KARACHI: The Pakistan government’s Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (COIOED) has logged 197 new cases of missing people this year, with families of alleged victims saying on Tuesday the low number reflected the people’s lack of trust in the process of reporting cases to authorities. 

Enforced disappearances is an enduring issue in Pakistan where relatives, politicians and rights activists say many people who have gone missing, especially in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, have been abducted by Pakistani security forces on the pretext of fighting militancy. The Pakistani state denies involvement in enforced disappearances.

The COIOED was set up in 2011 to trace missing persons and hold individuals or organizations to account for their disappearance. In a report released on Monday, the commission said around 10,285 cases had been registered with the body since January 2018, of which 4,514 individuals had returned home, 1,002 were in internment centers, 671 in prisons, and the dead bodies of 277 had been recovered. Additionally, 1,551 cases were closed for various reasons.

The commission said 47 cases had been reported in June. Twenty-eight cases had been disposed of due to people returning home, being in internment camps or jails, being found to be dead or determined to not be cases of enforced disappearances. 

The report said less than 30 percent of the total cases received by the commission over the last seven years were from Balochistan, and that 2,360 cases, or 84.52 percent of the total 2,792 registered cases from Balochistan, had been resolved. Among these, 2,025 people had returned home. 

But many relatives of alleged victims dismiss the figures.

Rights activist Sammi Deen Baloch, who has been advocating for the recovery of her father Dr. Deen Mohammad Baloch since 2011, said she had stopped pursuing the case in 2021 after losing faith in the body. 

“I stopped pursuing my father’s case in 2021 because commission members were rude to families, despite their duty being to provide relief,” Baloch, who is also the general secretary of the Voice of Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) group, told Arab News.

Baloch said the low number of reported cases from Balochistan indicated that either people were not coming forward or they were publicly showing their lack of trust in the government commission.

She also said it was particularly challenging to document all cases from Balochistan because families often preferred to keep their identities hidden, and because the province, Pakistan’s largest by size, covered a vast and remote area.

Monday’s report said the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province had the highest number of registered cases since the commission was set up, totaling 3,537 or 34.38 percent. Sindh’s registered cases are 1,823, accounting for 17.72 percent of the total, followed by Punjab with 1,675 cases, or 16.28 percent.

Amina Masood Janjua, who has been campaigning for the recovery of her husband Ahmad Masood Janjua since 2005 and is the chairperson of the Defense of Human Rights group, a network of families of missing persons, noted that KP saw a lot of cases of enforced disappearances during former military ruler Musharraf’s tenure. 

“Another reason is also that it is a border area and a physical War on Terror has been fought in this region,” Janjua said. 

Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, had 378 cases, 3.67 percent of the total registered while Azad Kashmir had 70 cases, or 0.68 percent of the total. Pakistan’s northern semi-autonomous Gilgit-Baltistan region reported only 10 cases of missing persons.

‘EXAGGERATED’

According to the commission’s data, 1,096 cases were registered from across Pakistan in 2018, followed by 800 in 2019. The next year, the figure dropped to 415 but surged to 1,460 in 2021.
This increased to 860 in 2022 while in 2023, 885 cases of missing persons were registered across the country. This year, only 197 cases were reported across the country during the first six months. 

Janjua agreed that a “lack of trust” in the commission was the main reason for the low number of cases that were logged, particularly from Balochistan, where there is a disconnect between the public and the state and people widely believe the mineral-rich province’s resources are being exploited by the government, a charge it denies. 

The province has also been home to a low-level insurgency by separatist militants for decades.

Shahid Rind, a Balochistan government spokesperson, acknowledged that the missing persons issue was “real” but said figures reported by families and rights groups were “often exaggerated.”

“Different leaders claim figures in the thousands, which lacks substantiation,” Rind told Arab News.

“The state requires specific data and documentation to confirm disappearances, and there is an established mechanism for this purpose,” he explained.

Former Pakistani senator Afrasiab Khattak, who has long championed the cause for missing people, disagreed, saying that the number of missing persons was much higher than that reported by the commission. He said given a lack of trust in the commission, families thus preferred to hold protests and sit-ins to register their grievances.

“They hope mobilizing public opinion may give some results than waiting for the decisions of these already failed forums,” Khattak said.