Polish Member of the European Parliament (MEP) Yszard Czarnecki has condemned the killings of journalists and other civilians in Balochistan.
Czarnecki, who is also the chairman of the Friends of Balochistan in the European Parliament, said in a statement issued from Brussels, Belgium, “The Pakistani government claims that the number of missing persons in Balochistan has declined. It is only because many of them have lately been found dead.”
He said since June 2010, more than 230 bodies of the previously missing persons have been recovered from different places in the largest, but the least populated, province of Pakistan.
According to the Balochistan Union of Journalists, he added, 10 journalists have been killed this year. The MEP said the missing persons’ issue and the policy of the Pakistani government’s kill-and-dump spree in the province are as disturbing as the fact that Balochistan’s problem is almost altogether missing from the mainstream discourse. He mentioned one special case of Javed Naseer Rind, whose name was added to the list of more than 10 journalists whose bodies have been found tortured and dumped in an area of Khuzdar, about 300 kilometres south of Quetta. He was a senior sub-editor at the Daily Tawar, Mastung, a pro-nationalist newspaper. He asked the government to carry out investigations regarding these killings, and urged the European Parliament to have a fact-finding mission delegated for a European Union investigation into the large-scale disappearances of civilians at the hands of the government agencies in the province.
