Is twenty the new expiration date for a Baloch life? The relentless drumbeat of death notices from Balochistan has numbed us – even those of us who chronicle its sorrows. Yet last week, a horrifying pattern emerged: five young Baloch men, barely out of boyhood and all precisely twenty years old, vanished from existence in five terribly different ways. Their synchronised demise at the threshold of life screams not of coincidence, but of a systemic verdict on an entire generation.
All belonged to the Baloch nation residing in Balochistan, yet each died under different circumstances. Zeeshan Zaheer Baloch, a resident of the Khudabadan area in Panjgur, was forcibly disappeared, and his body was found a day later. The second, a Baloch police officer, lost his life in an explosion. The third, Chada Khan Bugti, perished from thirst near the Uch Gas Company in Dera Bugti. The fourth belonged to an armed group and died in a clash. The fifth passed away from kidney failure at Shifa Hospital in Islamabad.
What lies behind these five deaths? Is it mere coincidence that youths of the same age met their ends through such different means? Or does this reveal a failing system?
The recovery of bodies after enforced disappearances signals the state’s failure. Death from thirst exposes the emptiness of development claims. Environmental degradation and contaminated water claim young lives weekly. Deaths in armed clashes continue as the conflict is fuelled rather than resolved.
If we accept that hostile foreign funding draws youth into armed groups and proxy wars in Balochistan, can’t our state offer Baloch youth more than outsiders provide? Can money alone explain why someone so young would sacrifice their life?
The crucial question is not how these young men died, but why they were forced to die. Is death the only destiny written for Baloch youth? Do their dreams and emotions hold no value?
We all share responsibility for these deaths. The justice-denying government, courts distracted by elite squabbles, federal politicians who view Balochistan merely as a source of votes, an establishment offering rigged solutions, media obsessed with insurgency narratives, and the urban publics of Punjab, Sindh, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who ignore these routine deaths – all bear blame.
These young men are gone, but their deaths demand an answer: will we keep watching twenty-year-old Baloch die this way? Or will we change the system that pushes them towards the abyss of death?
These five deaths are not isolated tragedies but symptoms of a deeper sickness – neglect, injustice, and a system that treats youth as collateral damage. Their lives, cut short at the threshold of possibility, force us to confront an unbearable truth: in Balochistan, mere survival has become a privilege.
Will we keep mourning lost generations, or finally demand accountability? The choice is ours – complicit silence or the courage to dismantle this machine of despair. These young men didn’t choose to die at twenty. But we can choose whether their deaths become mere statistics or the spark for change.
The clock is ticking. How many more Baloch sons must die before we say: Enough?
