This year, the largest diaspora organisation of Sindhis, the Sindhi Association of North America (SANA), is completing 40 years of its glorious existence. A matter of pride, indeed, as my association with the organisation dates back to its infancy years. SANA came into being when a group of Sindhi American university professors and their friends, incensed at the naked atrocities being committed by the authoritarian regime of Zia on unarmed and peaceful Sindhis, met via a phone call in 1984.
Horrified at the unabashed and ruthless use of lethal force against the defenceless people demanding nothing more than democracy and justice needed to be stopped, they strongly felt. In Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been judicially murdered five years earlier. Benazir Bhutto was languishing in the sweltering Sukkur jail.
Most of the other leadership too was either imprisoned or had fled the country. Baloch leadership, who had been waging a war against the democratic government of Bhutto from Afghanistan had all too willingly joined forces with autocratic Zia regime after ending their self-imposed exile. The media was already sold out, muzzled or paralyzed.
The brutalities of the Zia regime during and after the bloody Movement of Restoration of Democracy, MRD, were still going on. The movement had already cost around a 1000 Sindhi lives, according to a list published by authentic news sources. A large number of protestors in Sindh were jailed, where they were being brutally tortured.
It.
