prijava
SARAJEVO/THE HAGUE, August 30 (FENA) - In the course of today, in every part of the world, people will disappear. Syria, Libya, Burundi, and Sudan are in the midst of unrest where enforced disappearance has become a politico-military tactic. Countries such as Iraq, Sri Lanka, and – even after the passage of nearly half a century – Vietnam are trying to address a huge and painful legacy of missing persons from past conflicts, said the ICMP Director-General Kathryne Bomberger in her comment on the occasion of International Day of the Disappeared.
Given that the majority of those who go missing in conflict are men, multiple social obstacles and risks accrue to women survivors, who may be rendered more vulnerable to abusive behavior, including sexual exploitation.
The issue of missing and disappeared persons has intensified in the course of the last two decades. Climate change and environmental degradation have led to natural disasters and mass migration. Around 300,000 perished in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, many of them buried in mass graves without any identification. In Central America, in the Mediterranean, and across South Asia, tens of thousands of people are missing as a result of irregular migration.
Political instability in many parts of the world has resulted in endemic human rights abuses. Activists and dissidents in authoritarian states face the daily threat of incommunicado detention. They will leave for work; visit a government office; get into a car in the company of unidentified men – and they will not be heard from for months or years, perhaps forever.
The common factor in these different circumstances of disappearance is that families are condemned to a lifetime’s agony, the agony of not knowing the fate of a loved one.
It is good to remember this as we mark the International Day of the Disappeared.
While the issue of missing persons is only one facet of human security globally, it is a crucial one. Failure to account for large numbers of persons who go missing for involuntary reasons weakens the rule of law. State responsibility and state action are therefore essential.
Although the picture is bleak, it isn’t hopeless. Legal frameworks to account for the missing have been continuously strengthened in order to define the responsibilities of states more clearly. And social and scientific strategies have been developed that make it possible to account for more missing persons than would have been imagined even 20 years ago.
In the Western Balkans, for example, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) has spearheaded an effort that has made it possible to account for well over 70 percent of the 40,000 people who went missing in the conflicts of the 1990s, including 7,000 of the 8,000 men and boys who disappeared in the Srebrenica Genocide.
Accounting for the missing is a moral obligation, but it is also – and this is crucial – a legal obligation; fulfilling this obligation advances and strengthens the rule of law. On the International Day of the Disappeared, it is appropriate that we renew our commitment to meeting the global challenge of missing persons, building institutions as we do so that are more just and that merit the public trust, stated the ICMP.
(FENA) S. R.
