LAHORE: “It is now over a month that my son Raza is missing...even now when I drink water, I think of whether he has had any,” said the father of Raza Mahmood, a peace activist who went missing from his home in the city last month.

Speaking at a seminar titled ‘Human Rights in the Era of Enforced Disappearances’, rights activists and prominent members of the civil society on Saturday condemned the state’s tactic of operating outside the ambit of the law.

The Western state invented uniforms because it was necessary for the state to identify itself when enforcing the law, said Prof Muhammad Waseem. “But when the state sends men in plainclothes to make ‘arrests’, it automatically loses its legitimacy and authority.”

The professor of political science regretted that the act of disappearing people left many families broken and tormented, while the media rarely highlighted their pain.

Lawyer Hina Jilani lashed out at those behind the illegal act of ‘disappearing’ people without due process.

“The state has been the pawn of evil minds, and these minds have brought us to this point,” she said, adding “for them, the law is the least relevant aspect of the discussion”.

Yet the society remains unmoved, she lamented. “When I saw the families of Baloch missing persons, I learned then that the trauma of a loved one gone missing was much worse than if they were dead.”

Pointing out that there was a pattern to the disappearance of journalist Zeenat Shehzadi and other activists picked up by the state, Ms Jilani accused certain state institutions of picking up people, and added that they were shameful and corrupt and they only protected their own.

Activist Peter Jacob said it was established the world over that torture was a crime against humanity. “We must strengthen our institutions but the problem is when there is perpetually a state of human dysfunction, how do we do that?”

Speaking at the seminar, Dr Mehdi Hasan, with his typical biting humour, said that talking about the state or the government was futile because there was neither in Pakistan.

Author Ahmad Rashid said that Raza had become a symbol. The country, he said, had become authoritarian and civilians were being silenced.

“After Raza was picked up about 30 INGOs were asked to leave, leaving 5,000 Pakistanis unemployed and hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries in suffering.”

Towards the end of the discussion, IA Rehman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said that state institutions always shrugged off responsibility, claiming that they did not have missing persons in their custody. But it is their duty to recover them, Mr Rehman stressed.

He said people in KP went missing after they were accused of having links with militants, in Sindh they went missing because they were political dissidents and as for the Baloch – they have always been branded by the state as traitors, he said.

“More than 1,400 people are missing, and this number is only quoted from the list of unsolved cases put together by the missing persons’ commission,” he said. “We have seven torture prisons which are mini Guantanamo Bays, where people are thrown in without knowledge of when they will be released or when they will be sent to trial.”

Published in Dawn, January 7th, 2018