WASHINGTON, D.C.—To say someone has "disappeared" casts an eerie feeling, but this happens in many countries. It is often a practice of oppressive regimes that use terror and torture as a method to control political opponents.
It is an extra-judicial act where the victim is whisked away perhaps in the middle of the night, without trial, and is not heard of again. The government may say it knows nothing of the status of the person.
On August 30, the International Day of the Disappeared was observed at the House of Representatives' Cannon House Office Building. The event had two sponsors: The United Nations Association of the National Capital Area and the World Sindhi Institute (WSI). The latter organization focuses on human rights of the Sindhis in southeastern Pakistan, and many examples were given of Pakistani journalists and others who had vanished due to the government's intervention or tacit support. The former organization is a local group that discusses and supports the United Nations and its specialized agencies.
Amnesty International, which commemorated the "Day of the Disappeared" at Dupont Circle Park on the eve of this day, also participated in this event at the Capital.
'Disappearance' always involves more than just one victim; the family and friends are victims too in having to live with the uncertainty of not knowing whether their loved one is safe or being tortured, alive or dead.
"The first recorded use of enforced disappearance on a large scale was in Nazi Germany, when a 1941 decree provided for the secret transfer from occupied territories of individuals believed to be part of resistance movements," says Amnesty International. The former Soviet Union was notoriously famous for this practice as well. More recently in China, 40,500 Falun Gong practitioners, mostly from the countryside, have "disappeared" and are feared to have been used as involuntary donors of organs for transplantation.
The United Nations defines "enforced disappearance" as when persons are arrested, detained or abducted by agents of the State or by organized groups or private individuals acting on behalf of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the detention or the "concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law."
Chile and Argentina: Disappeared People
Disappearances gained notoriety in South American countries like Argentina and Chile during the 1970s and 1980s. In Spanish, "disappeared people" are called "desaparecidos." In Chile, under the military government of Augusto Pinochet, over 3,000 persons "disappeared."
David Smith, Deputy Director of United Nations Information center, spoke of his experiences in Argentina when in the late 1970s he was a young journalist. Argentina was under military dictatorship (1976-83) and over 30,000 unlawful abductions occurred in the late 1970s, according to the Mothers. The "Mothers" carrying pictures of sons and daughters in front of the government offices left a strong impression on him of how they "defied anyone who told them they did not have a right to know what happened to their son or husband."
These Mothers were an "enduring symbol of what people can achieve when they question a government."
Smith later went further and stated the Mothers were more than "symbols," but an "engine of change in the country." He noted that more recently at the end of 2001 when the economy collapsed, Argentina did not revert to dictatorship. The democracy was still strong and not a peep was heard out of the military.
The perpetrators of the crimes frequently murder the victims and dispose of the bodies so that they can never be found. In Chile and Argentina, the infamous "death flights" were used by the military juntas to dispose of the bodies at sea.
Worldwide Problem
"Disappearances" are much more than a Latin American phenomena. Hundreds of thousands of people have "disappeared" in countries such as Iraq, Sri Lanka, the former Yugoslavia and many others, says Amnesty International. The WSI notes the rise of this "horrendous crime" in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Pakistan.
Smith quoted from a statement released by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances that the victims "should not only be commemorated once a year. Rather, every day is a day of the disappeared." The Working Group voiced concern over the increasing number of cases of enforced disappearances around the world and expressed particular concern about the practice of disappearances of short duration as a tactic being used now to terrorize people.
The Working Group, established in 1980, assists the relatives of disappeared persons in ascertaining their fate and whereabouts and acts as a channel for communication between the families and governments concerned.
Disappearances Occurring in Pakistan
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) published a report in January 2006 which called attention to the Interior Minister's mention of 4,000 persons arrested in the province of Balochistan. The charges against a number of the thousands of people have not been disclosed to their families, according to the WSI. Another group, the Asian American Network Against Abuse of human rights (ANAA) is cited by WSI as saying that General Pervez Musharraf's government is using the "war on terror" as a pretext to take these Pakistani citizens, illegally detain and torture them in secret prisons, and send to Guantanamo Bay or kill them.
"Because of the clandestine nature of the arrests, it is impossible to know the exact nature of arrests," says the WSI. The reason they were taken is a secret. Some of the suspects have been missing for years, according to WSI. Police have refused to investigate or register complaints, says the WSI.
"Those who challenge detentions through the provincial courts find that security forces deny all knowledge of a person's whereabouts and judges have frequently failed to challenge these denials," says the WSI.
But new hope can be drawn from a recent development at the Supreme Court of Pakistan which is set to take up several cases detailing illegal abductions filed by relatives of Pakistan's many missing people. "The Supreme Court issued fresh directions to the government to speed up the process of finding missing people," says the WSI.
WSI provided at this commemoration the names of 76 Pakistanis who are missing.
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