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Happy Partition
Today, 14 August 2026, is a date worth thinking about, it’s Pakistan’s 79th Independence Day. The same year that catalysed the Nakba as the “United Nations” voted to partition land that didn’t belong to it, Pakistan gained independence.
But consider the UN in 1947, it only consisted of 57 members, all of whom took part in a vote on whether to enact Resolution 181, the Partition Plan for Palestine. 33 voted for, 13 against and 10 abstained, that’s a 57.7% for partition, 42.3% against or abstaining.
Those voting in favour included settler states, such as United States, pre-Apartheid South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Remember Canada, we’ll come back to that later. States voting against partition included, Egypt, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Pakistan. Notice any patterns?
Happy Hostage
Pakistan is 79 today, 79 years since the Union Jack came down and the green and white went up in it’s place, since the hateful racist British Empire packed its bags and left the land mass it had carved with tens of millions of people’s blood, a mapmaker’s quill and soldier’s bayonets. The thing I can’t stop thinking about today, on this day of flags and anthems for one, is it’s not flags and anthems for all, for people’s still being oppressed, in Pakistan and elsewhere. As Gaza is not free, Imran Khan is also not free.
Three years ago today, Imran Khan was taken hostage and jailed for refusing to bow to the American Empire. US Mafioso, Donald Lu sent a threat to Pakistan’s Ambassador saying if the no-confidence vote succeeded against Khan, “all will be forgiven in Washington”. The message was clear, change your foreign policy, or we’ll coup your leader. Khan’s “crime” was he refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, visited Moscow and wouldn’t take Empire’s side, and why should he? For that, the US leveraged the Pakistani military, the real brokers of power in the country, to stage a coup, and force a constitutional no-confidence vote to illegally overthrow a democratically elected leader.
Three years on, Khan rots in solitary confinement in Adiala Jail, with his family being denied access to see him for more than 8 months, with his health rapidly deteriorating. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s fraudulent regime of traitors tear-gas citizens in the streets for demanding his release for illegal incarceration. That’s reality, a democratically elected leader taken hostage by military terrorists propped up by Empire, that claimed it left.
Happy Hurs
There’s a community in Sindh Province in Pakistan called the Hurs. Most people don’t know who they are, the British are very good at erasing people, you see. Britain, as evil then, as it is today, understands with the cold murderous precision of colonial bureaucrats that a people who don’t know their own history struggle to fight for their futures. The Hurs still exist today, they still follow their spiritual and political leader, the Pir Pagaro. The original Pir Pagaro was a man who commanded loyalty the British couldn’t buy, didn’t understand and who they couldn’t break. For over a century, the Hurs fought the British, derailing their trains that were stealing the people’s wealth, attacking the oppressive violent British “police” stations, refusing to bow to Empire’s fist.
Now, we’re going to see a pattern start to form as I outline what comes next. The British, who don’t forget were stealing the Hurs’ land, called them criminal tribes, “dacoits” or bandits...even...”terrorists”, to frame their resistance as lawlessness, rather than as a political rebellion. So, in 1871, the British passed a law, the Criminal Tribes Act, declaring entire communities as criminal, by birth. The Hurs were branded as such in 1900, meaning a child born after that was guilty before they could walk, talk or even feed themselves. Son guilty, father guilty, grandfather guilty. Guilt was officially in their blood, so the British said, hereditary criminality, inescapable, the only way out was death or submission. This is what the British believed, what they needed to believe, because even they couldn’t starve a people, lock them up in concentration camps, bomb them, put dead bodies on display as warnings, unless they could convince themselves they were not people at all.
To the colonial mind, their defiance of British rule could only be the work of religious zealots or habitual criminals, not that of legitimate freedom fighters. This narrative of fanaticism tied resistance to religiosity, dismissing its political nature. The term “outlawry” similarly dehumanised the Hurs, positioning them outside the boundaries of “civilised” society and thus unworthy of legal protection. This terminology was used strategically, by labelling the Hurs as criminals, the British delegitimised a century-long resistance struggle, transforming a fight for sovereignty into a law and order issue, justifying the use of Martial Law, aerial bombardment and mass illlegal imprisonment.
