We publish an interview with Baloch activist Dur Bibi made by Meral Çiçek for Newaya Jin.
In the 19th century, Balochistan was divided into three parts. What role did Britain play here, and what was the political aim of this division?
The British carved our land to suit imperial strategy. In the 19th century they moved to secure the frontier of their Indian empire, to keep Persia and Afghanistan at bay and to control routes and resources. They treated Balochistan not as a single nation but as a convenient set of buffer territories: princely states (like Kalat) and British-administered agencies and leased areas were separated and governed differently. That fragmentation was deliberate, to divide the political authority of tribal leaders, create dependent rulers and puppet arrangements, and make it easier for the colonising authority to extract strategic advantage, impose treaties and secure military positions. The political aim was clear; secure lines of communication and control on the north-west flank of British India, neutralise any unified Baloch sovereignty, and integrate the region into imperial geopolitics rather than let it remain a single, self-determining polity.
Nowadays, energy roads play an important role in geopolitics and geostrategies. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor crosses Balochistan. How do these neo-colonial projects relate to oppression and occupation?
Projects like the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor are presented as “development”: roads, ports, power. But for many Baloch, they are the new face of old extraction. Large corridors and energy pipelines cut through our lands without genuine local consent, create militarised zones to “secure” construction, bring in external labour and companies, and promise benefits that rarely reach village livelihoods. In practice, these projects have intensified land dispossession, economic marginalisation, and heavy security presence – all factors that deepen grievances and make the state’s control more extractive than emancipatory. Many Baloch see CPEC as a neo-colonial infrastructure: routes that link external capital to resources and strategic access, while treating local people as obstacles to be managed rather than partners to be included. Scholars, advocacy networks and minority organisations have documented these impacts and complaints.
What differences are there in the situation of the Baloch in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan?
The situation of the Baloch varies considerably across Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, reflecting the differing governance structures, state policies, and regional dynamics in each country.
In Pakistan, particularly within Balochistan province, the Baloch experience a highly militarised environment. The state maintains control through periodic counter-insurgency operations, enforced disappearances, and a pervasive security presence. Large-scale development projects, such as Gwadar port and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), are implemented under stringent security frameworks, often exacerbating local grievances. Political avenues for Baloch nationalist expression are severely constrained, resulting in a protracted cycle of insurgency and punitive state responses.
In Iran’s Sistan-and-Baluchestan province, the Baloch face a combination of economic marginalisation, religious and ethnic discrimination, and intensive security enforcement. As a predominantly Sunni population in a Shia-majority state, they are systematically disadvantaged in terms of access to resources, political representation, and economic development. The region has seen mass arrests, executions, and heavy policing, with wider societal movements such as the Woman-Life-Freedom protests echoing local grievances while simultaneously attracting state repression.
In Afghanistan, the Baloch primarily inhabit southern and lowland border areas, where state authority is limited and control is often contested among local power-brokers, the Taliban, and other actors. Chronic instability, weak governance, and minimal development infrastructure shape their socio-political reality. Cross-border flows, migration, and movement of refugees further influence their livelihoods and political positioning, leaving them marginalised both locally and nationally.
Across these contexts, the Baloch share experiences of marginalisation, securitisation, and political exclusion. However, the modalities differ: Pakistan relies on militarised counter-insurgency and suppression of nationalist politics, Iran on sectarian and ethnic discrimination reinforced by repressive policing, and Afghanistan on structural neglect amid instability. These variations underscore how state structures and policies produce distinct, yet interrelated, forms of Baloch vulnerability in the region.
There is a long history of national resistance in Balochistan. What are the main objectives of Baloch resistance today? Which forms of struggle are organised?
The Baloch are unshakable in their objective: we want freedom, and there is no turning back. After decades of colonisation, exploitation of our resources, and systematic attempts to erase our identity through disappearances and mass killings, there is no illusion left about reforms or half-measures. The only solution is liberation.
