved neither of them was my son.”
Hafiz Saeed became one of almost 1300 disappeared Baloch citizens whose families have been holding almost a perpetual vigil for their release. They travel from distant villages and towns to hold three-month-long protest camps outside Islamabad and Karachi Press Club but our press usually ignores them. When Voice of Missing Baloch Persons recently held a rally to mark one thousand days of their protest, no TV channels covered it.
After his visit to the local morgue, Allah Baksh was convinced that his son was alive. For next six years Allah Baksh’s son kept making fleeting appearances in various reports, official documents and court hearings. Once it was admitted in Balochistan High Court that he was in the custody of our intelligence organisations. Once he was told that his son had been sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment because he was a terrorist. Then the high court was told that he was doing his time in Gujranwala jail. But after six years of running up down the country and knocking at every one’s door Allah Baksh stood besides a grave waiting for a body to be exhumed, certain in his heart that it wouldn’t be his son.
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