KARACHI: Sammi Deen Baloch, a senior leader of the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC), has released an urgent video statement revealing that she has been subjected to continuous harassment, surveillance and intimidation for the past one month, culminating in a late-night raid on her home by police and intelligence agencies who questioned her family members and frightened her neighbours.
In a video statement that has drawn widespread attention and concern, Sammi Deen Baloch said that police and intelligence personnel arrived at her home at precisely four o’clock in the morning, stood outside her door for an entire hour, demanded her address, interrogated other members of her household, questioned neighbouring residents about her and left with a chilling warning: “We will come back.”
Sammi Deen Baloch said the midnight raid was only the latest in a sustained campaign of intimidation that had been ongoing for the past month. She revealed that police had visited her home twice during this period, accompanied by female constables, each time questioning people in the surrounding area about her whereabouts and frightening them in the process.
She further disclosed that she was being followed and surveilled whenever she left her home. “Wherever I go outside, I am followed and pursued to frighten me,” she said in the video statement.
Opening her statement with a deeply personal note, Sammi Deen Baloch said the video she had originally intended to record was one marking 17 years since her father’s enforced disappearance but that the escalating harassment had forced her to speak out immediately instead.
“My crime is that I have asked about my father, who has been forcibly disappeared for 17 years and whose whereabouts and condition remain unknown to us to this day,” she said. “My crime is that I have exposed the oppression, injustice and cruelty committed against me, my family and every member of my nation before the world. I have called oppression what it is oppression.”
She said that even if she were arrested and imprisoned, she would continue to ask questions about her disappeared father from behind prison walls and would continue to demand accountability from state institutions for the injustices committed against her people.
In one of the most powerful passages of her statement, Sammi Deen Baloch gave a raw and unflinching account of what 17 years of activism had cost her personally. “Half of the days and nights of 17 years of my life have been spent in protest camps outside press clubs,” she said. “The streets and press clubs of Quetta, Karachi and Islamabad are witnesses to the pain and suffering I have endured there, to the fear I have faced.”
She revealed that she had been harassed, threatened, had her clothes torn, been dragged along roads and thrown into police vehicles and taken to jail and had herself been subjected to enforced disappearance. She added that other members of her family had also disappeared and been used as conduits to send her threatening messages.
“Despite all of these things and all of these state tactics, my position has not changed,” she said.
In an emotionally charged appeal, Sammi Deen Baloch addressed those who question why families of the disappeared continue their protests year after year.
“We do not come to the streets by choice. Nobody desires to spend their childhood, the good and bad days of their life, on roads and in protest sit-ins outside press clubs,” she said. “But to this day, nobody has felt our pain.”
She said her demand was simple and singular: that forcibly disappeared persons be brought into the open and that families be given closure. “Have the moral courage to simply tell us where our people are,” she appealed. “Put yourself in our place, in the place of your own sisters and daughters, and you will understand.”
“If you want to silence our voices, do not put us in prisons kill us directly so that our lives end and we are no longer capable of asking you questions,” she said. “If you seat us together and drop our bodies too, we will have no objection because the agonising life we are forced to live, we cannot continue without any closure.”
She was equally clear, however, that as long as she existed she would continue to ask questions. “But for as long as our existence remains on this earth, our lives will keep asking you questions.”
“I know that just as a fabricated murder case was constructed against Dr. Mahrang Baloch and Sibghatullah Shah Jee and they were sentenced to life imprisonment, a similar false FIR can be registered against me,” she said.
She added that there was currently no legal case against her. “The issue is not cases the issue is our raising of our voices,” she said.
Concluding her video statement, Sammi Deen Baloch made a series of direct demands. She called on authorities to end the oppressive treatment of relatives of the forcibly disappeared and political workers, to provide basic human and constitutional rights and to stop linking peaceful voices of dissent to external agents or armed organisations.
“You make people disappear, throw mutilated bodies, create mass graves and then expect those who have suffered to not even utter a word and to ask no questions that is not possible,” she said.
“Place your hand on your heart and ask yourself, if this same torment befell your own loved ones, where would you stand?”
She ended with a warning directed squarely at those who seek to silence her: “You have been doing this for 20 years. But remember for as long as you do not answer our questions, these voices and these demands will never end.”
