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WITH HOPE & HEARTACHE, WOMEN CONTINUE THEIR SEARCH FOR THE MISSING, THE VICTIMS OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES
INTERNATIONAL
DAY OF THE VICTIMS OF ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCES - 30 AUGUST
UN WORKING GROUP ON ENFORCED OR INVOLUNTARY
DISAPPEARANCES
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Disappearances/Pages/DisappearancesIndex.aspx
ARGENTINA – GRANDMOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED
http://www.abuelas.org.ar/english/history.htm
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-22004491
History of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo
Children Who Disappeared or Who Were Born in Captivity
The drama
of children who disappeared in our country, the Argentine Republic, is one of
the consequences of the National Reorganization Process enforced by the
military dictatorship, which ruled the country between 1976 and 1983.
These
children are the children of our children, who have also disappeared. Many
babies were kidnapped with their parents, some after their parents were killed,
and others were born in clandestine detention centers where their mothers were
taken after having been sequestered at different states of their pregnancies.
We, the
babies' grandmothers, tried desperately to locate them and, during these
searches, decided to unite. Thus, in 1977, the non-governmental organization
called Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo was established, dedicated
specifically to fighting for the return of our grandchildren. We also
relentlessly investigated our children's and grandchildren's disappearances, in
hopes of finding them.
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The International Day of the Disappeared: What happens to those who go missing through disaster and migration?
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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.
Credit:Daniela Pastrana/IPS
MEXICO
CITY (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
Amantha
Perera
- October 17, 2013
- 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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WUNRN
http://www.ammsa.com/content/missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women
CANADA
- CALL FOR INVESTIGATION INTO MISSION NATIVE/ABORIGINAL WOMEN & GIRLS
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WUNRN
http:www.wunrn.com
The Chechen
Republic, Chechnya, is a federal subject of
Russia.
Russia-Chechnya - Women with Photos to Mourn
"Disappeared" Relatives
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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.