(Editor’s Note: Thirty-six years ago today, Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. Thousands fell victim to his regime. The victims include people whose remains have not been found. The recent launching of the book “Reclaiming Stolen Lives” highlights the gravity of enforced disappearances not only in the Philippines but also in seven other countries in Asia.)
MANILA, Philippines—Jeng was three years old when his father was seized in the Philippines by government forces in 1985. “Even if tatay (father) is already dead, he should come home,” Jeng says.
Basila, a 9-year-old girl in Pakistan, smiles as she dresses up her doll with multicolored pieces of paper. She says though that her dream is for her father to come home and once again take his seat at the dining table.
Parvina, a middle-age mother in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, says in pain and anger that since her young son disappeared, she has searched for him amid the repression and threats to her own life by the Indian security forces and state police.
Public issue
Angkhana Neelapaijit, wife of the recently disappeared Somchai, a human rights lawyer in Thailand, says, “I don’t want it to be believed that forced disappearance is a personal matter; it is actually a public issue that everyone must pay attention to.”
Jeng, Basila, Parvina and Angkhana are among the hundreds of thousands of family members of the disappeared on the Asian continent. Their experience of having a disappeared loved one has brought them together along with other family members from some countries in South and Southeast Asia through the founding of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (Afad) in 1998 in the Philippines.
Society’s conscience
These families—wives, children, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters of the disappeared—show that the Asian culture is a deeply wounded one that needs to be healed. Their existence also serves as “society’s conscience” and an indelible proof that disappeared victims once lived in certain locations and had their own names, faces, families and homes.
“Reclaiming Stolen Lives,” an Afad publication, is a book that helps society remember the past. Painful as it is (but the truth liberates, too!), it speaks of the gravity of the phenomenon of enforced or involuntary disappearance in China, India (Jammu and Kashmir), Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand.
UN Convention
The book highlights the need for the signing and ratification of the UN Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and for the enactment of a corresponding local law. The countries’ unique developments are parts of our shared history as Asians.
In many Asian countries, anyone can become a desaparecido (disappeared person). Thus, it is urgent to have a UN Convention with a corresponding local legislation to protect all persons from this cruel human rights violation.
Article 2 of the UN Convention defines enforced disappearance as follows: “For the purposes of this Convention, enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty committed by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.”
Social volcano
In the Philippines, the first case of recorded enforced disappearance was the abduction on March 19, 1971 of Carlos “Charlie” del Rosario, secretary general of the Kabataang Makabayan.
Describing the Philippines as a country sitting on top of a “social volcano,” Marcos declared martial law on Sept. 21, 1972.
As the Marcos regime tightened its grip, student activists, union organizers, peasant organizers and rural folks disappeared. These occurred in the ’70s and early ’80s—a time when the country was experiencing severe economic hardships marked by the devaluation of the peso and the ever increasing gap between the rich and the poor. People began agitating in the streets, calling for the end to the Marcos regime.
Disappearances also happened in the Aquino, Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo administrations. The Arroyo administration is in “state of denial in terms of the human rights situation and economic crisis in the country today,” says the book.
In China, Tiananmen Square, the heart of Beijing, became the site of the June 1989 massacre of protesters, which also resulted in the disappearance of young students. The bereaved mothers were not even allowed to mourn in public, but Ding Zilin along with some of her fellow mothers founded an organization called “The Tiananmen Mothers.”
Cited, too, is the government repression of the Falun Gong, a movement whose members devote themselves to the “cultivation of their inner selves and the improvement of their mental and moral quality.” Massive human rights violations, including disappearances, remain unresolved in the country.
Pained paradise
The Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir is a land of beauty and historical sites but is a “pained paradise.” The main cause of the people’s sufferings is the repression by the Indian security forces and the state police.
The phenomenon of enforced disappearance has evolved since five decades ago when the people started to appeal for independence and later rebelled against the repressive system.
Recently, the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, Afad’s member-organization, along with the mothers, wives and relatives of desaparecidos discovered graves and mass graves estimated to be close to a thousand and which are believed to be those of Kashmiri desaparecidos.
Jammu and Kashmir, India and Pakistan have a lot to learn from self-sacrificing people like their own Mahatma Gandhi, who is revered in history as an advocate of prosperity, justice and peace without shedding a drop of blood.
East Timor
Indonesia is endowed with rich natural resources. Sadly, these are amassed by foreign powers and some people in power, their families and cohorts so that the common people suffer from abject poverty. Then President Sukarno sided with the poor in many ways but Suharto grabbed power at the cost of thousands of lives, leading to his more than 32 years of dictatorship.
The people’s struggle amid bloody repression led to the separation of Timor Leste as a nation through the leadership of Xanana Gusmao, Jose Ramos Horta, Bishop Carlos Belo and a lot more who championed the cause of liberating Timor Leste from the Indonesian regime.
