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Financial Times: Hidden war embodies Pakistan's struggle

By Matthew Green

Since his son's broken body was found on a patch of wasteland six months ago, the former bank clerk has emerged as an unlikely hero of the struggle against an epidemic of disappearances sweeping Baluchistan, a province in south-west Pakistan.

At a kerbside encampment in Karachi, the country's commercial hub, he leads a small band of activists nursing a quiet rage at the security forces, and a suspicion that they may be next to be whisked away.

"I received a phone call, they said "˜wind up your camp, it's creating a nuisance for us'," says Mr Baloch, 70, a co-founder of Voice for Baluch Missing Persons, a lobby group. "I'm not worried any more about threats - they've become routine. I'm just waiting for the moment when I'll be killed."

Pakistan's story is often told through the prism of its stormy relations with the US, strained by tensions over Afghanistan and the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, on Pakistani soil.

Not much is heard about the little-known, dirty war simmering in Baluchistan, a parched land of broken hills where militants seeking the unlikely goal of independence are locked in a vicious showdown with the state.

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