Happy Campers
In Sanghar, in Sindh, the British built camps, they called them settlements, the Hurs called them Loorhaa. The word doesn’t easily translate into English, but it resembles something like an enclosure, a trap, a “place where we were forgotten”. Let’s be clear, they had walls and guards, they were concentration camps. Thousands of Hurs were dispossessed from their ancestral lands and herded into them, men, women, children, the elderly, all separated from each other, forced to slave, patrolled by “police” with guns and no reason to be kind.
Children were born into and grew up inside these camps, never having seen the outside world, never knowing what freedom was. They only knew the walls, guards, the hunger, death. When Pakistan became independent in 1947, the Hurs were kept inside those camps, until 1952, five years after independence, five years of being forgotten by the country that was supposed to be free. Nobody remembered who they were, they didn’t open the gates, no one asked where they were, they were forgotten, abandoned.
Happy Hanging
The sixth Pir Pagaro was 33 years old when the British hanged him in 1943. His name was Sibghatullah Shah Rashdi II, the Hur’s spiritual leader, resistance figurehead, the man who refused to bow to Empire. The British put him on trial, then put a rope around his neck, but that wasn’t enough, it’s never enough for the British.
They stole his corpse, buried him in secret and never told his family where he was. They didn’t want his followers to pray at his grave, they couldn’t allow it, they had disappeared him and they were aiming for the Hurs to disappear next. They wanted to erase every trace of the man who had defied them, their one final act of utter spite. His mother never stopped searching for her son’s grave, she never found it, she died without knowing where her son was.
This is what the British did, and still do. They’re takers, not givers. They took everything from the Hurs, land, freedom, leaders, history, they even took their graves from them. They murdered their spiritual leader, stole his body, robbed a mother of her mourning, not grave robbing, but robbing grief itself.
Happy Haranguing
By 1942, the British had planes which, at the peak of World War Two European aggression, the British deployed to Sindh, not to fight German Nazis or the Fascist Japanese Empire, but to bomb the Hurs. They bombed Gring Bungalow, the main residence of Pir Sahib Pagaro Sibghatullah Shah, near Sanghar city. Its significance wasn’t military, but it represented the intersection of resistance, erasure and the preservation of memory in the Hur struggle against the colonisers. The bungalow was deliberately destroyed as part of a wider campaign to dismantle the Hur’s political and spiritual infrastructure, targeting the Pir’s family while the British held him hostage.
The British also bombed the Makhi Forest, the strategic heart of Hur resistance, as a primary target of colonial retaliation. The colonial administration, having declared the Hurs “terrorists,” passed the Hur Act of 1942, imposing Martial Law, the only place in the entire subcontinent this was ever done. The British Royal Air Force conducted aerial strikes using firebombs, to burn people out. They sent in the army to shoot, capture and rape, all at a time when Britain was supposed to be fighting a war for survival in Europe. The British attacked the forest, working to erase it and those who were taking sanctuary inside it, by clearing large parts, converting the land into agricultural areas, which were allotted to military personnel loyal to the Crown, and not the people.
Today, part of the forest remains, but it’s been permanently altered by this deliberate destruction. The region’s name, Makhi, is historically tied to the small bees that once produced honey there, but for Pakistan, its significance is permanently tied to the anti-colonial struggle.
Happy Holocaust
The British almost wrote the Hurs out of history, by calling their resistance “terrorism”, calling them bandits, defining them in law as criminals. They couldn’t call them freedom fighters, as that would have required admitting the truth, that the Hurs were rightfully fighting for something, against something. So the British chose to control the narrative, the textbooks, controlling what the world knew.
