Washington DC: August 23, 2011. (PCP) To mark the International Day of the Disappeared, the premier pro-independence American Friends of Balochistan is organizing a conference on enforced disappearances. Enforced disappearances, torture and extrajudicial killings are a norm in Occupied Balochistan, a France-sized territory in southwestern Pakistan which forms more than 40 percent of Pakistan's land mass and less than 10 percent of its people. Since July 2010, nearly 250 Baloch secular political activists have been forcibly disappeared and executed in Balochistan and their bodies thrown in the wilderness as part of the kill-and-dump policy of the Islamic republic of Pakistan. Eminent scholars, human rights practitioners and press freedom advocates will attend the conference at the Murrow Room of the National Press Club, Washington DC on August 30, 2011, at 2:00 PM. Messages of Balochistan independence leaders will also be read at the conferences.