Seventeen years ago today, Zakir Majeed was disappeared.
There are people in Balochistan today who are younger than his absence.
They have grown up seeing his face on posters, at protest camps, in the hands of a family that has had to keep proving, year after year, that he existed, that he was loved, that he was taken, that someone must know where he is.
Seventeen years is not a number. It is hair turning white. It is a mother learning the sound of every knock and still looking toward the door. It is Eid after Eid with one place in the house that no one knows how to fill. It is a family forced to live beside an unfinished sentence.
Today, on Baloch Missing Persons Day, we remember Zakir Majeed and all those whose names have been dragged through years of silence. But remembrance is not enough when a person has been missing long enough for a generation to inherit his absence.
Where is Zakir Majeed?
Seventeen years later, that question remains exactly where his family first placed it: before the authorities, before the courts, before the conscience of a country that has learned to scroll past the disappeared.
A disappearance does not end because the public gets tired of hearing about it or because the state has decided to alter its own narrative on ‘missing persons’ again.
It ends when the truth is returned. At this point, most are only asking for the indication of their loved ones’ graves.
#BalochMissingPersonsDay
#ReleaseZakirMajeed