Despite fears, concerns and stirs 'Enforced Disappearances' still is a missing truth
Enforced disappearance has become a global problem and is not restricted to a specific region.
(WebDesk) - 30 August has been observed as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances since 2011. The Day of the Disappeared sheds light on an issue that does not only violate various human, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights of the victims and their families, but also affects whole communities by spreading terror and a feeling of insecurity among them.
Enforced Disappearance means such person as has been picked up/taken into custody by any Law Enforcing/Intelligence Agency, working under the civilian or military control, in a manner which is contrary to the provisions of the law. The persons, who have gone missing in cases of kidnapping for ransom, personal enmity or on their own, do not fall within the ambit of the Enforced Disappearances.
Enforced disappearance has frequently been used as a strategy to spread terror within the society. The feeling of insecurity generated by this practice is not limited to the close relatives of the disappeared, but also affects their communities and society as a whole.
Despite international efforts and condemnation, enforced disappearances are to this day an alarmingly widespread issue and, in most cases, are committed with impunity. Photo: File
Enforced disappearance has become a global problem and is not restricted to a specific region of the world. Once largely the product of military dictatorships, enforced disappearances, can nowadays be perpetrated in complex situations of internal conflict especially as a means of political repression of opponents.
Despite international efforts and condemnation, enforced disappearances are to this day an alarmingly widespread issue and, in most cases, are committed with impunity.
History
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 General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance as resolution 47/133 on December 18, 1992.
On 21 December 2010, by its resolution 65/209 the UN General Assembly expressed its deep concern about the increase in enforced or involuntary disappearances in various regions of the world, including arrest, detention and abduction, when these are part of or amount to enforced disappearances, and by the growing number of reports concerning harassment, ill-treatment and intimidation of witnesses of disappearances or relatives of persons who have disappeared.
By the same resolution the Assembly welcomed the adoption of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, and decided to declare 30 August the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, to be observed beginning in 2011.
It is a day being observed to draw attention to the fate of individuals imprisoned at places and under poor conditions unknown to their relatives and/or legal representatives.
Critical Situation of Enforced Disappearances across the globe
Enforced disappearance remains a global problem that afflicts people in various countries and with different ethnicities, religions and political backgrounds. Pakistan is one among the countries, considered the most affected with the forced disappearances and missing persons affliction due to various reasons.
Although enforced disappearance is a crime under international law, the U.N. has recorded thousands of disappearances in over 100 countries in recent decades.Some of the countries which are crucially charged with the allegations of enforced disappearances include Iraq, Iran, Srilanka, Chile, Ethopia, Syria, African countries, Bangladesh, India, China, Russia, US and Pakistan.
Here are few of the fast facts about enforced disappearances situations in different countries:
IRAQ - Enforced disappearance is a widespread challenge in Iraq since 2003, although the government insists that it is a problem of the past and avoids admitting it is part of an ongoing, widespread and systematic practice conducted by government forces and government affiliated militias.
A shadow report submitted by Geneva international centre for justice to the UN committee on enforced disappearance said that due to the continuing degradation of the situation, there is no comprehensive statistic about the number of missing persons in Iraq. However, there are different resources in certain periods, such as the study of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), which put the number to be between 250,000 to over one million. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that between 2006 and June 2007, some 20,000 bodies were deposited at the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, less than half of whom have been identified. Unclaimed bodies were buried in various cemeteries around the city
SRILANKA - According to a United Nations 1999 study, Sri Lanka is the country that has the second highest number of disappeared people in the world (the first being Iraq). Since 1980, 12,000 Sri Lankans have gone missing after being detained by security forces.
More than 55,000 people have been killed in the past 27 years. The figures are still lower than the then-current Sri Lankan government s 2009 estimate of 17,000 people missing, which was made after it came to power with a commitment to correct the human rights issues.
IRAN - Iran is one such example of a country where cases of enforced disappearances are rampant and largely committed with impunity. A country with a wide, complex range of ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious diversity, the Iranian government has historically employed violent means to suppress diversity and silence those who dare speak up for minority rights.
