Forced disappearance: A torment worse than death
Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a prominent Syrian writer and dissident, discusses forced disappearance. Saleh’s wife Samira al-Khalil, a Syrian activist, was abducted by Jaish al-Islam in Douma, Eastern Ghouta in 2013.
Forced disappearance might seem like a fate worse than arrest, detention or torture, but it is actually worse than death itself. Why? With the finality of death, even when caused by a killing, the pain of loss fades over time, starting big but eventually diminishing. The departed may eventually fade in the minds and memories of their loved ones, especially if people had been allowed to say their farewells and with this they get closure and can eventually resume normal life.
Forced disappearances are nothing like that. They deny us closure — the memories and pain do not subside with time. On the contrary, they grow with every day — more time passes before we are even able to start believing and understanding what has happened to our lost ones. In our hearts we hope that this is all just a nightmare, that will come to an end and that they will appear again shortly, within a few days or weeks. As more time passes with no news of our loved ones, our worry only increases, and it eats at our hearts that we might never get a chance to know the truth. We fear we will wait so long (to hear the truth) that families either die of sorrow, or the perpetrators themselves die, taking the truth to their graves.
The situation gets worse when perpetrators deny they committed the crime, and this is a recurring element in forced disappearance, whether committed by states or other actors. The perpetrators join the powers that be, complicit in their intentional silence, not responding to any of the affected families or human rights organisations. Here, we discuss two forms of disappearance. The first is the physical act of kidnapping, leaving no sign of the disappeared. The second form is manifested in the perpetrator’s denial adding another layer of mystery and secrecy to the crime.
This allows sceptics to avoid pressuring the likely perpetrators, and allows accomplices share in the denial. However, denial is not solely used to ignore crime or to absolve the perpetrators of responsibility, but to further embed absenteeism and create solid obstacles in the search for the absentees, further ensuring impunity for the perpetrators. This remains true, even if we know for sure who the perpetrators are, as in the case of Jaysh al-Islam in the kidnapping of Samira, Razan, Wael and Nazim from Eastern Ghouta about four years ago, or in the case of those who disappeared at the hands of ISIS. ISIS did not deny the crime, but completely ignores it. ISIS committed the crimes but cared less about the victims’ parents, wives, children, mothers and fathers. Had it not been for the massive and consistently reaction to the crimes of Jaysh Al-Islam from the beginning, I believe the same thing would have happened here. The Salafist faction had to lie, with these lies emanating from its founder and leader, even though he would rather have remained silent.
I have lived the case of Samira, Razan, Wael and Nazem since day one — the case of forced disappearance of two women and two men, whose loved ones have known nothing about them for 1461 days. Each these days has been heavier and more painful than the day before it. This is torment. I think that the crime of enforced disappearance has a specific attribute that differentiates it from detention (for example, where the detainee is known, and the detainees may be visited), torture, murder, and assassination. It is that torment is continuous and simultaneous, for the forcibly disappeared and their family and loved ones. Forced disappearance is torture by way of obscuring information, and making the obscure a long-term condition.
Our families knew the realities of our customary detention in the 1980s and 1990s. They were aware of the detention framework and its justification in the case of Samira, her sister and her sister-in-law, and the case of my brothers and me. However, this is not at all the case of enforced disappearance as practiced today by the regime or its Islamic replications. We know nothing for sure, as if our disappeared are in special world far away, in a world parallel to our world: the world of the unknown! Zubaydah Kharbotli is unable to stop counting the days, not even for one day, since Ismail’s absence, her husband and the father of her children. She suffers, but she hopes every day. To put it simply, she tells her disappeared every day how much his absence is torture, and how her hope for his return never dies, how much the boys need him, but how they are doing well.
Ghadir Nawfal, my brother Firas’s wife, is in a similar situation and undergoes the same torment and hope. She doesn’t count the days like Zubaydah, but she constantly invokes the presence of her beloved disappeared and takes great care of their children. And like them, I am also overwhelmed with anxiety and hope, but through writing, I try to build a bridge with my disappeared, but it will not reach. I’m not sure of the best route to take in such horrendous conditions. There doesn’t seem to be an appropriate route. Perhaps what is particularly exceptional about the condition of the loved ones of the forcibly disappeared, and what makes the Assadist and Islamist forced disappearance crimes even more appalling, is the fact that the loved ones of the disappeared live far away from the crime scene. They themselves cannot search for the remnants of their loved ones. Zubaydah and her children, and Ghadir and her son, live in Europe. Razan’s parents live in Canada. Part of Nazim’s and Wael’s families live outside Syria. Samar Al Meer, and her son and daughter, as well as Lina Mohammad, Fariza Jehjah and Fadwa Mahmud, all live abroad as well. And I am like everybody else. It seems that this is the case for the families of many of the forcibly disappeared, a result of forced disappearances committed in the context of the revolution and war in Syria.
