International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances

Enforced Disappearances (EDs) have been frequently used as a strategy to spread fear and terror in a society, according to the UN. By now, the world body argues, it has taken on the dimensions of a global problem.

Once largely the product of military dictatorships, nowadays the practice is perpetrated in complex internal conflicts as an instrument of political repression. One famous example from the past is the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1960s and 1970s, against whose repressive tactics of ED, the “Mothers of Mayo” organisation rallied persistently in Buenos Aires’ main square for news of their disappeared loved ones. By and large, the disappeared never appeared, but the Mothers, by now Grandmothers, have not given up their persistent struggle.

For the UN today, of particular concern is the ongoing harassment of human rights defenders, families of the victims, witnesses and lawyers dealing with cases of ED. States use their overarching counter-terrorist narrative to cloak and ‘justify’ the breach of their obligations under the law, Constitution and human rights principles.

Most alarming, there is no let-up in the widespread immunity for EDs. The UN reports that hundreds of thousands of people have vanished during conflicts and their concomitant periods of repression in at least 85 countries around the world.

The victims of ED are frequently tortured and in constant fear of being extra-judicially killed. Having been removed from lawful protection and ‘disappeared’ from society, they are deprived of every one of their conceivable rights and are at the mercy of their captors. Even if they survive their nightmare ordeal and are eventually released, the physical and psychological scars of the brutality and torture they suffered remain lifelong afflictions.

The families and friends of the victims of ED, on the other hand, experience the torture and slow mental anguish of not knowing whether the victim is still alive and if so, where he or she is being held, in what conditions, and in what state of health.

This causes a constant alternation between hope and despair, wondering and waiting, sometimes for years, for the anxiously awaited news that may never come. In addition, they are also aware that searching for truth, justice and relief is risky, exposing them to threats to life and limb. If the disappeared person is the family’s breadwinner, the emotional upheaval is further exacerbated by material deprivation.

The serious economic hardships that usually accompany an ED are most often borne by women. It should not, therefore, come as a surprise that it is women who are usually at the forefront of the struggle against EDs. Of course this places them in the path of intimidation, persecution and reprisals.

When it is women who are disappeared, they are vulnerable not only to physical violence and torture, but also sexual. In either case, the disappearance of a parent traumatises a child for life.

The UN General Assembly through its Resolution 47/133 on December 18, 1992, adopted the “Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance”. This was followed by the “Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court” on July 1, 2002 and the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the “International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance” on December 20, 2006.

The last states that when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed at any civilian population, an ED qualifies as a crime against humanity not subject to any statute of limitations. It gives victims’ families the right to demand the truth about the disappearance of their loved ones and seek reparations.

On December 21, 2010, the UN General Assembly, through its Resolution 65/209 decided to declare August 30 the “International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances” to be observed from 2011 onwards.

The Day was duly observed in Karachi by hundreds marching from Teen Talwar to the Press Club. It fielded not just the usual cast of suspects, but a wider set of organisations than just the Baloch Yakjehti Committee that has, under the leadership of Dr Mahrang Baloch and Sammi Deen Baloch, transformed the Balochistan scene through a virtual social revolution led by women in that conservative, tribal society and inspired women and men throughout the length and breadth of Pakistan through their courage, steadfastness and commitment to the cause of their missing loved ones.

Partly because of that example, partly in response to their own lived experience of EDs, people in Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa too have taken to the road of peaceful protest against the ED of their loved ones. Increasingly, even Punjab has not been spared.

The horror of ED therefore is by now common cause, with varying levels of intensity presently, of all the people of Pakistan. Having joined the ranks of the peoples of 85 other countries around the world suffering from this horror, we are in ‘good’ company.

However, having suffered through the farce of the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances headed by Justice Javed Iqbal (retd), which did more to obscure and obfuscate the truth about EDs than anything else, in the process ‘failing’ to punish even a single person for the crime, we need to reflect on the spread of the practice of ED from Balochistan to begin with to the rest of the country. That obliges us all to stand together, shoulder to shoulder, against this increasingly common horror.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024