Balochistan Youth Forum (BYF) visits IPS

A delegation of youth leaders from across Balochistan visited Institute of Policy Studies on 16 September 2013 and had an hour-long heart-to-heart session with DG-IPS Khalid Rahman on the situation in the province.

A delegation of youth leaders from across Balochistan visited Institute of Policy Studies on 16 September 2013 and had an hour-long heart-to-heart session with DG-IPS Khalid Rahman on the situation in the province.

The youth group was part of Balochistan Youth Forum (BYF) – a project launched in early 2013 by Center for Research & Security Studies, Islamabad with the support of Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

The delegates shared their grievances vis-à-vis Balochistan issue and hoped that their interaction with institutions and people in Islamabad and the rest of the country would help create an air of better understanding of the ground realities in their province.

Khalid Rahman urged them to play their roles as youth leaders of Balochistan to find solutions of the problems by diagnosing the root causes and looking at the bigger picture. He said that a leader is a person who not only diagnosis the ills of the people correctly but also finds panacea for them.  

He said that the struggle between the haves and have-nots is a historic one and it is imperative to view the Balochistan issue in this perspective.

“The have-nots of Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkwa, Sindh and other regions of Pakistan are as oppressed at the hands of the ruling elites as that of Balochistan”, he said, adding that “the real challenge of their leadership is to identify the forces of oppression to struggle against instead of letting their people fight the have-nots of other ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian identities”.