Quratulain baloch biography of martin luther king

Last week, The Baloch Students Organisation (BSO), threatened that it will suspend transmission of private television channels across the province to protest the media’s ‘failure to properly highlight the plight of the people of Balochistan’.

What or who is the Baloch Students Organisation?

BSO has been around since 1967 and has continued to be an active and important player in the topsy-turvy sphere of Baloch nationalist politics. And even though over the decades it has experienced its share of splintering, almost all of its factions remain to be perhaps the most articulate and consistent factors in the volatile politics of Balochistan, as well as, within the series of Baloch nationalist uprisings that this province has (and is still) witnessing in the last many decades.

Nevertheless, it can be quite perplexing for an outsider to figure out the rather complex nature of Baloch politics, what with all the competing, cooperating and then competing again Baloch nationalist parties and organisations and their many factions and splinter groups.

That’s why an isolated study of BSO and its factions can help one understand just what has made the Baloch nationalist sentiment to continue simmering for more than 40 years, despite the fact that violent action from the Pakistan military, in-fighting within the Baloch movement, and (ever since the 1980s), the ‘state-sponsored’ introduction of radical Islamist groups in Balochistan, have left the long-running Baloch nationalist movement a tough and multifaceted thing to comprehend.

Baloch Students Organisation (BSO)

Left-wing Student organisation formed in 1967 as a reaction to the government of Pakistan’s armed action against the second Baloch insurgency in the early 1960s.

BSO was conceived as an independent student outfit to look after the academic and political interests of Baloch students in the educational institutions of the Balochistan province and in Karachi.

BSO’s rapid growth and its leftist orientati

Quratulain Baloch, aka QB, took to twitter last night, amidst all the debate surrounding Aurat March and ‘Mera Jism Meri Marzi’ , to tweet the following:

Why oh why?

This very talented songstress, in just one little tweet, tries to belittle and demean everything women in Pakistan’s history have shed blood, sweat and tears for. The position she enjoys, the freedom she enjoys to do the ‘work’ of her choice, or to have any say at all in whether she wants to work or not is because of all ‘shouting’ of all the ‘fake’ feminists.

Twitter said it best:

Even to those of you who don’t believe in feminism, would we have an independent country if our ancestors just silently continued to do whatever work they were doing? Would African Americans be free from slavery if Martin Luther King Jr. had just silently been doing his work as a baptist minister? The short answer is a definitive NO.

The first step towards change is to start conversations, and unfortunately for QB, that requires a whole lot of shouting.

2012 was a bad year for the Hazara community in southern Pakistan. The community had been devastated by a series of targeted killings and suicide attacks. Even their future protectors weren’t safe. Police cadets belonging to the Hazara community had been targeted and killed, mid-ranking police officers belonging to the community had been assassinated.

That year I interviewed a leader of the Hazara Shia community in Quetta about the future prospects for the Hazaras. Abdul Qayyam Changezi was weary of attending funerals of his loved ones. It’s a small community concentrated in parts of Quetta. So chances were that, whenever someone got killed, he either knew them or their family. Changezi had a desperate solution to save his people.

“It’s quite obvious that the government and security agencies are either not interested in protecting us, or are unable to do so,” he spoke in measured sentences without anger, as if trying to argue his way out of a mass murder. “The government should sell everything we own. Our houses, our businesses, the furniture in our houses, our pots and pans, every single thing. With that money they should buy a large ship and put all of us on that ship and push us out into the open sea. Surely there is one country somewhere out there in the world that will take us.”

The ship of Changezi’s imagination already existed and was plying its human cargo in the rough seawaters between Indonesia and Australia.

Since 2008, when the attacks against the Hazara community increased, Hazaras had been selling off their houses and businesses in search of that mythical ship. Many ended up in Malaysia and Indonesia from where they could pay four to six thousand US dollars to get on a boat that would take them to places such as Australia and New Zealand. The journey could last 50 to 60 hours and, in the words of one Hazara who attempted the journey more than six times, you either reached the promised land or became fish fodder.

The Hazaras continue to be u