‘She has won our hearts and minds’: can one woman unite the Baloch people in peaceful resistance?

On the morning of 26 August, about three dozen armed men intercepted traffic at Musakhel in Pakistan, a district on the border between Balochistan and Punjab. Identifying and off-loading 23 men from the Punjab province from different vehicles, they shot them dead. They also set 35 vehicles ablaze.

The Balochistan Liberation Army, the most active militant group in the province, claimed responsibility for the attack, which was the second of its kind this year. In April, nine passengers were forced out of a bus near Noshki, a city in Balochistan, and shot dead after the assailants checked their ID cards.

It was also among the deadliest of a series of at least six attacks that has shaken the country’s south-western region since Sunday night. More than 70 people have been killed, including law enforcement and security personnel.

The BLA is part of a broader rebel movement that accuses the Pakistani government of oppression and neglect of the Baloch people.

“We strongly condemn violence against any person, irrespective of their ethnicity, race, religion, or political beliefs,” says Dr Mahrang Baloch, the leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), which believes in peaceful protests.

Last year, Balochistan experienced 170 militant attacks, which led to the deaths of 151 civilians and 114 security personnel, according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, Dawn newspaper reported.

Balochistan’s history of resistance against the Pakistan government began in 1948 and continues. Pakistan’s military, paramilitary and intelligence forces have responded by kidnapping, torturing and killing Baloch men.

Mahrang, 31, has been protesting the abduction of Baloch people since 2006, three years before her father, a political activist, was “disappeared”. His tortured body was found in 2011.

But it was the disappearance of her brother in 2017 that inspired her to start campaigning, joining marches and sit-ins. Her brother was returned to the family in 2018, but Mahrang continued to campaign for justice for all the disappeared, despite facing intimidation and threats. In 2019 she founded BYC.

Since then she has organised small grassroots meetings in communities to hold conversations around issues Baloch people face. “We started mass mobilisation in schools as well as going door to door to provide the youth, especially young women, with political education.”

The respect and admiration Mahrang has garnered through these activities is all the more impressive given that she comes from Balochistan, the most conservative of Pakistan’s four provinces. Her courage, oratory skills and success at uniting the Baloch people has encouraged other women on to the streets.

“For me the most progressive aspect of our resistance is that thousands of women across generations, from young teenage girls to their mothers and aunts to their grandmothers and even great-grandmothers, have joined the cause,” Mahrang says.

Last month, BYC tried to organise a national gathering of all Baloch people – known as the Baloch Raaji Muchi – in Gwadar, a city on the shores of the Arabian Sea in Balochistan to talk about the persecution of the Baloch. But security forces forced many people to turn back and created roadblocks to stop anyone entering the city.

The gathering was the first time that the Baloch had “united in such a massive number to register their protest against state oppression”, despite the complete suspension of telecommunication and internet access, says Mahrang. “If the security forces had not created roadblocks and forced people to turn away, some 200,000 people would have come to Gwadar,” she adds.

Those who did get through faced police batons and teargas as the army tried to disperse the crowds, say witnesses.

Maham Baloch, 26, who attended the meeting, told the Guardian: “I am a Baloch, but it was the first time I saw and heard the family members of the missing persons; it just broke my heart. Mahrang has completely won our minds and hearts, and it is because of her that today I found out how Baloch are treated in their own country.”

Referring to the teargas shelling and baton-charging at the gathering, she adds: “They did not even spare the women, the elderly or the small kids accompanying their parents.”

Hafeez Baloch, a Karachi-based rights activist who had managed to reach Gwadar a couple of days before the gathering and witnessed the mayhem and violence, says that apart from reports that three protesters were killed, at Gwadar and Talar, more than “four dozen others were injured and scores were hauled up and taken away to undisclosed locations” in the first two days.

The gathering turned into a sit-in protest by the BYC and continued until all the people picked up were released unconditionally.

“Even those who may not otherwise have been interested showed up, and Mahrang became an instant celebrity,” says Behram Baloch, Dawn newspaper’s correspondent in Gwadar.

“Perched at the back of a truck as they were not allowed to set up a stage, she asked the crowd to remain peaceful,” says Hafeez. “Believe me, not even a pot plant was destroyed.”

But it was not just the ethnic Baloch who went to the meeting. Sara Abdullah, a Baloch woman, says her Punjabi neighbours went every day and for the first two days even distributed biscuits and bottled water, as authorities had stopped the water supply and produce from entering Gwadar. Many women brought cooked food from their homes to share. “I have never seen so much adulation towards a leader before,” she says of Mahrang.

After two days of the blockade, the Iranian Baloch sent food on speedboats. “The coastguards looked the other way and allowed food to enter Gwadar through the sea,” Behram says. Balochistan is a region divided between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan and families continue to straddle the three countries.

The protest ended 12 days after the state agreed to the demands of the BYC, including the release of detained activists.

Related: ‘I only protest. I want to go to school’: the childhoods lost in Pakistan when loved ones are ‘disappeared’

“From holding one Raaji Muchi in Gwadar for just six hours, as originally planned, the BYC was able to hold eight [in different locations] over a period of two weeks,” Hafeez says.

“We held public gatherings in Turbat, Kalat, Talar, Panjgur, Mangocher, Surab, Noshki and ended at Quetta,” Mahrang says. “In some cities we estimated the crowd to be between 10,000 to 20,000 and in one, 50,000 people had gathered to greet us,” she adds.

Since 2003, 50,000 Baloch have been abducted and 25,000 killed extrajudicially, says Mahrang. “These are very rough figures and could be more as even gathering data has become dangerous. Our volunteers have been warned to stop this exercise,” she says.

She dismissed figures shared by the government’s commission of inquiry on enforced disappearances, which was set up in 2011,which says it has received 10,285 cases to June 2024 and has dealt with 8,015. “These figures are rejected by the families of the missing themselves,” she says.

“As a teenager I remember thinking death was a natural transition when you became old. I feared death and refused to go to funerals. The first time I saw a dead body was when I was forced to go to a morgue and identify my father’s tortured and mutilated corpse,” Mahrang says.

“I have seen dozens of dead bodies of people close to me in the last 15 years; death doesn’t scare me any more.”