MOULA BUX was returning home from a court appearance in Sehwan Sharif on July 10, riding on the pillion seat of a relative’s motorcycle, when they were intercepted by a blue Toyota Corolla. The car had no number plate, and contained four uniformed policemen.

The cops dragged Moula Bux into the car and drove off. He has not been seen since then. His wife, three sons and a daughter are frantic. Relatives have been going from police stations to government offices, trying to find out where he is. Initially, the police refused to register a case, but were forced to do so in November on a Supreme Court directive.

Abid Raza Zaidi is more fortunate: kept in safe houses, he was moved around blindfolded, and tortured for four months until he was released recently. A Ph.D student, he tells of being transported by train, plane and car. He has no idea where he was taken. He was suspended upside down over an open sewer, and had his head lowered repeatedly into the foul water below. To this day, he has no idea why he was picked up. His is one of 70 such abductions reported in Karachi alone.

On December 3, Ghulam Mohammad Baloch was forced into a police van in Lyari. Witnesses say there were a number of police officers present, including a DSP and an SHO. On December 7, the Sindh High Court issued notices to the police and several intelligence agencies, directing them to produce Mr Baloch. Nobody has thus far accepted responsibility for this kidnapping.

According to Sajid Baloch, a relative, 6,000 Baloch have disappeared over the last couple of years. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has documented 400 cases, but obviously, most people, especially in rural Balochistan, have never heard of the HRCP, and therefore do not report these disappearances. Apparently, reports of such incidents have skyrocketed after 9/11. Almost invariably, the police and intelligence agencies deny any hand in these disappearances. And when the victims do return, most of them are too scared by threats to report their experiences to the media, or to go to court. In any case, most of them are blindfolded during their captivity, and cannot prove who had kidnapped them.

And yet, despite their claims of innocence, when the Supreme Court took up a case of 40 disappearances in November, and directed that they be produced, half of them were set free by various government agencies. So to pretend there is no official hand in these extrajudicial arrests is to assume a degree of stupidity in both our judges and the public. Clearly, these cases of kidnapping and torture are part of a covert state policy. There are just too many men disappearing for this to be a random crime wave.

This newspaper recently reported on a press conference held at the HRCP office by Saleem Baloch on December 20. Mr Baloch, an office-bearer of the Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP), told of being kidnapped last March, and being released a few days ago. During his eight-month ordeal, Mr Baloch came across many other Baloch in similar illegal confinement.

It appears that the uprising in Balochistan is the cause of many of these covert operations. Unable to produce any evidence that would stand up in court, the government is resorting to these methods to obtain information, and to punish people they think might be connected to Baloch nationalist organisations, most notably the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA). By succumbing to these tactics, our government is taking a page out of the American torture manual: Washington’s policy of rendition and its hellhole in Guantanamo Bay are clearly the models here.

But for all the adverse publicity these illegal operations have attracted, has the American government benefited by its actions? To my knowledge, little actionable information has been extracted from the victims. Many professional interrogators have confirmed the obvious over the years: under duress, people usually confess to anything their torturers demand. But of what use is this dubious intelligence?

By brutalising the population, you only make new enemies. We should have learned this lesson from our army’s experience in East Pakistan in 1971. An unknown number of people, possibly numbering in the hundreds of thousands, were killed; women were raped; and villages torched in an attempt to cow down the Bengali people. But far from submitting, the Mukti Bahini recruited more volunteers to its cause. Similarly, allied forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are generating increasing opposition to their presence through their harsh methods of putting down opposition.

But apart from suspected Baloch nationalists, other people have fallen victim to this policy. Moula Bux was an activist who sought a semblance of a fair deal for his people as gas was being pumped out from their land. In a letter addressed to the MD of ENI, a multinational exploiting the local gas field, Mr Bux wrote in January, 2004:

“(1) That in Gas Field’s plant as yet has not appointed any single said original area inhabitant [sic];

(2) That as by Company constructed road and Plant have not yet paid any remuneration amounts as in this respect faced losses by land owners [sic];

(3) That small small work and contracts were awarded to outsiders... [sic]”

I have no idea if Mr Bux’s agitation for local rights was responsible for his disappearance. But his family is convinced that this is the only possible explanation as he was not involved in any other kind of activity that could justify what happened to him.

The HRCP also has records of 20 young Shia men who have been abducted. Again, their families insist they were not involved in any subversive activities. This article is not about establishing the innocence of the ‘disappeared’, but to advocate their rights to a trial if the state has evidence against them. If not, they should be released. By behaving like those they seek to defeat (nationalists, extremists, etc), government functionaries are only strengthening resistance to a rule that is being increasingly viewed as illegal.

If the state does not follow the rule of law, how can it expect others to do so? So while the temptation to lash out at its perceived enemies might be great, by placing itself above the law, this government is eroding the very foundations of the state.