The regime’s targeting of the popular movement and using it as a weapon to create barriers and achieve dismemberment, and the policy of assassination and kidnapping that the Islamists applied in the zones they controlled. In most cases, we are ‘exiles’ outside the country. We are forcibly displaced. This wasn’t the case, for instance, for most of loved ones of the forcibly disappeared during the Lebanese civil war.
Thus, the matter is not restricted to the torture of the disappeared and their loved ones, or to the fact that forced disappearances grows and gets worse with time, but further to forbidding the families from following up with their loved ones on the ground in Syria. It is simply impossible, either because people are stranded and there is no possibility of reaching the abduction site, or because of the strong possibility of being kidnapped or killed if we are able to get there at all. It must be stressed that Islamists are more despicable in this regard than the al-Assad regime itself. Although the latter has a massive criminal record in all its forms and aspects, its kidnapping of Faeq al-Meer, for example, is not a strange behaviour, for he is an outspoken critic of the regime and a supporter of the revolution. Also, Abdulaziz al-Khayer had been kidnapped before due to the danger he represents to the regime.
As for the kidnappings of a large number individuals who opposed the al-Assad regime, committed by the Islamists of Jaysh al-Islam and Daesh, this is a twofold crime as it is both disappearance by force, which grows with time, and a twofold torture, against a background of collective displacement to which those Islamists contributed. They have harmed our loved ones while we are still at war with the main enemy and while we were not expecting a new enemy. The Islamists never lacked the determination to commit such crimes and always found the needed religious text to defend their evil. The mixture of kidnapping (by those who are masked and faceless), disappearance and denial, and the aforementioned specific characteristics of forced disappearances, in general and in the Syrian context in particular, it seems to me that forced disappearance is the mother of all crimes.
In the eyes of their families, it is the endless and repeated killing of the forcibly disappeared. Therefore, it is a continuous massacre and equivalent to genocide; it is the killing of the idea of justice every single day. The mother of all crimes is wrapped in obscurity, secrecy and brutality. And the fact that the people who committed the forced disappearance crimes are exactly the same people who deify themselves, whether Assadists or Islamists, is something that adds a foundational characteristic to this crime. This, in turn, makes it very fertile symbolically, culturally, legally and politically. This is an aim that’s worthy of all efforts. I mentioned earlier that the magnitude of forced disappearance grows with time, in contrast to natural absence which diminishes. The effect that death has on us eventually fades away but unlike death, the effect of forced disappearance does not die, it kills. It is like a monster that grows in its brutality and it will either kill us all out of frustration or we can kill it by prosecuting those responsible.
And what is the just punishment? It is not by forcibly disappearing the perpetrators of the crime as that would be more of a punishment for their families who have not committed the crime. The just punishment is one that not only puts an end to the crime whilst building social resilience and promoting communal healing. The prosecution must be made public, but one that does not affect the families of the criminals.
In the absence of proper prosecution mechanisms by a legitimate institution within the current Syrian status quo, given that the Assad regime has committed most of the enforced disappearances, that most of the disappeared are wanted by the Assad regime, the Syrian revolution’s aspirations for new justice have been crushed. Thus we the families of the disappeared people need to give these crimes and justice new intellectual, moral and legal perspectives. We also need to reconstruct the culture, the value system, and laws in a way that criminalizes the perpetrators, the authority both entity and doctrine, and to honour the disappeared as the heroes of the Syrian cause.
Separately, it might seem that we, the families and loved ones of the disappeared are in denial when we insist on waiting for them and refuse to contemplate the worst case scenario. First, we defend hope and refuse to give in to helplessness. Second, we want to know the fate of our disappeared, down to the smallest details. Third, we want the perpetrators to be held accountable to preserve justice and prevent impunity. We talk to our disappeared loved ones every day, in order to know, hope and protect our chance to seek justice.
This way the weapon of time used by those enabling enforced disappearance against us is turned into a weapon for us, and we make the best out of every additional day to tighten the moral, legal and intellectual net around the perpetrators. If the crime of enforced disappearance was committed by the- so-called religious factions, the destruction of their principles and creed is just as important as the physical punishment itself if not more so. I will end on a personal note. The pain of Samira’s absence hasn’t lessened. But there is something that has subsided during her years of absence, things related to my previous status as a political prisoner. I am no longer that person, that period is history. I am now the husband of a kidnapped woman, the brother of a kidnapped man and the friend of many abductees, the survivor uprooted, away from his loved ones, telling their story and collaborating to build the case against enforced disappearance.
Translated from Arabic by Mona Zeineddine
Edited by Jess Marie
