QUETTA, BALOCHISTAN: The Baloch Women Forum has strongly condemned the firing incident in Kuntani, Gwadar, in which Pakistani Coast Guard personnel opened fire on Baloch labourers, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.
In a statement issued by Baloch Women Forum organizer Dr. Shalee Baloch, she described the incident as a reflection of the deepening crisis across the entire coastal belt of Balochistan, where militarization and fear have turned the region into what she called a landscape of repression.
https://twitter.com/ShaleeBaloch/status/2053840551791710361?s=20
Dr. Shalee Baloch said that while the state markets Gwadar to the world as a futuristic economic corridor and presents it as an investment destination for foreign powers, the indigenous Baloch population remains deprived of even the most basic necessities of life, including access to clean water.
She said the situation in Gwadar had effectively turned the city into a no-go area for its own indigenous inhabitants, with checkpoints, enforced disappearances, targeted killings and restrictions on movement creating an atmosphere where the local population is treated as a security threat rather than rightful inhabitants of their ancestral land.
Dr. Shalee Baloch further stated that the logic driving the situation in Gwadar was one of colonial extraction, where the land is considered valuable but the native population is seen as expendable. She said that the state securitizes every inch of Gwadar not to protect its people but to protect strategic and economic interests tied to international investments and regional power politics.
She said the Kuntani incident exposes the darker reality behind the language of development, arguing that beneath promises of prosperity lies a structure of occupation where the state decides whose lives matter and whose suffering can be ignored for the sake of strategic interests.
The Baloch Women Forum called on the international community and human rights organizations to take notice of what it described as a systematic exclusion of the Baloch people from their own coast, resources and future.