In this struggle, different forms of resistance are alive and interconnected. On the political front, organisations like the Baloch National Movement (BNM) and BSO Azad continue to raise the banner of independence, mobilising the youth, carrying the message of resistance into universities, villages, and the diaspora. Alongside them, the Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) has carried forward one of the most painful but vital struggles: the fight for justice for the disappeared. Their long marches and sit-ins have forced the world to confront the human cost of Pakistan’s occupation. In recent years, the Baloch Yakjehti Committee (BYC) has become a unifying force, bringing thousands of people, especially women and students, into the streets. Their rallies and hunger strikes have shown that the resistance is not confined to the mountains but lives in the cities, in the hearts of the new generation.
But political and human rights struggles are not the only fronts. In the mountains, in the deserts, and even in the cities, the armed struggle continues with full determination. Baloch military organisations carry out guerrilla warfare, fedayee (self-sacrificing) actions, and attacks on the occupying army and its economic projects. This military resistance is not separate from the political and human rights movements; together they form a single body of struggle, with one voice, one determination, one demand for freedom.
This unity of purpose, across political platforms, human rights campaigns, and armed resistance, is what makes the Baloch struggle impossible to extinguish. It is a movement that has survived waves of repression, the murder of leaders, and the silencing of activists. And still, it grows stronger, because the Baloch people have decided that liberation is the only path left.
When, 3 years ago, the Jin Jiyan Azadî uprising started in Iran and Eastern Kurdistan, the Baloch people took a strong part in the struggle, especially women. And most of the people killed by state forces were in Balochistan. What is the role of women in the liberation struggle today?
Baloch women did not suddenly appear in 2022 with Jin, Jiyan, Azadî. Their political awakening and public role started much earlier. Since 2009-2010, women in Balochistan have been active in political movements and on human rights fronts. They organised rallies, hunger strikes, and campaigns against enforced disappearances, and stood at the forefront when men were being silenced. Karima Baloch – may her name live forever – played a vital role in breaking barriers and showing Baloch women that resistance was not only their right but their duty. She became a symbol of courage, inspiring an entire generation of women to step into leadership and into public struggle.
The Jin Jiyan Azadi uprising in Iran gave Baloch women another language of courage, another echo of their own struggle. It resonated deeply, especially in Sistan-o-Balochistan, where women poured into the streets despite brutal repression. The uprising confirmed something Baloch women already knew: that women’s liberation is inseparable from national liberation.
Conditions in Pakistani-occupied Balochistan make their mobilization even more remarkable. There is no real internet access, only some WiFi and mobile network coverage in the main cities, while vast rural areas remain cut off. Many women don’t even know what is happening outside their villages, yet from 2009-10 until today they have continued mobilising, organising protests, joining political fronts, and now even entering the military ranks of the resistance.
This step of women taking up arms has a symbolic as well as a practical meaning. For Baloch women, it is not only about self-defence, it is about declaring that they are equal participants in the liberation of their land. And here too, the inspiration from the Kurdish women’s movement is clear. The image of Kurdish women fighters has shown Baloch women that resistance is not constrained by gender. Today, Baloch women stand with banners in the streets and with weapons in the mountains, carrying forward both political organising and armed struggle, making themselves visible as an unstoppable force in the liberation movement.
In the last 3 years, 4 female Baloch resistance fighters made fedayee (self-sacrificial) actions. What is the effect of this form of action on the society, especially women, and the occupying states?
Over the past three years, the emergence of female Baloch resistance fighters engaging in fedayee (self-sacrificial) actions has marked a profound shift in both the internal dynamics of Baloch society and the strategic calculus of the occupying states. These actions are not merely individual acts of militancy; they carry layered symbolic, social, and political significance.
For Baloch society, the participation of women in fedayee operations challenges entrenched patriarchal norms and expands the conceptual space of resistance. Traditionally, women in Balochistan have been confined by social codes and domestic expectations, but these actions project a radical form of agency, demonstrating that the struggle for freedom transcends gendered boundaries. Female fedayee fighters become living, and in many cases, martyr, symbols of courage, inspiring other women to envision themselves as active participants in the political and social struggle. Their sacrifice disrupts narratives of female passivity and reinforces the idea that liberation is a collective responsibility shared by all members of the nation, regardless of gender.
