London Wallpaper: EXCESSES COMMITTED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES OF PAKISTAN

*Dear Agha Humayun Amin Sahib,*

* My Obituary
for my student Advocate Zaman Khan Marri who was murdered by the
Intelligence agencies has been printed in the Daily Times. I share my sorrow
with you all.*

* With Best Regards*
* Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur*
**
*

Wronged souls don't vanish: an obituary of Zaman Khan Marri

By Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

Zaman Khan Chalgari Marri, a practicing lawyer, was kidnapped on August 19,
along with another lawyer Munir Ahmed Mirwani from Quetta. On September 6,
his mutilated body was found in Mastung.

He leaves behind an inconsolable wife, seven daughters, a son, a grieving
family and an angry Baloch nation.

On August 24, the Balochistan Bar Association had gone on a three-day strike
and accused intelligence agencies of kidnapping both the lawyers. The
Balochistan High Court chief justice, who took suo motu notice of the
kidnapping, had asked the authorities concerned for both the lawyers' safe
and early recovery. However, these directives went unheeded because those
who kidnapped him are answerable to none. He has been murdered because he is
a Baloch and every Baloch is now deemed a suspect by the state.

Khalid Hayat Jamaldini was also harassed because he too is a Baloch.
Fortunately, he was a bit luckier and was spared the fate that befell Zaman
Khan.

However, the rate at which atrocities are being perpetrated in Balochistan,
sooner or later, Jamaldini's luck too will run out, as will happen with many
other Baloch before our struggle puts a final end to such crimes. Such
atrocities become a reason for the unyielding and unforgiving stance of the
victimised nation. Their attitude then – to put it in French Revolution's
best known figure Maximilian Robespierre's words – becomes, "To punish the
oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity." The
Baloch people will never forgive these atrocities.

I have never written an obituary before in my life, but this truly painful
incident has compelled me to do so. I came to know Zaman Khan's family
before I knew him and when there were military operations during 1974 in the
Marri area, some of us stayed in the same area where their family used to
live during winters. They shared their meagre grain rations with us when
ours ran out and couldn't be replenished the same day.

Once when I was travelling to Kabul from Helmand during my stay in
Afghanistan, Zaman Khan's now deceased father, Mehrab Khan, came to me and
took me aside and offered me some money so that I could use it during the
trip. At that time, he like thousands of other Balochs and myself, subsisted
on the meagre monthly stipend from the beleaguered Afghan government. I
didn't take the money from him, but the feelings with which he tried to help
me are still etched on my heart.

I first met Zaman Khan in the refugee camp in Kalat, Afghanistan, when I
went there in 1978. He was in his teens and a keen student and a good
football player. Though the life at the camp was anything but easy, his
spirits were buoyant and his approach to life positive. His infectious
cackling laughter still resounds in my ears. That laughter and the happiness
in his family have now been extinguished forever by the state, whose
never-ending rhetoric claims Zaman Khan and other Baloch as its citizens.

He was the fastest of all, playing barefooted on the graveled grounds that
we used as our football field. He used to play football in the freezing
weather with the same adeptness that he had during milder weather or in the
sizzling heat. Always ready to share the ball as willingly as he shared
whatever he learnt with his junior students. The school that I managed had
just me and another Baloch as teachers and there were hundreds of students
anxious to learn. I would assign the students of the higher grades, on a
rotation basis, to teach the students in lower grades.

He willingly and diligently performed his role as a teacher with the care
that his less endowed fellows deserved. The students he taught always looked
forward to his next class. Zaman Khan never tired of helping the students
who were slower than others and it was this sense of responsibility, which
distinguished him from others. He was ever enthusiastic to learn and teach
by asking questions and seeking answers. He then went to the Soviet Union
for further studies along with other Baloch refugee students as education
there offered more opportunities. He was diligent as ever and soon qualified
as a lawyer and on his return started practicing law in 1994.

The Pakistani state it seems is bent upon eliminating Baloch people whom the
intelligence agencies or the Frontier Constabulary presumes unsupportive of
their policies. Each Baloch death is an indictment of the Balochistan
government, the supposedly democratic government at the centre, the
deafeningly silent media (Zaman's death was only reported by Daily Times)
and also the civil society. The government does not seem to get tired of
making false promises and presenting hollow packages, which the Baloch know
are as shallow as their response to these atrocities. The media is rightly
protesting Umar Cheema's torture, but it is deafeningly silent on the murder
of an advocate whose crime was nothing more than pursuing cases of the
missing persons in Balochistan, including his own maternal nephew who is
still missing. Such atrocities would not have passed unnoticed anywhere else
in the world.

Mumia Abu-Jamal, a jailed American activist, writes, "When a cause comes
along and you know in your bones that it is just, yet refuse to defend it —
at that moment you begin to die. And I have never seen so many corpses
walking around talking about justice." How long will the Baloch keep
tolerating these atrocities without their anger erupting in another
intifada? How long will they keep mum about this slow genocide?

I don't think that Baloch cherish the idea of becoming walking corpses.
Instead, they definitely prefer to die fighting. These ceaseless atrocities
will increasingly drive them to subscribe to a separate Balochistan state, a
state where abductions and extra-judicial killings will not await them in
the streets. For a person as dedicated and diligent as Zaman Khan, whose
refusal to bow to the will of the brutal state became the reason for his
death, I want to end his obituary with the poet William Ernest Henley's
(1849-1903) poem 'Invictus'. Had he submitted to what they wanted him to
admit and accept, he would have lived, but he preferred that his 'bloody
head remains unbowed', he preferred death over a life of ignominy.
'Invictus' also represents Baloch feelings towards the ceaseless atrocities
and is their united answer to all those responsible for these crimes.

Out Of The Night That Covers Me

(Invictus)

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,