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FOR YEARS, WITH HOPE & HEARTACHE, WOMEN SEARCH FOR THE MISSING, THE VICTIMS OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES 

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Link to Full UNArticle: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14970&LangID=E

 

INTERNATIONAL DAY OF THE VICTIMS OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES - 30 AUGUST

REMOVE ALL OBSTACLES TO AID INVESTIGATIONS ON FATE OF DISAPPEARED PERSONS

GENEVA (30 August 2014) –Two United Nations expert groups on enforced disappearances call on States “to remove all obstacles” to aid investigations into the fate of disappeared persons.

On the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances urge Governments to support relatives of the disappeared by removing all obstacles hindering their search for loved ones, including through the opening of all archives, especially military files.

“More than 43,000 cases, the majority dating back decades, remain outstanding with the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. These cases stay open for several reasons, often because relatives have no support in finding out what happened. 

The search for disappeared family members and, in many cases, the identification of discovered remains, is always the most pressing request of relatives who endure tremendous suffering in their long wait to know the fate or whereabouts of their loved ones. Many relatives face unjustified hurdles in their search, due to the lack of political will, or insufficient and inadequate investigations......

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http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/05/no-celebration-for-mothers-of-the-missing-in-mexico/ 

Mexico – Women Continue to Mourn Missing Family Members 

"Where are they?" ask mothers looking for their missing sons and daughters, after driving 2,000 km to Mexico City. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

 

"Where are they?" ask mothers looking for their missing sons and daughters.
Credit:Daniela Pastrana/IPS

MEXICO CITY, May 15, 2012 (IPS) - Emma Veleta and Toribio Muñoz were married 40 years ago and had seven children, four boys and three girls. They lived in the town of Anáhuac, 100 km from the capital of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. But on Jun. 19, 2011, as they were celebrating Father’s Day, tragedy struck.

Armed men wearing federal police uniforms stormed into their house and took away Muñoz, a retired railway worker, and all of his sons, a nephew, a son-in-law, and a grandson. Veleta has never seen them again.

"I thought that if I came to Mexico City, I could find some clues about what happened to my family," she told IPS. "I didn’t find anything, but I did discover that many women are going through the same thing," she added, explaining that she had had to flee her town after receiving a series of threatening phone calls.

Guadalupe Aguilar, a retired nurse, is also searching for a missing loved one: her son José Luis. The last she knew of him was on Jan. 11, 2011, when the 34-year-old went to meet his brother in the city of Guadalajara, in the western state of Jalisco.

"It was a 12-minute drive, but he never got there. His car turned up later in Colima (a neighbouring state)," said Aguilar, who on Sept. 7 managed to speak to President Felipe Calderón when he visited Guadalajara, and asked him for help finding her son.

Calderón "told me to go to the Procuraduría de Víctimas (Mexico's new crime victims protection office), which would open a file on the case," she told IPS. "But all that has been done, and I have nothing concrete to show for it. And I see all these women here, and I ask myself: how many of us do there have to be, for us to get some attention? Why don’t they do anything?"

Veleta, Aguilar and many other women in this country did not celebrate on May 10, which is Mother’s Day in Mexico. They traded flowers and mariachis for a March for National Dignity – a caravan that covered 2,000 km over the last week to demand justice in the disappearance of their loved ones.

"We came (to the capital) to remind Mexico that we don’t have much to celebrate, because part of our heart is dead," activist Norma Ledezma, head of Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters), a human rights group from Chihuahua, told IPS.

The first group of women set out on Monday May 7 from violence-stricken cities in Chihuahua like Cuauhtémoc, Bocoyna, Gran Morelos and Ciudad Juárez. And as the caravan headed south, it was joined by mothers from the states of Durango, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, Jalisco and México.

After a 2,000-km drive, they reached the capital on Wednesday May 9, where they met with the mothers who have come together in the Committee of Relatives of Dead and Missing Migrants of El Salvador (COFAMIDE), which has documented 319 cases of Salvadoran migrants who have gone missing in Mexico.

On Friday May 11, they met with Attorney General Marisela Morales to express their main demands: federal investigations and an immediate search for all of the missing persons, as well as the creation of a national database on cases of disappearance, a special prosecutor’s office on disappearances, and a federal programme to assist the families of victims.

