Families despair over missing relatives

From dawn to dusk, Shanta Bhandari spends her time looking for her son, who disappeared in 2002 when the Nepali police arrested him on charges of working with the Maoist rebels, who have been waging an armed rebellion against the state for the last 10 years. But her 21-year-old son Bipin was just a student at the time and a member of the Maoist-affiliated All Nepal National Free Student’s Union-Revolutionary (ANNFSU-R). Until 2002, the union had not been directly involved in Maoist activities. But after the breakdown of second ceasefire in 2003, the union started to affect the educational sector by constantly calling national education strikes, was involved in extortion, as well as bombing schools to pressure the government to meet their demands to nationalise all private schools and remove the terrorist tag from their union. In 2005, the government has again banned ANNSFU-R slating it as terrorist organisation. Bhandari and other mothers whose sons were arrested on the same day set out on a mission to force the state authorities to reveal the whereabouts of their sons. They approached almost all organisations they thought would help pressurise the government. They pleaded for help from local human rights groups, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the United Nations office in Nepal, the Supreme Court and even the Royal Palace, but the government paid little attention. They finally went to the police headquarters responsible for the disappearance, where authorities there promised to call them after a week. But three years on they heard nothing. Instead, they came to arrest Bhandari’s husband, a lawyer, again accusing him of working for the Maoists. He has since gone into hiding, leaving Bhandari and her young daughter on their own to be constantly hounded by threatening calls from the police. “My heart tells me he is still alive,” said Bhandari, who explained that instead of crying at home helplessly, the best way to remain strong was by campaigning for justice from the state authorities: not just for her son but for all such disappearance cases. Later in 2002, having failed to get anywhere with the government, Bhandari and three of the other mothers organised a hunger strike in the middle of the capital, Kathmandu. The country was then under a state of emergency, imposed by the government of former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. Deuba’s government introduced the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) which gave unlimited powers to the police to arrest anyone they suspected to be Maoist. By 2003 and 2004, Nepal had recorded the highest number of new cases of disappearances in the world, according to the United Nations Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances. Human rights groups also reported that the majority of people arrested by the police and army were innocent civilians. Almost 100 other parents joined Bhandari in her hunger strike as news of the campaign spread around the country. The issue finally got high-profile attention from the media and human rights groups, who started to pressurise the government. Finally, after a four-month long hunger strike, the government revealed the names of 18 out of 132 disappeared persons in 2002. The families also set up Rajya Dwara Bepatta Pariyeko Pariwar Samaj (the Society of families of missing persons by the state), which is leading a campaign to help all those who disappeared following detention inside police stations and army barracks. According to the NHRC and local human rights group, Insec, there remain some 1,000 people still missing after they were arrested by security forces and held in detention centres. Exact numbers are hard to pin down as many cases remain under-reported due to fear of the security forces, who often threaten the families to prevent them from talking to human rights organisations. Those who suffer most are the rural poor who have little to no information or power to register their cases. “The numbers are hard to confirm because many families are afraid to report the cases of either disappearances or those who have been released from detention,” said advocate Kopila Adhikari from Advocacy Forum, an activist group against illegal detention and extrajudicial killings. The forum alone has registered around 550 disappearance cases from nearly 25 districts since 2001. The National Working Committee of Disappearances, established with help from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Nepal, is preparing a report on confirmed data of the disappeared, which will be released within a month. “Once we have the accurate data, we will start filing the cases at the Supreme Court,” said Adhikari, who coordinates the committee, which has also planned to lodge cases at the UN’s Human Rights Committee (Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) if their efforts fail to pressurise the government. The number of disappearances increased further after the breakdown of the first peace talks in 2003, when the Maoists scaled up violence and the security forces were given more sweeping powers to arrest any suspect. “In almost all cases documented by Human Rights Watch (HRW), witness testimony confirmed that individuals who “disappeared” were last seen in the custody of government security forces, who had detained them during large-scale operations or targeted raids, arrested them at checkpoints, or had simply taken them away from places of work or study,” said the HRW report, ‘Clear Culpability: Disappearances by Security Forces in Nepal”. The report added that the Maoists have been less accused of disappearances because the rebels openly executed their victims in public forcing relatives and villagers to witness the killings of those accused of working as government spies or defying the Maoists. Despite the critical situation of disappearances, some international human rights watchdogs, such as the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and HRW, have criticised the international community for failing to respond effectively. “The AHRC has been continuously pleading with the international community to intervene since cases of extra-judicial killing and disappearances are on the increase in Nepal,” said a December report by the group. It added that the majority of cases fail to be investigated on the grounds that the Royal Nepalese Army is beyond the reach of any domestic law in Nepal.