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Hafiz Saeed's Foundation (FIF) - A New Weapon For Balochistan
  • FIF.jpeg
    FIF.jpeg
Balochistan is a nation struggling to break free from the colonial shackles of Pakistan. Our country was invaded on 1st April 1948 by Pakistan and Ever since, it has been under military rule from Islamabad. Thousands of Baloch people have been massacred, hundreds of thousands made refugees, and thousands more have disappeared or been tortured and jailed, often without trial.
The country's natural resources have been stolen by Pakistan's political, military and big business elite, while most Baloch people live in abject poverty. As if this was not enough that now Pakistan is seeking help from Hafiz Saeed's terrorist organization to deceive the minds of young Baloch who want a Free Balochistan.
Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation(FIF) is an organization being run by Hafiz Saeed, he uses this platform to collect funds from Muslim Communities in the name of charity. Nowadays its activists are sending their literature & books in Balochistan to diminish Balochi culture. The buzz about Balochistan in Pakistan involves China but in Quetta, jihad in Kashmir and Myanmar takes centre stage. Activists of the FIF — the charity wing of the proscribed Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD) can be often seen armed with a copy of the paper Ahrar, the JuD’s organ, and other literature propounding ihad in various parts of Balochistan.
Talk of jihad by non-state actors was supposed to die down in the wake of the National Action Plan (NAP). But the FIF activist proudly advertises that their literature is sent across Balochistan outfits. FIF are widely believed to be propped up by authorities as a counter to Baloch militancy — as exhibited by the impunity with which the activists could spread their message. At present there is
no wall-chalking nor are there any sectarian slogans painted on the city’s walls. But still Pakistan is painting all these manipulating thoughts in the minds of young Balochs.
Compared to the number of general bookshops in Quetta or elsewhere in the province for that matter, a growing number of bookshops have sprouted where jihadi and other religious literature is sold. Looking at the rate of growth of such bookstores selling Jihadi material, one may wonder that where is all the funds coming from?
And through a thorough research one comes to know that The Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, has been famous for raising funds through bank accounts under pseudonyms. The accounts continue to be active even though the FIF is blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council, obliging all member-states to freeze their assets. Financial sponsors of the Karachi unit of the FIF who sought information on its charity work in Syria, its Facebook page shows, were asked in individual chats to send cash to an entity called the Balochistan Water Project, which has an account in a branch of a Dubai bank in the city.
Even though the FIF’s bank accounts were ordered shut in 2015 — and is subjected to surveillance by the intelligence services of several countries — the account’s operations evaded international antimoney laundering and countering-terror financing monitors. There is no mention of any FIF bank account in the organisation’s publications and advertisements.
In 2015, then Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson Tasneem Aslam had announced that the country had frozen the Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s bank accounts, as part of “action against organizations which were banned by UN’s sanctions committee”. Though, Pakistan continuously uses such organization to spread insurgencies and to exercise their control on Balochistan.
In 2010, the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism said the Lashkar “coordinates its charitable activities through its front organizations Jamaat-ud-Dawa and, more recently, Falah-i- Insaniyat Foundation.” It is used to collect donations from “Pakistani expatriate communities in the Middle East and Europe, particularly the United Kingdom.”
The organization's publications lay out an expansive agenda of charitable causes from Gaza and Syria to Myanmar, as well as projects spanning the length of Pakistan and even projects in Balochistan but all these funds are in reality used to corrupt the mind of youth and suppress the voice of freedom among Balochs. These are cast as acts to defend Pakistan and the wider Islamic world.
The written material distributed by FIF activists describes Baloch heroes as trouble-makers and unpatriotic. Pakistan is keen on adopting such nasty tactics to control the freedom movement among Balochs, earlier it used to torture or imprison our freedom fighters but now it is using terrorists to play with people's minds. But one thing Pakistan keeps forgetting is that Balochistan will remain the land of the free because its the home of the brave!!
Baloch Freedom Front
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