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Over the last many months, there has been a sudden surfacing of mutilated corpses bearing torture marks of students, political workers, rights activists, all who had earlier gone missing. – File Photo

Qadeer Baloch misses a thousand heartbeats each time he lifts the sheet of a corpse, afraid it is going to be his son this time. For three years he has seen over a hundred mutilated bodies brought from across Balochistan, all tortured – singed, sliced, eyeballs pulled out, limbs drilled, some unrecognisable due to the acid burns.

“I don’t wish that of even my worst enemy,” says the 62-year father who started the Voice for the Baloch Missing Persons, a support group of families of the abducted. They assemble outside the Quetta Press Club, every day, holding a sit-in as a way of protest.

His son, Jaleel Reki was picked up while he was on his way home from Friday prayers on Feb 13, 2009, and has been missing since.

Reki was politically inclined and was fighting for the rights of the Baloch people, acknowledges his father, who has himself been receiving threats to stop this campaign.

Most family members will tell you openly that those ‘missing’ had nationalist leanings and were raising their voices against years of injustice meted out to the Baloch people.

“I’d be the happiest person on earth if tomorrow my son surfaces, is tried in the court and then sentenced for his crime. I won’t flinch even if he’s sent to the gallows; but to silence all dissenting voices like this is downright cruel,” says Qadeer Baloch.

While all attention remains focused on the US-led war on terror, the atrocities committed on the Balochs, in this mineral-rich province, since 2000, is of little interest to the rest of Pakistan.

Even the media, otherwise robust and active, are unusually silently about the brewing discontent.

Read More:http://www.dawn.com/2011/07/04/reluctant-pakistanis.html