by ANUSHE ENGINEER
For some people, activism is optional. For Sammi Deen Baloch, it isn’t. Her father was abducted when she was 10 years old, and since then, she’s marched from Quetta to Islamabad, protested in frigid weather, repeatedly challenged the state and put her safety secondary to her cause countless times, all so she can close a chapter in her life she didn’t choose to write.
Anyone who has shared her fate knows Sammi Deen Baloch as a household name —she’s been a beacon of hope in their darkest hour.
She recently took centre stage when the plight of enforced disappearances finally became a part of the national discourse as hundreds of Baloch women marched to Islamabad to protest the extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances in Pakistan.
It is difficult to believe that at just 25 years of age, Sammi has become a beacon of raising one’s voice against the unimaginable tragedy of losing loved ones to enforced disappearances, caught up in an endless cycle of protesting the violence against her people and being threatened into oblivion.
Clearly, no amount of threats has silenced her; if anything, she has emerged stronger, louder, and more fierce.
Well-thought-out words and fiery interviews may never do justice to describing who she is. One needs to see her in her element as an activist, a true paladin, to understand her tragic brilliance. Simply put, when Balochistan has plunged into darkness and despair, Sammi has been the light.
If circumstances hadn’t brought her to this junction, Sammi might have been an ordinary girl who never left her village. Her activism was born from the death of any sense of normalcy her family had, which, she gradually learned, was the tragic reality of hundreds of Baloch families.
“That’s when I knew I had to play this role, not just for myself but for them as well,” she told me.
For years now, she’s counselled these families on how to protest in the streets, which lawyers to contact and made them aware of the rights they’ve been denied.
Her selflessness comes from recalling the cluelessness and isolation of navigating activism at the tender age of 11; bus rides alone from Karachi to Quetta, where her court cases to locate her father were being heard; harassment and awkward stares, people shunning her mother for going against the grain.
As her fearlessness increased, so did the threats to her safety and what she said were attempts at hacking her phone. And this is in addition to the mental torture she’s had to endure for more than half her life.
“The way I’ve suffered, I don’t want other families to go through the same ordeal,” she said. “I want to show them how to resist.”
Enduring a living death
Sammi has always been vociferous in maintaining that women’s rights are central in the conversation surrounding enforced disappearances, a painstaking reality she knows all too well.
“If you want to make a woman endure a living death, kidnap someone from her household. I have lived it firsthand. My smartness, my creativity level, everything vanished when my father was kidnapped.”
Women bear the brunt of enforced disappearances when the men in their household are abducted, losing their source of income and sense of stability.
“They’ve taken away a husband from his wife, a son from the parents, a father from his children. Father, son, brother — these aren’t just words, there’s so much more tied to them. The memories, the remembrances, the cravings, the needs, the love — it’s all tied together. And it’s all taken away from us.”
She is particularly vocal about Baloch women’s lack of rights, which they are often unaware of as a result of being deprived of an education and basic resources.
Sammi has championed women’s rights for as long as she’s been vocal about enforced disappearances, and she’s grateful for the support lent by local women’s rights organisations.
It is the silence from their international counterparts she finds questionable.
“People talk about women’s rights all the time, do research studies, bag awards for their work. And yet, we haven’t seen any international organisations come to Balochistan and do research here,” Sammi said.
Balochistan has one of the highest maternal death rates, and the highest rate of children out of school. Hundreds of Baloch women are forcibly displaced, their children missing, Sammi laments, and yet international women’s rights organisations have not brought these issues to attention.
“The people of Balochistan are also human, please think of them as human too.”
She doesn’t believe in championing one cause over the other; she only wants that they don’t turn a blind eye to the plight of Baloch women. If anything, she’s repeatedly invited them to Balochistan to get a better sense of ground realities.
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