Karachi: For the last 13 years, two girls – Sammi and Mehlab – have been waiting for their dearest father Dr Deen Mohammad Baloch to return home.
They have been staging protests on the streets of Balochistan and various places of Pakistan, seeking to known when their wait would end.
Nobody is giving any answers to them and their endeavour to find their dad continues.
Deen Mohammad, a Physician, was abducted illegally by the Pakistani military 13 years back from Ornach area of Balochistan and since then there is no trace of his.
He is among tens of thousands of Baloch people who have become victims of ‘enforced disappearances’ in Balochistan every year.
In most of the cases, such people are never seen again by their family members. In several cases, the victims return home in brutally tortured form, either as dead bodies or as living dead.
Despite knowing this, Sammi and Mehlab, have spent the last 13 years on the streets, seeking justice.
A distraught Sammi has often stated that she wishes that nobody else is forced to grow up like her on the streets, looking for father.
“It is very difficult to spend your childhood in protest camps,” she has said.
However, despite her wishes, there are tens of thousands of children like her in Balochistan, who have been waiting for years for their fathers or some other loved kin to return home after ‘enforced disappearances’ carried out by the Pakistani military.
The scourge of ‘enforced disappearances’ has victimised all sections of the Baloch society, mostly the student community.
For the last 6 days, families of several Baloch students who have gone missing years or months back have been staging a protest in front of the Karachi Press Club.
They include the families of Saeed Umar, Abdul Hameed and Imran Baloch, who were abducted recently.
