Voices against extra judicial killings, missing persons growing: Babar

F.P. Report

Islamabad: Former Senator Farhatullah Babar said that protesting voices against extra judicial killings, mysterious disappearances of citizens with impunity and Guantanamo Bay type internment centres in tribal areas were becoming louder by the day and gaining traction with the people throughout the country predicting also that the state will no longer be able to suppress it.

Addressing a camp of the relatives of missing persons organized by the Defence of Human Rights Pakistan in front of National Press Club in Islamabad Thursday evening he said that some invisible hands were now manipulating workers of political parties at lower level against challengers of state narrative and warned that such efforts will backfire.

Elaborating he said that some unsuspecting workers of the PPP were thus lured in two tribal agencies recently to condemn a newly launched movement against missing persons that has origins in the tribal areas.

He said that the Party has taken notice of it and the concerned workers issued show cause notices already.

Senator Farhatullah Babar called for making public the report of the 2012 visit to Pakistan of the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances as well as the report of the first Commission on Enforced Disappearances.

He said that although the present Commission had been in place for six years and had also recovered hundreds of missing persons it had miserably failed in exposing the hands behind the mysterious disappearances even though there is provision in the law that empowered and required it to do so.

He also called for disbanding the present Commission and replacing it with a new one which should also include expert investigators as members and be required to make its report public.

Farhatullah Babar said that the lawyers movement a decade ago achieved what then appeared to be impossible. It will be no surprise if a nationwide movement against enforced disappearances is also launched.

If the state did not heed the pulse and dubbed indigenous movements like the Pushtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) as anti state it will have to brace itself for a severe backlash, he warned.

The former Senator said that the 2018 was election year and urged political parties to include the mysterious disappearances and other related human rights issues in their Parties’ manifestos. He said that the Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto had already directed the Manifesto Committee in this regard.