Forced disappearance

"Desaparecidos" redirects here, for the United States band see Desaparecidos (band).

A forced disappearance occurs when an organization forces a person to vanish from public view, either by murder or by simple sequestration. The victim is first kidnapped, then illegally detained in concentration camps, often tortured, and finally executed and their corpse hidden. In Spanish, "disappeared people" are called "desaparecidos", a term which specifically refers to the mostly South American victims of state terrorism during the 1970s and the 1980s, in particular concerning Operation Condor.

According to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force on July 1, 2002, "forced disappearances" qualify as a crime against humanity, which thus cannot be subject to statute of limitation.

Typically, a murder will be surreptitious, with the body disposed of in such a way as to never be found. The person simply vanishes. The party committing the murder has deniability, as there is no dead body to show that the victim is actually dead. Furthermore, the perpetrators of disappearance often go to great lengths to obscure or eliminate all mention of the disappeared, by altering the historical record and encouraging the silence of surviving relatives. In Chile and Argentina, for example, the infamous "death flights" were used during operation Condor by the military juntas to dispose of the victims' bodies at sea. Since the bodies couldn't be found decades later, those responsible for human right violations claimed that the statute of limitations impeded any trial. However, in Chile, judge Juan Guzmán Tapia would create, by jurisprudence, the felony of "permanent sequestration": he argued that since the bodies couldn't be found, the statute of limitations couldn't be applied since the sequestration continued and was still in effect. Juan Guzmán thus ensured the possibility of bringing to trial some of the Chilean military men involved, even though the amnesty law of 1978 continues to apply, since the democratic government has not yet abrogated it.

Linguistic considerations

In the case of forced disappearance the word "disappear", which is normally an intransitive verb, becomes transitive. Therefore, victims are referred to as the "disappeared". They have been "disappeared" by whomever, and those responsible are charged with "disappearing" him or her. Some people uncomfortable with the passive use of this term prefer to say that someone "was made to disappear". Both phrases are usually considered doublespeak euphemisms. The verb desaparecer, like its English translation disappear, is grammatically intransitive, but it is used in this sense to imply causativity (so desaparecidos are people who were "made to disappear").

Well known incidents

The term desaparecidos specifically refers to South America's "Dirty War", particularly in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, which cooperated together, along with other dictatorships, in operation Condor. However, the term may be used in other contexts. NGOs such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch recense in their annual report the number of forced disappearances cases.

Mafia

In what is probably the best known non-governmental case, the mafia is said to have "disappeared" U.S. trade-unionist Jimmy Hoffa, doing away with his body in a way that ensured it was never found.

Nazi Germany

During World War II, Nazi Germany set up secret police forces including branches of the Gestapo in occupied countries, which they used to hunt down known or suspected dissidents or partisans. This tactic was given the name Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) to describe those who disappeared after being arrested by Nazi forces without any warning. The Nazis also applied this policy against political opponents within Germany. Most victims were killed on the spot or sent to concentration camps, with the full expectation that they would be killed.

Northern Ireland's "Troubles"

In "The Troubles" of Northern Ireland dozens of people on all sides were disappeared, the most infamous case being that of mother of ten, Jean McConville, who was abducted, tortured and murdered by the Provisional IRA in 1972. She had been accused of being an informer. Her body was discovered by accident in 2003. Another well known case is that of Columba McVeigh, a seventeen year old catholic who was murdered by the IRA in 1975 on suspicion of being an informer. The most recent case was that of Lisa Dorrian, who disappeared in February 2005. At first, she was filed as 'missing'. Then 9 days after her dissapearence, a murder enquiry was started. She is thought to have been killed by the Loyalist Volunteer Force.

Operation Condor and Argentina's Dirty War

During Argentina's "Dirty War" and operation Condor, political dissidents were forced to jump out of airplanes far out over the Atlantic Ocean, leaving no trace of their passing. Without any dead bodies, the government could deny they had been killed. People murdered in this way (and in others) are today referred to as "the disappeared" (los desaparecidos), and this is where the modern use of the term derives. An activist group called "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo", formed by mothers of those victims of the dictatorship, were the inspiration for a song by Irish rock band U2, Mothers of the Disappeared (see also the Valech Report for Chile). Boris Weisfeiler is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad, a German colony founded by Nazi Paul Schäfer in Chile which was used as a detention center by the DINA, the secret police.

