Forced to disappear
LAST year, on Jul 15, Abd al Akram al Sakka disappeared. That night, 20 members of Syria’s air force intelligence arrived at his home in the Damascus suburb of Daraya. This frail 68-year-old man, an imam at his local mosque, has not been seen since. He vanished into a network of secret prisons and detention centres run by the Syrian security forces.
His family does not know where he is being held or what condition he is in. They say they don’t even know why he was arrested in the first place. Despite increasingly desperate pleas from his relatives, the Syrian authorities refuse to say what has happened to him. Abd, like thousands more in Syria and in countries on every continent, is one of the disappeared. “Disappearance means that you don’t know anything about them, and even if you know anything — you are always worried that this information is not OK,” his son-in-law Haytham Al Hamwi told Amnesty International.
Dr Pat Rice, from Fermoy, Co Cork, was the victim of an enforced disappearance in Argentina in the 1970s. He went on to become a lifelong campaigner for the disappeared and spoke movingly of what the experience is like for those left behind. “What always impacts me when I hear relatives tell the story of the enforced disappearance of their loved one”, Dr Rice observed, “is their focus or even obsession with the last moment when that person was taken. In fact that threshold moment is when their normal life ends and their anguished search to know the fate of their loved one begins.”
A person is “disappeared” when they are arrested, detained or abducted, either by state officials or agents acting on their behalf. Since the captors deny they are holding the person or refuse to reveal their whereabouts, the victim is especially vulnerable. It has happened in almost half the countries in the world and claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. Very often, people who have been disappeared are never released. Their families and friends may never find out what has happened to them.
We cannot know how Abd al Akram al Sakka has been treated since he disappeared almost 18 months ago, but we do know how other detainees have been treated. Since protests began in Syria in Mar 2011, thousands of men, women, and children as young as eight, have been detained because they, or their relatives, were involved in peaceful political protests. More than 280 have died in custody with the remains of many, including a 13-year-old boy, showing signs of brutal torture. Many of these detainees were the victim of enforced disappearances, held secretly without any way to contact their families, but some were more fortunate. They are the disappeared who came back.
Emad (not his real name) was arrested in Jul 2011, along with his father. He was active in the local co-ordination committees of Syria, which organised peaceful demonstrations in support of human rights. “I was blindfolded and handcuffed and taken to the interrogation room,” he told Amnesty International in Jordan, where he is now a refugee.
“They forced me to kneel and put a stick in my mouth horizontally and tied it up behind my head. Then they brought my dad and started beating him in front of me with their wooden and electric prods for almost 45 minutes.”
Later, Emad would be stripped naked, handcuffed, and then splashed with water before being given repeated electric shocks over a number of hours. When not being tortured, prisoners are often held in inhumane conditions.
“They led me away to a solitary cell, one of 30 there,” said Al Shami (not his real name), a 40-year-old civil engineer arrested last November. “It was 2m by 2m, with a high ceiling. ‘Your name is 23’, they said, as I was in room number 23. Over time, I came to hate this place. I thought of climbing up the walls and diving down to kill myself.” Al Shami spent 24 days in this cell, but other detainees reported even longer periods of solitary confinement, or found themselves crammed into tiny cells with so many other prisoners that they had to take it in turns to sleep.
Amnesty International has documented cases of disappearances in every continent. As well as Syria, we are currently working on cases in Algeria, the Americas, the Balkans, Indonesia, Libya, Mauritania, Mali, Pakistan, Russia, and Sri Lanka, among other countries and regions. In the disputed Indian province of Kashimr alone, more than 8,000 people have disappeared since 1989.
In Dec 2006, the UN adopted the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. It aims to prevent disappearances, uncover the truth when they do occur, punish those responsible, and provide reparations to the victims and their families. Ireland, to its credit, signed the convention in 2007 but — more than five years later — has failed to ratify it. Next year Ireland will take on the presidency of the EU. We are also a candidate county for membership of the UN Human Rights Council. Ratifying this convention would add to the growing international pressure on governments actively involved in enforced disappearances to do the same. It would show what side Ireland is on in the choice between those who have been disappeared, and the governments and regimes holding them.
Yesterday was International Day for the Disappeared. Families around the world wait in hope for those they love to come home and light candles and say prayers. In Syria, the family of Abd al Akram al Sakka marked the 412th day since he disappeared.
* Noeleen Hartigan is programmes director of Amnesty International Ireland
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