A Kashmiri woman with the picture of her son who went missing 17 years ago. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS.

By Athar Parvaiz
SRINAGAR, India , May 5 2014 (IPS)

Forty-seven-year-old Shahmala’s husband has been missing since 1993. In India’s restive Jammu and Kashmir state, she is what is known as a half-widow, a woman who has no clue whether her husband is dead or alive.

In December last year, a group of clerics issued a fatwa (Islamic decree) at a meeting in state capital Srinagar that women in Kashmir whose husbands had been missing for more than four years could remarry. But for Shahmala, the decree is of no consequence.While the decision has been widely welcomed, many also say it has come too late as most disappearances in Kashmir took place during the 1990s and early 2000s.

She has lost her youth, her children have grown up, and she has weathered the blows of life as a single mother for 21 years. The prospect of marriage at this stage seems remote.

“It should have come much earlier in order to help hundreds of half-widows across Kashmir remarry,” law professor Showkat Sheikh, who teaches at the Central University of Kashmir, told IPS.

According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (CCS), there are 1,500 half-widows in the state, where an insurgency since 1989 has resulted in many custodial disappearances of men. Human rights activists say most of these men were taken away by the security forces that were battling insurgents, and never seen again.

The ‘half-widows’ they leave behind are stigmatised, lonely and often under severe financial strain.

Many of these women join sit-ins by the relatives of missing persons every month in Srinagar to seek the whereabouts of their loved ones.

All these years, the half-widows of Muslim-majority Kashmir had to abide by Islam’s Hannafi school of thought that says a woman has to wait up to 90 years to marry again following the disappearance of her husband. But civil society groups appealed to Islamic scholars to find a solution to Kashmir’s problem.

The result was the new fatwa in December, a decree on remarriage coming for the first time since insurgency broke out in the state 25 years ago.

While the decision has been widely welcomed, many also say it has come too late as most disappearances in Kashmir took place during the 1990s and early 2000s. According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir, at least 8,000 people have gone missing.

Some of these cases, as Professor Sheikh observes, are 15 to 20 years old. “The half-widows who are still young might think of remarrying, but it might not be helpful for those now advanced in age,” he told IPS.

Shahmala has struggled all these years to make ends meet. Following her husband’s disappearance, her two brothers-in-law started taking care of her and her two children.

“But after four-five years, their wives wanted to live separately,” Shahmala told IPS in Lolab area, 110 km north of Srinagar. “Our family disintegrated, though my brothers-in-law continued to help with my children’s education.”

This arrangement too did not last long. Both children eventually dropped out of school. “Fatherless children can hardly study, especially when their mother is also uneducated and without any source of income,” she said.

“My son is now 21 and drives a cab to fend for the family,” Shahmala said. “Had his father been around, he would have been in a college or university. But this is what fate has chosen.”

Human rights activists say Kashmir’s half-widows do not fall under a compensation policy. The Kashmir government does give an equivalent of around 3,300 dollars to the families of those killed in militancy-related incidents.

Dr. Peerzada Mohammad Amin, who teaches sociology in Kashmir University, told IPS: “I think Islamic scholars across South Asia and particularly in our part of the world focus more on ritualistic Islam than on social problems even though it is clearly mentioned in basic Islamic literature that religion can’t be separated from politics, sociology and economy.

“In all these years, society, state and religion have failed to respond to this human problem in Kashmir. If they come forward in a committed manner, things can still be done for these women.”

In spite of societal pressures, there are many half-widows, especially the younger ones, who would like another shot at a happy married life.

Mehmooda (name changed) is only 29. When her husband went missing five years ago, they had been married for just one-and-a-half years, and was pregnant.

She has thought of remarrying but continues to live with her in-laws on their insistence. “They are very good people and they take good care of me,” she told IPS. But, she says, they didn’t agree when her parents brought a marriage proposal for her.

“While I respect my in-laws and appreciate whatever they are doing for me, I have my whole life ahead,” she said. “Things don’t always stay the same.”

Five years after the end of a bloody and protracted civil war, Sri Lanka has begun its first survey of families of the missing in order to assess their needs.

The assessment is expected to lead to recommendations for assistance and, in some cases, bring closure, say government officials and members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).The families of the missing have never been categorised as a special needs group during Sri Lanka’s post-war reconstruction phase.

In January, the ICRC made a proposal to the Sri Lankan government to carry out an evaluation of the needs of families of those who went missing in the last two and a half decades.

“We are doing this countrywide from April. We will approach a representative sampling of families of the missing and understand what their needs are,” David Quesne, ICRC deputy head of delegation in Sri Lanka, told IPS. The ministry of social welfare is the government partner for the survey.

The issue is controversial. Sri Lanka’s sectarian war began in the early 1980s, with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) demanding a separate state for minority Tamils in the north. The rebels were finally defeated by government forces in 2009.

More than 70,000 people were killed in the conflict, and estimates of the number of people missing have varied, with some putting it as high as 40,000.

The ICRC only registers details of missing persons once a tracing request is received. Quesne said right now the ICRC has over 16,000 such requests dating back to the 1990s.

Last month, Sri Lanka rejected a resolution at the Geneva-based U.N. Human Rights Council that requested the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to launch an investigation into alleged rights violations, including the issue of the missing. Foreign minister Gamini Laksham Peiris said the government would not support any such inquiry.

