On most Thursdays, a small group of women sitting on a thin cotton sheet with photographs that have started to curl at the edges can be seen on a quiet street close to the Karachi Press Club. A few of the pictures are outdated. Some are decades old. Like a shopkeeper straightening his counter, the women reorganize them while they converse, almost mindlessly. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that the kids in some of the photos would now be adults, perhaps even parents if they were present at all.
Pakistan is a nation that produces a lot of documentation. SIM cards are linked to thumbprints, identity cards come with biometric scans, and it is difficult for a citizen to purchase a motorcycle without leaving a paper trail. Nevertheless, thousands of people have managed to get past this stringent registration process. Since its establishment in 2011, the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances has reportedly received about 7,000 cases and resolved about 5,000 of them. On a spreadsheet, the remaining amount seems tiny. In a Turbat living room, it doesn’t sound tiny.
Provincial security officials frequently reiterate the official position, which is that the numbers are inflated. They speculate that some of the missing joined militant groups on the other side of the border. Others perished while attempting to travel to Europe. Maybe some people just decided to disappear from lives they could no longer bear. Parts of this are probably true. Many young Baloch men have been absorbed by migration routes via Iran and Turkey, and not all of them returned home. Even so, the explanation seems lacking, much like a sentence does when the speaker veers off topic.
It is no coincidence that Balochistan is at the center of this narrative. Hundreds of cases dating back to 2001 have been recorded by the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, and the frequency of disappearances hardly ever slows. 99 cases were reported in October 2024 alone, which is more than three per day on average. Names first appear on Twitter, then on the walls of press clubs, and finally on graves in Khuzdar or Panjgur. Seven months after being abducted in July 2024, Hayat Sabzal Baloch was discovered dead. According to reports, fifteen-year-old Anas Ahmed was taken from Guzgi in January 2025. Press releases insist that the list is getting smaller, but the list keeps getting longer.
You notice how the families have picked up the vocabulary of bureaucracy while listening to these talks. They discuss habeas corpus petitions and FIRs in the same manner that others discuss school admissions. Since her own husband, Masood, vanished in the vicinity of Rawalpindi in 2005, Amina Masood Janjua has been involved. Her organization lobbies lawmakers, files cases, and writes letters that are largely ignored. The work itself seems to have evolved into a sort of holding pattern, a means of resisting forgetting even in the face of unanswered questions.
Things may get better. Although Pakistan has not ratified the International Convention on Enforced Disappearances, pressure from the European Union—which is loosely linked to trade preferences—has occasionally made a difference. It’s also possible that nothing will change and that the women on the cotton sheet will be there the following Thursday and the Thursday after that, rearranging photos that get progressively faded with each passing season. Perhaps the most honest thing to say about it at this point is that both possibilities seem equally likely.
