‘I only protest. I want to go to school’: the childhoods lost in Pakistan when loved ones are ‘disappeared’

When people filled the streets and parks to celebrate Eid al-Fitr in Pakistan earlier this month, Sammi Deen Baloch was not among them. Instead, she picked up a placard and joined a protest at the Karachi Press Club with dozens of other families.

Sammi, 25, says there was no celebrating for the families of Pakistan’s disappeared, just an ongoing and painful wait.

“Our lives are spent in the missing persons’ camps, staging sit-ins for months and taking part in rallies. I did not have a childhood like every other child after the abduction of my father,” she says.

Sammi was one of thousands of protesters who joined rallies on the festive day of Eid across Balochistan province, and in major cities including Karachi and Islamabad.

Sammi was nine years old when her father, Deen Mohammed Baloch, a doctor, was allegedly taken by security forces in Khuzdar, a district of Balochistan, in 2009.

Balochistan, Pakistan’s south-western province, has been at the centre of a separatist insurgency since the early 2000s. The Pakistani security forces are accused of kidnap, torture and murder in the fight to quell the insurgency, an accusation they have denied on several occasions.

According to the NGO Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, more than 5,000 people have been abducted since the early 2000s, their fates unknown. Since December 2016, at least 6,224 people have disappeared in the province, while 2,065 have been released and 2,766 killed, figures from the Human Rights Council of Balochistan show. Earlier this month, the Balochistan government denied there were “thousands” of missing people and disputed accusations that its Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances was stalling its investigations.

The first major protest calling for the release of all missing persons began in late 2013, when families walked more than 2,000km (1,200 miles) from Balochistan to Karachi and Islamabad, arriving in February 2014. Today, rallies, road blocks and sit-ins continue.

Related: Where is Balochistan and why is it the target of Iran and Pakistan strikes?

But protesters say spending weeks at a time in protest camps, sleeping in the cold, is taking its toll on their health, especially among young women and children.

Seema Baloch, whose brother Shabir Baloch disappeared in October 2016, was also protesting in Karachi during Eid. She was pregnant when she first joined rallies to campaign for his release. Her son Meeras, five, and three-year-old daughter, Shari, have grown up in protest camps.

In July 2022, Shari became very sick during a 50-day sit-in in Quetta when there were heavy downpours, says Seema. “Our children are growing up in a very hopeless and helpless situation and they are suffering. The disappearance of one family member is a collective punishment for the entire family,” she adds.

Shari was among dozens of children who spent more than a month in a protest camp outside the National Press Club in Islamabad from December to January, when they talked to the Guardian about their experiences.

Holding a photo of her uncle, Shari joined in chants of “missing persons ko, baziab karo”, meaning “release all”, says Seema.

“It was the first sentence Shari learned. Even at home, she starts chanting slogans. This breaks my heart, as I never wanted her to grow up like this.”

Ayesha Khalil was four years old when her father, Khalil Ahmed, was abducted in 2019 in Kech, Balochistan. She was also at the Islamabad sit-in, with her mother and siblings, holding a framed picture of her father.

“I don’t like it here,” Ayesha, now nine, said at the protest camp earlier this year. “I cry every night in the blanket. I want to go back to my home and school, but I can’t go back alone. I want my father back. My mother told me that Baba gave me rides on his motorbike when I cried. I don’t remember that and I want my father back to give me rides again.”

Asadullah Marri, 11, the son of Sharbat Khan Marri, was not born when his father was abducted. “I never went to school. I don’t remember the days and months I have spent in protests, on roads and camps. I wish to go to school. I don’t play any sports. I only protest for the release of my father,” says Asadullah.

Mir Aalim, 13, who joined the sit-in to protest for the release of his brother, and Anisa Ramzan, 14, whose father is one of the disappeared, said the games they played in the camp outside the National Press Club in Islamabad were all related to the trauma of losing family members.

“All children took part in games and drama,” says Anisa. “One play was how the FC, a paramilitary force, barged into our house, tried to abduct my father, and blindfolded him. I act as my mother, beg them to stop, but they kick my face with their boots and take him away.”

Hamid Mir, a journalist who was at the camp in Islamabad, says: “An entire generation is living in trauma. The state has created psychological patients through enforced disappearances. You can’t expect them to love the state if you treat them like this. Sadly, powerful people who run the state don’t listen and they think what they are doing is right – but it is destructive.”

Dr Farah Nasim Saeed is a psychologist who has worked with victims and family members of the disappeared. “The trauma doesn’t go away, the pain and the loss,” she says. “Families might be stuck in the protest and don’t go through the process of grieving. This means normal sense of living is lost and sometimes it may transfer to later generations; children don’t know how to make sense of their lives.”

For Sammi, the fear is that these children will become like her. “I want them to have a career and life and be normal people. The state should have mercy on us and these children and bring our family members back,” she says.