Rights groups allege war against the armed group has included a shadowy campaign of enforced disappearances. As lightning cuts across the darkened Peshawar sky, Manzoor pashteen implores thousands of demonstrators to no longer be afraid. The rain lashes down upon them, as they stand in rapt attention, listening to the leader of the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights movement that has quickly risen to national prominence across Pakistan. Among the crowd, dozens of people clutch posters, photocopied legal documents or passport-sized photographs of their loved ones, holding them aloft.
The pictures are of Pakistan's disappeared, the detritus of the security forces' more-than-a-decade-long war against the pakistan taliban armed group and its allies. Since 2011, a government commission investigating the enforced disappearances has dealt with more than 4,929 cases of Pakistan's "missing people". Rights groups say the figure is vastly under-reported.
"I am not against any institution, but if they are being oppressive, then we are against them!" thunders Pashtun. "Every oppressor, whether it is a member of the Taliban … or it is the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's most powerful intelligence agency), or the MI (Military Intelligence) or the army, we are against anyone who is committing cruelty!"In pakistan, ruled for roughly half of its 70-year history by its powerful military, people have been disappeared for less. Indeed, often they have disappeared for no apparent reason at all.
Ikram Behram, 26, was a tailor working in the city of Peshawar, the capital of the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where much of Pakistan's war against the Pakistan Taliban has taken place. On August 10, 2013, his family says, a group of armed security forces personnel abducted him from his shop. He has not been seen or heard from since."Elite anti-terrorist force police came into the shop and asked for him by name," says Sarfaraz Ahmed, 23, Behram's cousin. "When he identified himself, they abducted him and took him away."It has been five years, Ahmed says, but Behram's family "has been told nothing" by the authorities."If he is guilty of a crime, then charge him in court," says Ahmed. "At least then, we will know what has happened."
The oldest case dates back to 2005, and the most recent abduction allegedly occurred on December 3, 2017. Those allegedly taken include students, scholars, IT consultants, shopkeepers, daily wage laborers, a policeman, a tailor and a hotel waiter. Pakistan's military was provided with details of each of the cases but did not offer comment. Often, those who disappear are traced to being in security forces custody in a network of internment centres operated across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, says Farid Khan, who works for the government's Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances. In an ongoing Supreme Court case on the issue, however, the government has so far refused to share a list of those being held in captivity, often under vague charges or under a 2011 anti terrorism law that allows indefinite detention for "terrorism" suspects.
Of bodies, and secret courts
Not all who enter the internment centers come out alive. According to the Defence of Human Rights (DHR) rights group, at least 153 people have died while in custody at the centers. Yaqoob Khan, 32, a shopkeeper originally from the tribal district of Bajaur, was abducted while sitting in an Islamabad park with his son Ilyas in December 2015, his father says."On February 12 [this year], I got a letter saying I should pick up the dead body of my son from [the eastern city of] Lahore."
Many of those held in the internment centres have been tried in Pakistan's secretive military courts for civilian "terrorism suspects". Since 2015, when those courts were formed, they have sentenced at least 375 people, with a conviction rate of 88 percent, Legal advocacy groups have alleged rampant rights abuses in the courts. Sohail Ahmed, 28, was one of those to be tried. Ahmed went missing from his home in the northern Swat Valley in 2010, his father Usman Ali told Pakistani tv, after military personnel raided their home.
