Dr Mahrang Baloch, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee leader, has been included in Time magazine’s ‘2024 Time100 Next’ list for “advocating peacefully for Baloch rights,” the magazine said on Wednesday.
The list showcases 100 young individuals “who are not waiting long in life to make an impact” and includes artists, athletes, and advocates. The magazine says the list aims “to recognise that influence does not have [requirements] … nor does leadership look like it once did”.
The magazine selected Dr Mahrang for her peaceful advocacy as well as her December 2023 march to Islamabad, where she and hundreds of women “justice for their husbands, sons, and brothers”. The publication adds that the doctor has been the target of “harassment, arrests, and assassination attempts”.
“There is a lot of threat. There is a lot of oppression,” Dr Mahrang said. “Still … we will struggle for humanity.”
Asked if she would live to see her community no longer in turmoil, she replied, “Maybe. Our life is not certain in Pakistan.”
Mahrang was suddenly pushed into the limelight when she began to spearhead protests after her father, Ghaffar Longove, went missing in December 2009 from outside a hospital in Karachi.
At the time, she was still a student in primary school. The eldest of six siblings, Mahrang would burn her school books in front of the Quetta Press Club in an act of protest, demanding that her father be returned home. Her father’s mutilated body was found in 2011.
In December 2023, Dr Mahrang was one of the organisers of a large march and sit-in in Islamabad to protest enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings of their community.
“If the state does not hold sincere negotiations on the above demands and does not show seriousness and if the treatment of the past week with protesters continues then after seven days, the movement will express its disappointment with all state institutions against state policies of genocide and treating Balochistan like a colony, and put its case before the Baloch people,” she said.
Then-caretaker prime minister Anwaarul Haq Kakar took exception to the support lent to Baloch protesters, saying those who supported the cause could go join the Baloch militants.
“Advocates of terrorists in Balochistan should go and join them if they are convinced on the veracity of their issue and fight the state along with them, so that we know where they stand and how to deal with them,” he said, alluding to rights activists and journalists standing with the Baloch marchers.
Today, scores of women across Pakistan live in a state of uncertainty — not knowing whether their fathers, brothers, or husbands are alive or not. According to a report released in July, a total of 197 missing persons cases were reported in the first half of 2024 alone, with a vast majority recorded in Balochistan.
