Thousands of people arrested and never heard from again, hundreds of protesters (including women and children) beaten to a pulp, tortured and disappeared. Untold numbers killed and injured at the hands of Pakistani police and paramilitary forces. Two activists spearheading the protest, Sammi and Sabiha Baloch, who have not been heard from in twenty-four hours: they were reportedly beaten and tortured by police. Who, again according to eyewitnesses, allegedly set fire to buildings and vehicles to justify the use of force against the people. That is the tally, partial and by default, of the last few days in Pakistan's Balochistan region. Where a large national protest rally was scheduled to be held in Gwadar to protest the enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings and abuses the population has been suffering from for years now, and against the Chinese occupation of the port city of Gwadar, which has now been turned into an open-air prison to please Beijing and its development projects related to the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. To prevent the population from reaching Gwadar, the Islamabad government has virtually put the region under siege. Checkpoints were set up everywhere, Gwadar was sealed off, a curfew was imposed, and the Internet was blocked. The Frontier Corps fired on unarmed protesters trying to reach the city in Mustang, and beat the crap out of anyone on the street. The situation is so bad that Mary Lawlor, U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights, urged the Pakistani delegation to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva to pressure its government to fulfill its commitments to the United Nations on human rights protection. And Amnesty International issued a statement in which it "Calls on the Pakistani authorities to immediately lift the internet cut-off in Balochistan and to fulfill their obligations under national and international human rights laws to facilitate the right of people to protest peacefully by removing roadblocks on the road to Gwadar to allow freedom of movement for protesters." Meanwhile, in the past few hours, the protesters' security service stopped two armed men who were trying to approach the stage from which Mahrang Baloch, the young woman who has become the face and soul of the uprising, was supposed to speak. The two, who are part of military intelligence, had been tasked with killing the girl. According to witnesses, security forces demanded custody of the detained attackers, threatening serious consequences for the movement's leadership if they refused to hand them over. And an audio recording of the deputy commissioner of Gwadar is circulating on social media, in which he can be heard threatening Mahrang, Sammi and other leaders and organizers of the protest with death: who are mostly young women, mothers, daughters, sisters and wives of the thousands of people who go missing in the region every year. The same ones who marched on Islamabad last winter to demand answers from the government and were instead as scripted brutalized and beaten. On the other hand, it is a script that has been repeated for years with no variation: a few days ago in Bannu peaceful demonstrations by ethnic Pashtuns protesting against the military ended in a bloodbath as did protests by Pakistani Kashmiri citizens last month. While terrorists and supporters of terrorism, such as members of the hardline Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan organization, who have been blockading Islamabad for days demanding that the government provide aid to Gaza, announcing a boycott of Israeli products and declaring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a terrorist have been treated with kid gloves as usual.