They also called for the implementation of a protocol on the procedures to be followed in investigations of disappearances, and of United Nations recommendations in cases of forced disappearance.

The interior minister, Alejandro Poiré, cancelled the meeting the mothers had scheduled with him.

"Where are they?" the mothers-turned-activists ask at every door they knock on.

In the caravan, they were accompanied by members of HIJOS, an organisation made up of the sons and daughters of victims of forced disappearance of Mexico’s "dirty war" against dissidents, in the 1960s and 1970s.

"Don’t lose faith," they were told by Senator Rosario Ibarra, founder of the Committee for the Defence of those Imprisoned, Persecuted, Disappeared and Exiled for Political Reasons (known as the Eureka Committee).

"Don’t ever think that they are dead. Look for them as hard as you can, fight as hard as you can. I have been fighting since 1975, I’m already old now," said Ibarra, who visited the mothers at the camp they set up on Thursday May 10 at the Ángel de la Independencia monument, a focal point for protest in Mexico City.

Most of the women are indirect victims of the war on drugs and crime launched by President Calderón at the start of his term in December 2006. Since then, the groups that organised the caravan have documented more than 800 disappearances.

There are no official figures. The only indication of the magnitude of the phenomenon has come from the National Human Rights Commission - an independent government body - in April 2010, when it reported that it had received 5,397 reports of people who have gone missing since the start of the Calderón administration, and that nearly 9,000 dead bodies had never been identified.

Nitzia and Mita, 16-year-old twins, are looking for their mother, Nitzia Paola Alvarado, who was detained by members of the military on Dec. 29, 2009 along with their uncle José Ángel and their cousin Rocío in the town of Buenaventura, Chihuahua. None of them were taken to a police or military precinct, and they were never seen again.

Due to harassment and threats, 37 members of the family were forced to flee the state.

The caravan, which returned north over the weekend, received a letter from victims’ relatives who formed the group LUPA (the Spanish acronym for Struggle for Love, Truth and Justice), in Nuevo León, one of the states hit hardest by the spiralling violence, where 49 decapitated and dismembered bodies were found along a highway on Sunday.

"There are no words to describe the pain that mothers feel when a son or daughter disappears…but if we had to try to describe it, if we had to find words, we would tell you it is a terrible ordeal, a via crucis that never ends, unending agony," says the letter.

"Our pain and our struggle for our missing sons and daughters are heightened when we see that part of society is indifferent, when we see a government that also contains corrupt authorities who are in league with criminal elements," LUPA adds.

These women who have lost sons and daughters and who don’t know what to tell their grandchildren when they ask what happened to their father or mother have decided to channel their pain into the struggle for justice.

Julia Ramírez has 12 children. Alejandro, the oldest, decided to migrate to the United States when he turned 18, to help support his family. He left his home in San Luis de la Paz, in the central state of Guanajuato, on Mar. 21, 2011, with 16 other campesinos (peasant farmers). None of them were ever seen again.

"My children told me there would be a mother’s day festival. It was really hard for me to leave them, but I have to continue the search; they’re at home, but their brother isn’t," she said.

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WHEN THE MISSING DON'T RETURN

 

- October 17, 2013

 

COLOMBO/KATHMANDU (IPS) - Some call it ‘frozen loss,’ a point in time that families and relatives find almost impossible to extricate themselves out of, even years after their loved ones have disappeared.

“The families of the missing get into a [state of] tunnel vision,” says Bhava Poudyal, mental health delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Azerbaijan. He is talking about the thousands of families still searching for their loved ones who have gone missing in his native Nepal, or in Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and dozens of other countries.

It’s a situation that does not let go of its captives easily. “Their lives are dominated by the missing, there is no release,” he tells IPS. “They live with the ambivalence of hope and despair day in and day out.”

“Everyone seeks answers all the time, the state of ambiguous loss is torture."

It’s a condition Santhikumar, a bicycle repairman in his forties in Oddusudan village of the Mullaitivu district in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, is all too familiar with. It has been four years since his brother-in-law went missing during the final stages of the Sri Lankan military’s war against the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in April 2009.

Santhikumar has been helping his sister and her two daughters make ends meet even as he joins them in the search for the breadwinner of their family. He has visited every official detention centre in the north and nearby areas, but with no luck so far.

