Mystery of the ‘disappeared’

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.

— Thomas Jefferson

IN March 1976, a military coup overthrew the elected civilian government in Argentina.

The coup had been preceded by a period of economic crisis and political instability and many Argentines welcomed the generals. Little did they know that brutal repression was to follow.

Under Operation Condor, the military unleashed a ‘war against subversion’, targeting anyone considered ‘unpatriotic’. These included individuals, students, political activists, labour and human rights organisations.

However, the Argentine generals, having studied the lessons of previous military dictatorships, were determined to carry out their repression quietly and largely out of sight. They decided that rather than filling stadiums with political prisoners or leaving mutilated bodies on the side of roads, they would perfect the practice of kidnapping their victims from their homes, murder them in secret and leave no evidence behind.

Many political dissidents were heavily drugged and then thrown alive out of planes flying above the Atlantic Ocean, leaving no trace of their passing. Without any dead bodies, the government could deny they had been killed. In this manner some 15,000 to 30,000 men and women became desaparecidos — the Spanish and Portuguese term for the ‘disappeared’ that specifically refers to the mostly South American victims of state terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s.

A forced disappearance occurs when an organisation forces a person to vanish from view, either by murder or by simple sequestration. The victim is first kidnapped, then illegally detained, often executed and the corpse hidden.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which came into force on July 1, 2002, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, ‘forced disappearances’ qualify as a crime against humanity, which thus cannot be subject to the statute of limitation.

Imprisonment under secret or uncertain circumstances is a grave violation of some conceptions of human rights as well as, in the case of an armed conflict, of international humanitarian law. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance as Resolution 47/133 on Dec 18, 1992.

Despite this, it is estimated that secret imprisonment is still practised in about 30 countries. The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) working group on enforced or involuntary disappearances has registered close to 50,000 cases of people who disappeared under unknown circumstances.

The common denominator in all these countries is authoritarian rule, gross violation of human rights, abuse of power by state authorities, lack of accountability and a weak and complaint judiciary.

Pakistan has the dubious distinction of being a member of this select group of countries. While exact numbers are difficult to determine, hundreds, if not thousands, of Pakistanis have simply disappeared. Since 9/11 and the so-called ‘war on terror’ the disappearance of Pakistani citizens has increased. Many continue to languish in secret detention centres and prisons, subjected to psychological and physical torture with no recourse to justice. Many are taken out of the country to other destinations, including the now infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

Nothing can highlight the plight of the disappeared more poignantly than the ongoing ordeal of the Pakistani neuroscientist Dr Aafia Siddiqui. A mother of three small children, Dr Siddiqui simply ‘vanished’ one day in March 2003.

Both the Pakistani and US governments denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. Both continued to do so for the next five years until out of the blue she turned up last month in the middle of Afghanistan, outside the governor of Ghazni’s compound. The bizarre events that followed her arrest and her extradition to the US defies belief.

In a perverse way, despite all that she must have gone through (and one cannot even begin to fathom her experience), Dr Siddiqui is one of the fortunate ones, for she has ‘reappeared’. The less fortunate never return. Can one imagine what their families must endure? Imagine what happens to us when a father, brother, mother, sister, son or a daughter is late coming back from work or college. Imagine the anxiety and distress we go through until contact is made or the individual returns home.

Now imagine an individual who simply disappears with his/her family left in the dark about their whereabouts. As no judicial procedure is followed in the ‘arrest’ no authority needs to admit the existence of the individual. The suffering of the families is probably as severe as the torture of the ‘arrested’ individual. Many develop complicated mental health problems and grief reactions from which they never recover. Many die, waiting in vain for the disappeared to return. Imagine what Dr Siddiqui’s mother must have gone through over the last five years of her disappearance.

What lessons are we to learn from the desaparecidos of Argentina, Pakistan and other countries where this practice goes on? There are several: recognising an individual’s right to liberty; the right of presumed innocence until proven guilty; and the right of the accused to defend himself in a court of law. These are the foundational principles of any fair society.

The other important lesson is that we must avoid at all costs the dangerous precedent set in Argentina in 1976 (now practised in the US) that allows the chief executive or his designate to declare a person an ‘enemy combatant’ (or enemy of the state) without a judicial process.

The fundamental problem with such absolute power is that it allows repressive state authority to kidnap, detain, imprison, torture and execute anyone, without the right to defend himself, on mere suspicion. This is being followed by many repressive regimes and must be struck down.

The ‘disappeared’ are a blot on a nation’s conscience. They remind us that societies whose government treats citizens with disdain, do not respect their rights, abuse power and authority and deny them the right to justice and freedom, are all but doomed. Sixty-one years after independence, with hundreds of our citizens secretly kidnapped and tortured, we are experiencing this bitter lesson. Let’s hope it is not lost on us.

Courtesy Daily Dawn Lahore / By Murad M. Khan