Aceh
With the formation of the armed Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in October 1976, Aceh was declared a “Military Operations Area” from 1989 to 1998. The military and the police targeted the civilian population to destroy the GAM, resulting in massive human rights violations including disappearances.
Former leaders of the liberation movement were elected to the top government posts during the recent election in Aceh. This new government faces the resolution of thousands of human rights violations and reconstruction because of the tsunami, which devastated the province and neighboring countries in 2004. Cited, too, is the threat of “annihilation” to the indigenous peoples in resource-rich West Papua.
Munir
An article on Munir, a former Afad chair, plays a significant role in the book.
The case may yet become a breakthrough in the campaign for justice in Indonesia. Munir, husband of Suciwati and a doting father to their two very young children, was poisoned on a Garuda flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam on Sept. 6, 2004. The international human rights community mourned his sudden death.
Nepal
Enforced disappearance in Nepal started during the monarchy but this peaked during the decade-long conflict with the launching of armed insurrection in 1996 by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-Maoist).
In those 10 years, Nepal experienced the worst human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings and disappearances. Nevertheless, the people have shown their trust in the CPN-Maoists as the group got the biggest votes during the elections.
The Nepalese are aware that both the monarchy and the Maoists committed human rights violations, including disappearances. However, they continue to hope that the new government will not resort to “historical amnesia,” which will make Nepal like other Asian countries where impunity is entrenched.
Nepal has become the youngest republic in the world. On June 11, 2008, Gyanendra, Nepal’s last king, left the palace, saying that “he had accepted the political course his country has taken.”
Thus, Nepal has reached the crescendo of political transition from a monarchy to a republic with the successful conduct of the constituent assembly (CA) polls on April 10, 2008. The announcement of Nepal as a republic during the recent CA meeting and the eviction of the king are milestones toward durable peace and upholding human rights and the rule of law.
Jhelum River
In Pakistan, it is not only the warring parties which suffer casualties but also the civilians—old and young women, men and children. The book cites the successive authorities’ greed for power and their collaboration with and consequent subservience to the United States.
The country’s situation is exacerbated by the massive 7.6-magnitude earthquake on Oct. 8, 2005. As of November 2005, the government’s official death toll was 87,350. The earthquake has greatly affected the Pakistani-controlled parts of Jammu and Kashmir, displacing tens of thousands of families most of whom continue to live in tents along the Jhelum river.
This famous river used to provide the people’s daily water needs as well as vegetation for their agricultural lands. It has become a source of conflict between Pakistan and India. Today, the river, which was constructed in 2006 to redirect its flow for the needs of the Pakistanis’ palatial homes, continues to be a silent witness to the hardships and pains of the common people, including families of desaparecidos.
Tamils
In Sri Lanka, the dispute between the Sinhalese and the Tamils was exacerbated by administrations whose main priorities had been that of maintaining themselves in power. The Tamils’ peaceful efforts to live independently were all in vain.
The Tamil’s struggle for a separate nation led to the formation in 1983 of the militant youth movement called the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which decided to meet government repression by force. On the other hand, the Sinhalese youth earlier formed their organization called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP/People’s Liberation Front). Fighting the succeeding governments, the Tamils’ just demands are drowned by the continuing accusation that they are but a rebellious people.
The succeeding governments showed some efforts to resolve the internal conflict but these failed as seen in thousands of human rights violations, including disappearances. Blood continues to be shed under the current presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who claims to have a human rights background.
Thailand
Thailand is a “country that has followed a troubled but more or less democratic political path since its establishment as a constitutional monarchy in 1932.” The successive governments came to power not by popular elections but through a series of 18 coup d’etats over the past 75 years.
Different factions, mostly from the military, had taken political power so that no regime has survived for a long time without the intervention of the monarchy, bureaucratic elites and military cliques.
While contending forces claim that they defend the interest of the general public, the people suffer from the impact of political turmoil and the curtailment of their rights and freedoms. This situation has been a fertile ground for human rights violations which include massacres, killings and enforced disappearances. Among the reported cases of enforced disappearances happened during the Thammasat University Massacre (1973-1976), the Black May of 1992 and cases in Southern Thailand.
The book has graphs based on the initial 5,326 cases contained in an accompanying CD. The figure pales in comparison with the thousands of cases cited by Afad’s member-organizations. However, the documentation is a breakthrough and a step toward a more complete statistics of enforced disappearance cases on the continent.
(Erlinda Timbreza-Valerio is one the writers of “Reclaiming Stolen Lives,” which was launched in Quezon City, Philippines on Aug. 29, the eve of the International Day of the Disappeared. The other writers are Mugiyanto, Mary Aileen D. Bacalso, Rosa Bella M. Quindoza, Kopila Adhikari, Dhiraj Jumar Pokhrel, Emilia P. Aquino, Francis Q. Isaac, Darwin B. Mendiola, Chang Chui and Santiago Corcuera. The book is available at the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances, tel. no. (632) 927-4594; mobile phone: 00-63-917-792-4058; e-mail: afad@surfshop.net.ph)