“People come and tell us that they saw him on this location on this day. So we go looking for him there,” he says. “But we have not found anything concrete yet.”

The family has got used to the never-ending search, he adds. “There are good days and bad days. Mostly we are okay, but there are days when my sister just stares aimlessly for hours, or when her daughters break down crying. Birthdays are the hardest, the girls have so many memories of appa (father).”

Some 2,300 km and a whole country away, Rena Mecha shares the same feeling of despair in the Jalthal village of Jhapa district in eastern Nepal. The 36-year-old mother of a boy and girl, 16 and 14 respectively, has been searching for her husband who went missing during the pro-democracy movement in the country in 2006. “I lost everything when he went missing,” she tells IPS. “Nothing can bring that life back.”

The current ICRC documentation shows that around 1,400 people have been missing in Nepal since the 2006 peace agreement. In the country’s rural areas, the wives of the missing men desist from calling themselves widows, as that would entail a whole new set of complications, like having to dress in white and being considered a ‘bad presence’ by others.

In southern Sri Lanka too, the immediate community has ostracised women who have accepted that their missing husbands are dead, accusing them of betraying their husbands, says Ananda Galappatti, a medical anthropologist who works with the families of the missing in the country.

In Azerbaijan, says Poudyal, many families continue to cook meals and set a plate for a missing person even long after their disappearance. Close to 4,600 people went missing during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between the republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“It is the constant state of waiting which makes closure very difficult, if not impossible,” Zurab Burduli, the ICRC protection delegate in Sri Lanka, tells IPS.

Galappatti says the families are assailed by an identity crisis that can be exacerbated by the social environment. “Am I a married woman or a widow? Am I a child without a father? Am I a parent whose daughter is dead?  Planning for the future becomes extremely difficult in this situation,” he tells IPS.

In Sri Lanka, the number of missing persons is a contentious issue. A presidential task force set up to investigate the southern insurrection by the Janata Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP) in the late 1980s recorded at least 30,000 cases of missing people in 1995. The ICRC has a current caseload of 16,090 missing persons in Sri Lanka dating back from 1990.

According to Burduli, the first step in assisting these families is to recognise their complex situation and devise assistance plans targeting them.

“The ICRC’s experience around the world shows that because of the complexity of the needs and their multi-disciplinary nature, coordinative national mechanisms are best suited to address those needs in a comprehensive and consistent manner,” he says.

In Nepal, the families of the missing admit that once the national tracing programme began following the 2006 peace agreement, their situation improved slightly.

“I was the only one in my village with someone missing, I felt so alone,” says Mecha. “Now at least there are people who understand my situation.”

Grassroots groups provide families psychosocial support here, something that is yet to take root in Sri Lanka.

“It is imperative that any public process also includes the psychosocial accompaniment of families – with sensitive and skilled practitioners on hand to support families as they prepare for or go through these processes,” says Galapatti.

At the same time, officials with the Nepali Red Cross who work as tracing officers warn that the process of dealing with the families is slow and time-consuming.

“Everyone seeks answers all the time, the state of ambiguous loss is torture,” says Shubadhra Devkota from the Nepali Red Cross.

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http://www.ammsa.com/content/missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women

CANADA - CALL FOR INVESTIGATION INTO MISSION NATIVE/ABORIGINAL WOMEN & GIRLS

Women's March Vancouver

Women’s Marches Demand Justice for the Disappeared Aboriginal Women.

 

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The Chechen Republic, Chechnya, is a federal subject of Russia.

Russia-Chechnya - Women with Photos to Mourn "Disappeared" Relatives

http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004CE90B/httpPictureGalleryImage?readform&country=Russian%20Federation&unid=8FCCDAE4EA668D7CC125742400355182&image=

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INDIA-KASHMIR - MOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED SEARCH & SUFFER

SRINAGAR, India (WOMENSENEWS)--Parveena Ahangar hasn't known peace for years.

"I can't describe how each day passes. I keep taking medicines every single day to control my tension. At night, I'm awake. I just can't sleep," Ahangar says.

She's felt this way, she says, ever since the day 21 years ago when she lost her son.

"My teenaged son, Javed, was picked by the security agencies in 1990," she says.

