Pakistan Wants the World to See It as a Peacemaker. I Want It to Find My Father.

The world should not forget about Pakistan’s human rights abuses, even as the state tries to overhaul its image.

Sammi Deen Baloch holds a picture of her father during a rally seeking the return of forcibly disappeared persons in September 2025.

Even today I vividly remember the forcible disappearance of my father Dr. Deen Mohammed Baloch. It was June 28, 2009 at 5 a.m. The mobile phone rang, and kept ringing until my mother picked it up. The caller was an orderly from a public hospital in Khuzdar, Balochistan province. He delivered the worst news: My father had been abducted by intelligence agencies while he was on a night shift.

I was 10 years old at the time.

June brings the tormenting flashback in its worst forms. That day 17 years ago robbed me of my childhood, bringing me to the streets to protests for the release of my forcibly disappeared father – or at least for his family to finally learn his whereabouts. 

Over time, my father’s disappearance became not only an emotional absence, but an administrative one. It followed me into every form, every office, every space where identity must be complete.

When a child grows up without a father in Balochistan, even ordinary tasks become complicated. School admission forms require a father’s name. National identity cards and passports demand details people like me cannot provide. Even in moments of crisis, when my mother, a diabetic patient, has needed urgent medical care, hospital staff have asked for guardianship documents I do not have.

Uncertainty rules our lives. After 17 years, we still do not know whether my mother is a widow or a wife, whether my sister and I are orphans or daughters waiting for a father who may still return. 

My mother’s life changed the most. In our societal norms and within Islamic tradition, she could no longer move through the world as a woman seen as complete on her own terms. Expectations were placed on her that went beyond grief: how she should dress, how she should appear in public. Over time, she withdrew from the public life that once belonged to her. 

But I am not the only one who is suffering, although I am maybe one of the few who has been suffering for 17 years. I have participated in protests and marches alongside hundreds of young girls, elderly women, ailing men, and teenagers who have had their loved ones forcibly disappeared. I marched on foot nearly 3,000 kilometers from Quetta to Islamabad in 2013 and 2014. I have attended rallies, organized sit-ins outside press clubs across Pakistan, and peacefully protested, demanding the return of my father. 

I never had a peaceful childhood after my father’s abduction; today I am a human rights activist asking to end enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

But in response, the state has beaten, humiliated, imprisoned, and charged me under terrorism laws. I have also been placed on the Exit Control List, which bars me from leaving the country.

This is not only my story. It is the story of hundreds of mothers, sisters, and children of the disappeared in Balochistan, people taken by Pakistani security agencies to contain a long-running insurgency. As the conflict intensifies in Balochistan, with suicide bombings and militant attacks threatening to derail a Pakistan-U.S. pact, Pakistan’s response has hardened, and peaceful activists like me continue to face increasing restrictions from the security forces. The security forces blur the line between peaceful activism and militancy while trying to contain the insurgency.

Violence by insurgents seeking separation from Pakistan in Balochistan has escalated in recent years, and the broader security situation in Pakistan has deteriorated. But alongside that, the space for peaceful activism has shrunk dramatically. I, along with more than a thousand others, have been placed on a domestic anti-terror watchlist locally called the Fourth Schedule. As a result, we face travel bans, and are blacklisted, which has made even basic life tasks – renting a home, having a SIM card, opening a bank account, or boarding a domestic flight – difficult or impossible.

On March 24, 2025, at around 5:30 p.m., I was one of several human rights defenders arrested in Karachi while peacefully protesting against a crackdown on Baloch rights activists, days after Baloch militants hijacked a train in March 2025 in Balochistan. Following the hijacking, dozens of my fellow human rights activists were arrested, charged under terrorism laws, and imprisoned.

Enforced disappearances remain one of the most serious human rights violations in Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan today. Thousands, among them students, political activists, and ordinary citizens have been disappeared since 2000, when the insurgency erupted. Hundreds have later been found dead, their bodies mutilated – bearing the signs of torture – and abandoned. Others like my father remain missing for decades, with no information about their fate or........

© The Diplomat