The families of victims in Al-Ahwaz, Iranian Kurdistan and Iranian Balochistan launched the #Where_is_my_child campaign on traditional media and social media.
CHINA - The People’s Republic of China is another country that resorts to enforced disappearances to silence minorities’ attempts to speak out for their rights. While, tragically, Beijing is largely successful in keeping these atrocities hidden from the international community, the Uyghurs of East Turkestan in particular are systematically targeted.
It is only in recent weeks that international media outlets picked up on the issue and reported on the mass forcible disappearance and internment of Uyghurs in so-called “re-education camps”, where they have to endure solitary confinement, beatings and other forms of physical and psychological torture aimed at systematically repressing and eradicating their culture and religion.
Although the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has expressed serious concerns over these mass violations of the rights of Uyghurs, Tibetans and Southern Mongolians and even though China is a signatory to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination since 1981, the Chinese government continues to deny the massive internment of Chinese minorities.
RUSSIA - Russian rights groups estimate there have been about 5,000 forced disappearances in Chechnya since 1999. Most of them are believed to be buried in several dozen mass graves.
The Russian government failed to pursue any accountability process for human rights abuses committed during the course of the conflict in Chechnya.
Unable to secure justice domestically, hundreds of victims of abuse have filed applications with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
In March 2005 the court issued the first rulings on Chechnya, finding the Russian government guilty of violating the right to life and the prohibition of torture with respect to civilians who had died or been forcibly disappeared at the hands of Russia s federal troops.
US - The U.S. government has constructed a wide-ranging detention system for terrorism suspects and others it considers to be implicated in the “War on Terror.” This system includes the informal transfer of suspected terrorists (rendition), detention in both acknowledged and secret U.S.-controlled detention facilities outside the United States, and detention in foreign-controlled facilities at the behest of the U.S. government (proxy detention).
According to an International human rights watch report, the United States has engaged in forced disappearance of prisoners of war in the course of its War on Terror. Amnesty lists at "least 39 detainees, all of whom are still missing, who are believed to have been held in secret sites run by the United States government overseas."
The United States Department of Defense kept the identity of the individuals it held in Guantanamo secret, from its opening, on 11 January 2002, to 20 April 2006. An official list of the 558 individuals then held in the camp was published on 20 April 2006, in response to a court order. Another list, ostensibly of all 759 individuals who had been held in Guantanamo, was published on 20 May 2006.
BANGLADESH - Since 2010, under the Awami League regime, at least 298 people – most of whom are opposition leaders and activists – have been enforcedly disappeared in Bangladesh by the state security forces. According to the report of a domestic human rights organization, 82 people were enforcedly disappeared from January to September 2014. After the disappearances, at least 39 of the victims were found dead while others remained missing. On 25 June 2010, an opposition leader Chowdhury Alam was arrested by the state police and remained missing since then. His abduction was later denied by the law enforcing agencies.
Before the controversial national election of 2014, at least 19 opposition men were picked up by security forces. The incidents of enforced disappearances were condemned by both domestic and international human rights organizations. Despite the demands for the govt. initiatives to probe such disappearances, investigations into such cases were absent.
INDIA - According to multiple human rigts commission organisations reports, India is constantly being alleged with the gross violation of human rights in southern regions, in Punjab and in Indian occupied Kashmir.
Ensaaf, a nonprofit organization working to end impunity and achieve justice for mass state crimes in India, with a focus on Punjab, released a report in January 2009, claiming "verifiable quantitative" findings on mass disappearances and extrajudicial executions in the Indian state of Punjab.
It claims that in conflict-afflicted states like Punjab, Indian security forces have perpetrated gross human rights violations with impunity. The report by Ensaaf and HRDAG, "Violent Deaths and Enforced Disappearances During the Counterinsurgency in Punjab, India", presents empirical findings suggesting that the intensification of counterinsurgency operations in Punjab in the 1980s to 1990s was accompanied by a shift in state violence from targeted lethal human rights violations to systematic enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions, accompanied by mass "illegal cremations". Furthermore, there is key evidence suggesting security forces tortured, executed, and disappeared tens of thousands of people in Punjab from 1984 to 1995.