"Security men came to our Batmaloo home to pick him up, saying they were taking him for interrogation. We pleaded with them, saying he couldn't have done anything wrong, that he had just passed his matriculation. But they didn't listen and took him to the interrogation center at Pari Mahal. We never saw him again."

Ahangar's husband fell ill because of the trauma, and gave up working. He remains in poor health today.

Ahangar lives in the India-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir in the north of the country, near borders of Pakistan and China, an area plagued by territorial tensions.

She has scoured the Kashmir Valley for news of her son. She has visited jails through the region. She has approached the United Nations. "I've appealed to every possible government authority, to politicians across party lines."

Many other women in the Kashmir Valley recount similar stories. SRINAGAR, India (WOMENSENEWS)--Parveena Ahangar hasn't known peace for years.

"I can't describe how each day passes. I keep taking medicines every single day to control my tension. At night, I'm awake. I just can't sleep," Ahangar says.

She's felt this way, she says, ever since the day 21 years ago when she lost her son.

"My teenaged son, Javed, was picked by the security agencies in 1990," she says.

"Security men came to our Batmaloo home to pick him up, saying they were taking him for interrogation. We pleaded with them, saying he couldn't have done anything wrong, that he had just passed his matriculation. But they didn't listen and took him to the interrogation center at Pari Mahal. We never saw him again."

Ahangar's husband fell ill because of the trauma, and gave up working. He remains in poor health today.

They say they've sold land, homes, jewelry; exhausted every asset in the search for their children.

Never Giving Up'

Ahangar provides leadership for many of them through the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), which she co-founded in 1996.

"I have decided never to give up this nonviolent protest of ours until my last breath," she says.

On its website, the APDP describes the problem of "enforced disappearances" as starting in 1989, when a group of young men took up arms against the Indian state in support of the longstanding popular movement for self-determination in Kashmir, which began in 1947 after the creation of India and Pakistan.

"In the name of national security and state interest the massive Indian security apparatus in the state has been operating in a climate of impunity shielded by emergency legal provisions like the Disturbed Area Act and Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which grant immunity against being held accountable," says the site.

Ahangar began her organization after a small group of parents, all of whom had undergone the trauma of having their children taken away from them and then found missing, came together.

Support has been building.

This year, she was nominated for the Frontline Human Rights Defenders Award 2011. Civil libertarians in India are aiding her efforts. A prominent academic, Uma Chakravarti, has formed a support group for the APDP in New Delhi.

The once-tiny group now has offices in almost all districts of the Kashmir Valley. Ahangar says it's difficult to keep count of the members.

She is currently trying to prosecute security forces for the disappearance of her son through a lawsuit in the High Court with a prominent lawyer, Zafar Shah, volunteering to represent her.

"I could not have afforded a lawyer," says Ahangar. "Fortunately for me, Zafar sahib is not charging me. In fact, there are many lawyers in the state who have taken up the cases of missing children without charging a paisa (a cent) because they realize that we are not in a position to pay and the issue is a crucial one that needs to be redressed. It is an outrage that while we continue to suffer, those responsible for the crime have not been booked and are, in fact, roaming about freely."

The Same Question

The APDP members have met numerous prominent political leaders of the Kashmir Valley, to no avail so far.

Ahangar says she asks all of them the same question: How would they feel if their own young sons were picked up and never seen again?

When Radha Kumar, the government appointed interlocutor, visited the APDP office in Srinagar, Ahangar says she asked her to ask all the high-ranking female politicians in New Delhi how they would react if their innocent children were to be picked up and tortured by security agencies.

The APDP has long argued that over 8,000 men have gone missing in the Kashmir Valley, a stance vindicated by the recent report of the State Human Rights Commission of Jammu and Kashmir, which confirmed that over 2,000 bodies lie in unmarked graves in 38 locations in the state.

The state government has now even offered to conduct DNA profiling on these bodies in order to identify them.

Ahangar, however, refuses to be diverted by the issue of unmarked graves.

"I know this whole issue of unmarked graves is a very serious one," she says, "but don't link the missing with that issue because then attention will get diverted. This is what the government authorities want; they don't want attention to be focused on our missing children."

She points out how, over the years, misleading facts and figures have been put out for public consumption, but the truth has always remained hidden.

With no closure in sight, Ahangar says there is no APDP member who will ever give up.

"I just pray to Allah to give me the 'himmat' (courage) to carry on," she says.

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