NEARLY 1,400km in 70 days. Walking 20km a day. It’s a feat beyond endurance for most people. And that’s not counting the 700km traversed from Quetta to Karachi earlier. The small group of about 15 people — including nine women and three children — is approaching the end of its protest march from Karachi to Islamabad. Led by Qadeer Baloch of the Voice of the Baloch Missing People, the marchers’ purpose is to draw attention to the abductions of Baloch men allegedly by agents of the state, including the Frontier Corps and intelligence personnel, on suspicion of separatist sympathies. The tortured, bullet-riddled bodies of nearly 600 such ‘missing’ people have been found in the last three years dumped in various parts of Balochistan. Many remain untraced, sometimes since years, and the total number of enforced disappearances may run into the thousands. Despite repeated interventions by the Supreme Court, which has particularly sought the FC’s response to the allegations against it, young men in the province continue to go missing.

The protest undertaken by the VBMP illustrates the desperation of people who have run out of options in their quest for justice. Although they, and whoever has offered them food and shelter along the way, have been harassed and intimidated from the outset, matters have now reportedly reached a particularly grave pass as they approach Islamabad. The threats are becoming ever more blatant, and some exchanges between police and the marchers have been captured on video. By responding in this manner to a peaceful protest — the right to engage in which is the mark of a civilised society — the state is exacerbating an already fraught situation. While in the desolate reaches of Balochistan, kill-and-dump operations and abductions can be carried out away from the public eye — although sometimes the stench from improperly buried bodies does expose the inconvenient truth — it is quite a different matter when obstacles are created in the path of those engaged in a peaceful march whose progress is in the public domain via the internet. The repressive tactics to silence the VBMP will ensure that its voice will echo ever louder in the court of public, as well as international, opinion.