In 2011, the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) recommended the identification of 2,156 people buried in unmarked graves in north Kashmir. The graves were found in dozens of villages on the Indian side of the Line of Control, the border that has divided India and Pakistan since 1972. According to a report published by the commission, many of the bodies were likely to be those of civilians who disappeared more than a decade earlier in a brutal insurgency. "There is every probability that these unidentified dead bodies buried in various unmarked graves at 38 places of North Kashmir may contain the dead bodies of enforced disappearances", the report stated.
PAKISTAN - It is being said that the systematic exercises of abductions and enforced disappearances in Pakistan are began with he reign of the dictator General Pervaiz Musharaf and most specifically after the US invasion of Afghanistan.
According to Amina Masood Janjua, a human right s activist and chairperson of Defence of Human Rights Pakistan; a not for profit organization working against enforced disappearance there are more than 5000 reported cases of enforced disappearance in Pakistan. There are no formal allegations or charges against the persons thus forcefully disappeared.
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Amna Masood Janjua since two decades has been a voice of the victims of enforced disappearances. Photo: File
In Pakistan, the Baloch people are equally affected by enforced disappearances carried out allegedly by agents of the state. In August 2018, the Human Rights Council of Balochistan and the Baloch Human Rights Organisation published a comprehensive report documenting that, in the first few months of 2018 alone, 541 people had been forcibly disappeared in Pakistan’s Balochistan province. Although activists who speak up for the rights of the Baloch people are usually the direct victims of this crime, the report also highlights the abduction, torture and intimidation of civilians who are not politically active or human rights activists.
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Further East, the people of Sindh also fall victim to this most heinous human rights violation. To raise awareness of these gross violations of both national and international human rights standards, students and activists carried out a rally in support of the thousands of victims in recent past, garnering the support of human rights activists, members of civil society and regional parties. Despite of their efforts, however, the whereabouts of more than 140 Sindhi people remain unknown.
As per the latest update by the officially constituted Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances (CIED) through its monthly statement released on August 1, 2018, the total number of missing persons since 2011 to July 2018 was 5,290. Out of this, 2,636 persons were traced till July 31, 2018, while 382 cases were ‘deleted’ due to “non-prosecution and incomplete address”. Only 446 were found to be ‘not missing persons’ as per the Commission’s own account.
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A protest, rally and a hunger strike were staged to probe the whereabouts of missing persons of Sindh. Photo: File
International and locally operated human rights organizations on multiple occasions have pointed out the absence of a law under which the cases of enforced disappearances could be tried. The HRCP and ICJ have time and again demanded that enforced disappearances should be criminalisedthrough a dedicated law.
In 2016, the Senate adopted a legislative proposal for bringing the intelligence agencies under a special law to be tabled by the Government. The incumbent government of PML-N at that time had cowed down and never allowed that bill to ever be mentioned again.
Recently, International Human Rights organization in a routine exercise wrote to the Prime Minister of Pakistan Imran Khan and pointed out the human rights abuse and criminal ignorance in taking stern actions against the prevailing deteriorating situation of human rights such as arbitrary detentions, torture, deaths in custody, forced disappearances, and extrajudicial execution.
Amnesty International stated on March 19 this year, “No one has ever been held accountable for an enforced disappearance in Pakistan.” Pakistan is signatory to international conventions. Last year, the UN Human Rights Council adopted Universal Periodic Review outcome on Pakistan.
Pakistan Federal Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari had expressed in a tweet in the past,
— Shireen Mazari (@ShireenMazari1) May 6, 2018
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Balochistan Nationalist party leader Akhtar Mengal on certain conditions priorly the stern measures to be taken in resolving the mystries of enforced disappearances through legislations and implementations of law, has extended his support to newly elected government of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf. He himself has raised the issue of forced disappearances in his address to the first session of National Assembly.
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The new government will have to take numerous steps to end this brutal practice once and for all. Among other things, the 2010 report of the first Committee on Enforced Disappearances will have to be made public. The Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances must be signed.