From the perspective of the occupying state, the involvement of women in armed resistance produces a unique form of anxiety and strategic disruption. Militarised states accustomed to suppressing male combatants now confront an enemy that violates both their operational expectations and social prejudices. Female fedayee actions complicate surveillance, detention, and counter-insurgency operations, as they expose the moral contradictions and limitations of the state’s authority. Each act of female sacrifice sends a message that Baloch resistance is not confined to conventional combatants or geographic zones; it is a societal ethos, embedded in the cultural, moral, and political fabric of the nation.
Academically, these acts can be seen as a performative politics of martyrdom, where the personal body becomes both weapon and message. They function as both deterrent and inspiration: deterrent for the occupying state, which is forced to recalibrate its methods of repression, and inspiration for the community, particularly Baloch women, who witness that the boundaries of participation in the struggle can and must be expanded. The phenomenon also signals a generational and ideological shift in Baloch nationalism. Resistance is no longer defined solely by traditional male militancy, but by collective, symbolic, and ethically charged actions that challenge occupation at multiple levels: psychological, moral, and operational.
In sum, the emergence of female fedayee fighters over the past three years has intensified the revolutionary imagination in Baloch society, galvanised women’s participation, and unsettled the occupying state by demonstrating that resistance is gender-inclusive, morally indomitable, and strategically adaptive. Their actions are not isolated incidents but pivotal moments in the ongoing struggle for Baloch self-determination.
What is the situation of women within Baloch society in general? With which obstacles are they confronted? How do they organise themselves?
Baloch women today live under a double burden. On one side is the state, which wages a brutal war of disappearances, massacres, and militarisation. On the other side are the patriarchal structures within society, which often try to silence women’s voices and confine them to the private sphere. Poverty, lack of access to education, child marriage, and rigid honour codes remain real obstacles. In Pakistani-occupied Balochistan, the absence of infrastructure and the near-total isolation of rural areas, cut off from internet, roads, and basic services, deepen these difficulties.
Yet, despite these chains, Baloch women are organising themselves in ways that previous generations could not imagine. From 2009 onwards, women took to the streets in protest against enforced disappearances, led hunger strikes, and gave voice to the silenced. The legacy of Karima Baloch and others has shown that women can stand not only as victims but as leaders of resistance. Women’s committees, youth networks, and grassroots groups now play a role in every major protest. In the mountains too, women have entered the ranks of the military struggle, inspired by the Kurdish women’s movement and by their own historical courage. The presence of women in both political and armed fronts is shattering old norms, forcing Baloch society itself to transform. Women are no longer invisible; they are at the centre of the national struggle.
What is needed in order to change the situation of the Middle East and Asia, from war and crisis to freedom and democracy? What is the role of women?
The crisis of this region is not born from its people but from colonial borders, occupying armies, authoritarian regimes, and the exploitation of our resources by foreign powers. To change this, we need a fundamental shift. The wars and crises will not end with more pipelines and trade corridors, nor with false promises of “development.” They will only end when nations like the Baloch, Kurds, and others are given their right to self-determination, when states stop ruling through tanks and disappearances, and when societies dismantle the patriarchy that mirrors the oppressor’s violence inside our own homes.
Women are at the heart of this transformation. Without women, there can be no liberation, no democracy, and no freedom. Women have already shown that they can stand in front of armies and dictators. They bring not only courage but a vision of a different world, one where life is valued more than profit, where justice is placed above borders. The role of women is not secondary, it is decisive: they are the backbone of resistance and the guarantee that any future freedom will not be another form of domination, but a genuine democracy of peoples.
Do you have a message to the Kurdish women’s movement?
To our Kurdish sisters: your struggle is our mirror and our strength. The way you have stood against empires, dictatorships, and patriarchal chains has lit a fire in the hearts of Baloch women. Your slogan, Jin, Jiyan, Azadî, is not only Kurdish, it is universal. It echoes today in Balochistan, where women are taking their place in the front lines of political protests and even in the mountains of the armed struggle.
We see in your movement proof that women can reshape the destiny of nations, and that liberation is impossible without the liberation of women. You have shown the world that resistance can be both fierce and feminist; that a rifle in a woman’s hand is not only a weapon but a declaration that she will never again be silenced.
We send you solidarity from Balochistan. Your path inspires ours, and together we carry the same dream: to break the chains of colonisation, patriarchy, and tyranny, and to build a future where women are not only free, but are the architects of freedom.