Between 1976 and 1983, in Argentina, it is thought that up to 30,000 dissidents (9,000 according to the official report by the CONADEP ^*), and people connected to them, were subject to forced disappearance under the military junta that was in power. From bits and pieces of information collected from military officers involved in the so-called "Dirty War", many victims were sedated and dumped from airplanes into the Río de la Plata (today these are called vuelos de la muerte, flights of death). Other people were held in torture and detention centres; the most notorious one was the Navy's Mechanics Training School (ESMA) in the Núñez district of Buenos Aires.

Many women gave birth in captivity, and their children were given illegally in adoption to families of military or police personnel, or their friends, while their mothers were killed soon after. The task of locating these children and restoring their lost identity has been going on ever since the restoration of democracy in 1983, and has been key in unveiling the atrocities committed by some people otherwise protected by the laws that mandated an end to the trials of former military government officials, or by the pardon granted by President Carlos Menem in 1999, since appropriating children from their mothers is a crime that lies outside the scope of military procedures, and thus also outside any kind of amnesty law or pardon that implies orders in a military context.

Soviet Union

In the modern era, the method was first used in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge. When someone was purged, secret police (in this case the GPU or OGPU of the NKVD) would take them away to a police building or a remote location to be killed, usually in the dead of night. If the victims were important people, artists would airbrush them out of photographs; books, records, and histories would be recalled, rewritten, or redacted; pictures, busts, and statues would be taken down; people would be discouraged from talking about them; and the government would never mention them again. It was as if the disappeared had never existed. Millions were sent to Gulags as forced labor, but always on the strict understanding that, if they were to be released, they should keep quiet about their treatment.

United States' War on Terror

Various press reports, including allegations by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Dana Priest, accuse the United States of disappearing over one-hundred suspected terrorists to black sites throughout Eastern Europe or to foreign countries known to torture suspects for information as part of the United States' War on Terrorism. The practice, sometimes known as extraordinary rendition, has been subject to intense scrutiny by the world press and some European governments. Irene Khan of Amnesty International criticized the practice in a 2005 speech in front of the Foreign Press Association:

"Guantanamo has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law. If Guantanamo evokes images of Soviet repression, "ghost detainees" – or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring back the practice of "disappearances" so popular with Latin American dictators in the past." ^*

Western Sahara

Further information: Human rights in Western Sahara and Years of Lead

Since Morocco invaded Western Sahara in 1975, somewhere around 1,500 suspected Polisario-sympathizers and other independence activists have been abducted. In several cases, whole families were taken in retaliation for Sahrawis joining the Polisario forces in Tindouf, Algeria. The disappeared were subjected to severe torture, and held in secret detention camps such as Tazmamart where many died due to poor conditions or lack of medical treatment. In the early 90s, hundreds of Sahrawis were released and others proclaimed dead after the signing of a cease-fire between Morocco and the Polisario, but approximately 500 remain unaccounted for. Many of the released prisoners have since been re-arrested for protesting their detention.

Disappearances in human rights law

In international human rights law, disappearances at the hand of the state have been codified as enforced or forced disappearances. For example, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court defines enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity, and the practice is specifically addressed by the OAS's Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons.

Disappearances work on two levels: not only do they effectively silence those opposition members who have disappeared, they also sow uncertainty and terror in the wider community in general, thus silencing other opposition voices, current and potential alike. Disappearances entail the violation of a series of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. For the disappeared person, these include the right to liberty, the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the right to a fair trial, to legal counsel, and to equal protection under the law, the right of presumption of innocence, et cetera. The families, who often spend the rest of their lives in searches for remains of the disappeared, also become victims of the disappearance's effects.

Metaphorical use

The idea of forced disappearance, along with the transitive verb "disappeared", have entered the popular lexicon of the United States, and are now routinely extended to political or social commentary. Upper mid-level government officials who are unpopular, or who have spoken publicly against their superiors are frequently disappeared (e.g., former FEMA Director Michael D. Brown or former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill). Embarrassing documents that are supposedly lost in transit or otherwise unavailable are also said to have been disappeared.

Film

Imagining Argentina (2003). Directed by Christopher Hampton.
La historia oficial (1985). Directed by Luis Puenzo.
Missing (1982). Directed by Costa-Gavras.

External links

Desaparecidos.org (in English & Spanish)
"The Commissar Vanishes" — Nikolai Yezhov airbrushed out of a picture with Stalin;
The International Commission on Missing Persons
Kausfiles, February 14, 2004 (includes example of metaphorical usage of the term in U.S. political discourse)
The Vanished Gallery
University of Ulster's CAIN website page on The Disappeared

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