download pdf

COVER

CONTENTS

 EDITORIAL

COVER STORY

- Never Again To Ask Question: Where are You?

NEWS Features

FROM VICTIMS TO HEALERS
PSYCHO-MORAL SUPPORT TO
THE FAMILIES OF VICTIMS OF
ENFORCED DISAPPEARANCE

The Brave
Women
Human Rights Defenders

The Ordinance Anticlimax and its Aftermath...

Expression of Pain
Wives of the Disappeared
Bare Their Hearts...

A Glow in the Dark:
The AFAD’s 11th Anniversary

Eleven years of trials and
triumphs towards a world
without desaparecidos

NEWS FEATURES

To See With The Heart
A Sharing 


The State of human Rights in the Philippines:
Wearing off the Facade 

Peru: A Milestone in the Struggle for Justice
Fugimori is sentenced to 25 years in prison
for crimes against humanity
 

A Reflection: Between the Devil
and the Deep Blue Sea


Sri Lanka: Human Rights Under Fire}

Report on the Lobby for the United Nations Convention For the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and Workshop of Women Human Rights Defenders

announcement
Helping the Families of the
Disappeared help themselves...

Solidarity Message


literary
Mothers of the Disappeared
 

 

EDITORIAL


Solidarity for Truth and Justice 

By Mugiyanto
AFAD Chairperson

The struggle for truth and justice always demands patience and persistence. Truth and Justice need to be reclaimed from those who stole them from us. Always, there is antagonism between the fighters, represented by victims of human rights violations and the thieves represented by state perpetrators. The success or failure of the struggle for truth and justice depends on the dynamics of these opposing forces in a given socio-political and economic context.

That we keep on publishing The Voice depicting our cries, struggles, hopes and dreams is an expression of patience and persistence. Each edition seems to be a repetition of previous issues - an indication that not much has changed in the situation. Yet, with conviction, victims believe that truth and justice shall prevail. As Taty Almeida of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Linea Fundadora, in her visit to Indonesia in April 2009, advised the Indonesian human rights activists:

“Lose no hope. Keep fighting. Guard the memories.
We wear headscarves with the names of our disappeared children.
We also bring the pictures of our children.
In so doing, we will never forget them all the more.
We need to show that the disappeared are human beings;
they have names, faces and families.”

We have learned that persistence and perseverance have brought concrete inroads in the struggle of the victims and their families in all parts of the world. The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance is, in itself, a result of patience and perseverance – of an insistent knocking at the doors of the United Nations that the crime against enforced disappearance deserves no less than an international treaty with an independent monitoring body. More recently, a sweet fruit of persistence and perseverance is the sentence of former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori to twenty-five years in prison for the crimes against humanity that he committed.

Human rights violations are multi-faceted. Most Asian countries commit ugly forms of these violations. While impunity remains the order of the day, new cases of disappearances are recurring in huge numbers. This reality has concerned The Honorable Santiago Corcuera, Chairperson-Rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (UNWGEID), who, in his message to the AFAD during its 11th anniversary, stated:

“It is somewhat difficult for us to believe that more than 60 years after the Nazi regime
in Europe and 30 years after the dirty wars in Latin America, the practice of enforced disappearances is still so widely carried out. This is largely because enforced
disappearances are indeed, a tool of social control, through terror, that still pays off for
those who commit it.”

The worst reality is Sri Lanka, which has a very high number of disappearances reported to the United Nations. The Human Rights Watch 2008 World Report states that more than 1,500 people were reported disappeared from 2005 to 2007, with more than 1,000 cases of enforced disappearances that occurred in 2006 alone. The ugliest face is shown as the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, who was once a human rights advocate and part of those who first organized the Organization of Parents and Family Members of the Disappeared (OPFMD) in the early ‘90s, is now considered as one of the world’s worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances.

Stop enforced disappearances! Prosecute and punish the perpetrators! Institute measures for reparation and redress! Institute measures of prevention! All these are challenges to truth, justice, accountability, peace and human dignity. They have to be concretely confronted and realized if we are to destroy the culture of impunity existing in most Asian countries.

The initiative to set up a Commission on Disappearances in Nepal; the Bill Criminalizing Enforced Disappearances in the Philippines; the establishment of a Commission on Disappearances in Indonesia and Timor Leste as recommended by the joint Truth and Friendship Commission (TFC); the openness of the Thai Government to be a party to the Convention on Enforced Disappearances and some other initiatives by other Asian countries – all these need to be closely monitored and followed-up in order to finally garner concrete results in the struggle for truth, justice, redress and the reconstruction of the desaparecidos’ historical memory so that this crime against humanity will never happen again.

To realize our dreams, it is important to forge genuine solidarity with similar formations of families of the desaparecidos from other Asian countries and other continents and facilitate exchange of experiences. The initiative that has been taken by our Indonesian members, KontraS and IKOHI to invite the Madres de Plaza de Mayo from Argentina and other leading victims from Thailand and Timor Leste is an example par-excellence.

Just around the block is the commemoration of the International Day of the Disappeared on 30 August. Especially on this day, survivors and families and relatives of victims of enforced disappearances from Asia, Africa, Middle-East, Euro-Mediterania, Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, more than ever, have to link arms with the rest of civil society. More loudly and clearly, they have to echo their collective voices against enforced disappearances – an apt way of honoring all the desaparecidos of the world.

 


VOICE August  2009

 

Copyright 2008  AFAD - Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances
Web Design by: www.listahan.org