Today, zionists control the narrative, control what western media says, controls what the world knows. They call slaughtering babies self-defense, call starvation necessary, they call a genocide a war. But today, Palestinians are dying on livestream, and as the cameras roll, as the children bleed, as the mothers scream, the world turns down the volume. The British lied about the Hurs, as zionist lie about the Palestinians. Today, “Israel” has planes, and as the British did before them, they choose to murder people who are legally resisting Empire, purposefully bombing schools, hospitals, refugee camps, universities, ambulances, pretending that's self-defense. The RAF in 1942, as the IAF in 2026. Same sky, same bombs, same children being erased.
The British Empire was once the most powerful force on earth, nobody knew about a “criminal tribe” in a distant colony, the Hurs died in silence, forgotten, never even know. The British went home with medals, pensions and never apologised. They never will. Today, the American Empire is seemingly the most powerful force on earth, funding zionist crimes in Palestine, arming them, defending them, covering up for them. The UN is a feeble powerless entity, it always was, by design. Remember after all, it was created by Empires of the past, even before they allowed the people they oppressed and murdered relentlessly to “self-rule.” They make decisions for others, like passing Resolution 181, without consultation, decisions made by members who don’t even accept those rules themselves.
Happy Hypocrisy
Remember Canada, I said we’d come back to it? In 2005, Canada asked it’s population about Provincial electoral reforms, British Columbia voted in favour, with 57.7% of the vote, the same percentage as the UN members who voted to partition Palestine. Well, the Canadian government required 60% support of all votes cast, otherwise they said it didn’t count. Canada demanded 60% of voters support something in their own country, otherwise it wasn’t enough. So why was it enough for Canada to vote in favour of reforms in other people’s land which passed, with the same percentage of votes cast, that they rejected for themselves? It’s time to ask why? It’s time to start questioning what we’ve been told.
What’s the difference between annihilation and self-defense? What’s the difference between burying a leader in a secret grave and burying a people under rubble? What’s the difference between starving a child in a concentration camp and bombing a child in a refugee camp? What’s the difference between forgetting a people and erasing them while they are still alive?
The answer is, there is no difference, the only thing that’s changed is the century.
Happy Inter-dependence
The Hur struggle is now being reconsidered and recognised as a significant chapter in Pakistan’s anti-colonial history rather than a criminal footnote. The Hurs haven’t been forgotten in Sindh, as seminars and commemorations still honour Pir Sibghatullah Shah Rashdi II. The full legacy of the British genocide isn’t lost in their history books, and the remaining community and scholars continue to demand acknowledgment, including an official apology from Britain. The Hurs exist and are still waiting for Britain to care enough to say sorry for the crimes they committed.
The British buried the Pir in a secret grave so his people couldn’t find him. “Israel” is burying Palestine in plain sight, broadcasting it live, dancing on their graves and daring the world to intervene. Will it really be never again, or will we wait one more time before never again means something?
Happy Birthday
Pakistan celebrates 79 years of independence today, as Gaza is still waiting for its first.
Same lies, same erasure. Same crime, every time. Free, Free Palestine.
If you made it this far, please consider donating to secure Amir’s future education to study a degree in Information Technology in Italy, any amount donated will help secure his future. Thank you.
Other articles in this series
The Walk Home: to One Democratic State of Palestine
The Temporal Alibi: how the “American Left” uses Palestine to Avoid their Reflection
I’m Pakistani, thank you for writing this piece. Brilliantly put together! Solidarity and love for Palestine always❤️
The Hurs, Sindh, and firebombed Makhi forest colonial playbook of dispossession, warehousing, torture, politicide, mass starvation, and displacement is repeated in the Kenyan forests on Mount Kenya and the Aberdare Mountains a decade later, as you say the same story, which is built into the UN in 1948 by the settler colonial security council, when the legacy is passed to the ES-10/24 war criminals in Palestine.