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SOCIETY allowing the military to abduct and force the
disappearance of critics couldn’t be called a democracy,
leaders of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary
Disappearances (Afad) declared.
“In many
points of the globe, there are people who are made to
disappear for exercising their rights and for opposing
…human-rights violations,” the Afad said to kick off the
commemoration of the International Week of the
Disappeared.
“It is
done mostly in the context of [a] widespread and
systematic way under a climate of impunity where the
perpetrators are free to do what they want without
accountability,” the leaders said in a statement.
Enforced
disappearance, according to Edita Burgos, is a
phenomenon “ironic in a time of democracy.”
Burgos’s
son, Jonas, an agriculturist working with farmers in
Bulacan, was abducted while eating lunch in a shopping
mall allegedly by members of the Armed Forces of the
Philippines.
“I have
taken the reliefs offered in a democracy,” Burgos said.
“But it’s nearly a year and I still don’t know if they
have killed my son or if he’s still alive.”
Burgos’s
experience was shared by Irina Krasovskaya of
Belarus
whose husband has been a desaparecido—the
disappeared—for 16 years.
The Afad
said that while enforced disappearance is a global
phenomenon, “Asia is now considered the graveyard of the
desaparecidos for having submitted the most number of
cases to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or
Involuntary Disappearances in recent years.” The group
is lobbying for governments like the Philippines to
ratify the International Convention for the Protection
of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
Gimena
Gomez of the Federation of Associations of Relatives of
Disappeared Detainees said the convention is the only
hope of the thousands of families whose members were
abducted.
Former
government executive- turned-whistle blower Jun Lozada
said that a government resorts to enforced disappearance
“because it ran out of excuses and ways to cover up
corrupt practices.”
Lozada
who shared his abduction for six hours, cited that a
government that undertakes such practice to silence its
critics is a “criminal government.”
“It is a
government that has lost the trust of its people,”
Lozada said.
The Afad
would be launching on Tuesday an online database storing
the statistics and profile of the victims of involuntary
disappearance as well as the context of their countries
and their perpetrators. |