“We are continuing with national mechanisms,” he said, highlighting the work done with the ICRC and a needs assessment of the war displaced carried out with the U.N.

Gwenaelle Fontana, ICRC protection officer in Sri Lanka, told IPS that the survey would be island-wide and would use a sample selection of families. “The initial idea is to assess the needs of these families. We will assess all the aspects – economic, administrative, legal and psycho-social,” she said.

The sample will include families of members of the armed forces listed as missing.

“It will be a precious tool for the authorities in designing policy in favour of such families,” Fontana said.

The families of the missing have never been categorised as a special needs group during Sri Lanka’s post-war reconstruction phase.

“That is unfair because we have a unique set of needs. We have to look for our missing loved ones while making sure the family is provided for,” said the mother of a missing person from northern Kilinochchi who did not wish to be identified.

Sri Lankan officials have indicated plans to assist the families of the missing. A presidential commission on the missing is set to conclude by August. It has so far has received 16,000 complaints.

The ICRC survey is likely to conclude towards the end of the year, and officials say the report will be handed over to the government for action.

Between late 2008 and April 2009, the ICRC had evacuated around 14,000 people in need of medical attention. But later some of them were reported untraceable.

“We have received requests from families or close relatives of evacuees that they had lost track of,” Quesne said.

The ICRC began looking for the missing evacuees in January in the northern district of Jaffna. By late March, at least 26 cases had been successfully traced.

Fontana told IPS that the government authorities had shown interest in issuing ‘certificates of absence’ for the missing, instead of ‘death certificates’. Such a certificate eases legal and administrative work like pension payments and dealing with legal documents like land deeds.

“The authorities have expressed much interest. But as adaptation of the legislative framework is always complex, the process of issuing certificates of absence will naturally take time,” Fontana said.

Adhri Rajbanshi, 70, from Jhapa district in eastern Nepal has been looking for her missing son since 2003. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS.

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO/KATHMANDU, Oct 17 2013 (IPS)

Some call it ‘frozen loss,’ a point in time that families and relatives find almost impossible to extricate themselves out of, even years after their loved ones have disappeared.

“The families of the missing get into a [state of] tunnel vision,” says Bhava Poudyal, mental health delegate for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Azerbaijan. He is talking about the thousands of families still searching for their loved ones who have gone missing in his native Nepal, or in Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and dozens of other countries.

It’s a situation that does not let go of its captives easily. “Their lives are dominated by the missing, there is no release,” he tells IPS. “They live with the ambivalence of hope and despair day in and day out.”“Everyone seeks answers all the time, the state of ambiguous loss is torture."

It’s a condition Santhikumar, a bicycle repairman in his forties in Oddusudan village of the Mullaitivu district in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, is all too familiar with. It has been four years since his brother-in-law went missing during the final stages of the Sri Lankan military’s war against the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in April 2009.

Santhikumar has been helping his sister and her two daughters make ends meet even as he joins them in the search for the breadwinner of their family. He has visited every official detention centre in the north and nearby areas, but with no luck so far.

“People come and tell us that they saw him on this location on this day. So we go looking for him there,” he says. “But we have not found anything concrete yet.”

The family has got used to the never-ending search, he adds. “There are good days and bad days. Mostly we are okay, but there are days when my sister just stares aimlessly for hours, or when her daughters break down crying. Birthdays are the hardest, the girls have so many memories of appa (father).”

Some 2,300 km and a whole country away, Rena Mecha shares the same feeling of despair in the Jalthal village of Jhapa district in eastern Nepal. The 36-year-old mother of a boy and girl, 16 and 14 respectively, has been searching for her husband who went missing during the pro-democracy movement in the country in 2006. “I lost everything when he went missing,” she tells IPS. “Nothing can bring that life back.”

The current ICRC documentation shows that around 1,400 people have been missing in Nepal since the 2006 peace agreement. In the country’s rural areas, the wives of the missing men desist from calling themselves widows, as that would entail a whole new set of complications, like having to dress in white and being considered a ‘bad presence’ by others.

In southern Sri Lanka too, the immediate community has ostracised women who have accepted that their missing husbands are dead, accusing them of betraying their husbands, says Ananda Galappatti, a medical anthropologist who works with the families of the missing in the country.

In Azerbaijan, says Poudyal, many families continue to cook meals and set a plate for a missing person even long after their disappearance. Close to 4,600 people went missing during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between the republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“It is the constant state of waiting which makes closure very difficult, if not impossible,” Zurab Burduli, the ICRC protection delegate in Sri Lanka, tells IPS.

Galappatti says the families are assailed by an identity crisis that can be exacerbated by the social environment. “Am I a married woman or a widow? Am I a child without a father? Am I a parent whose daughter is dead?  Planning for the future becomes extremely difficult in this situation,” he tells IPS.

In Sri Lanka, the number of missing persons is a contentious issue. A presidential task force set up to investigate the southern insurrection by the Janata Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP) in the late 1980s recorded at least 30,000 cases of missing people in 1995. The ICRC has a current caseload of 16,090 missing persons in Sri Lanka dating back from 1990.

According to Burduli, the first step in assisting these families is to recognise their complex situation and devise assistance plans targeting them.

“The ICRC’s experience around the world shows that because of the complexity of the needs and their multi-disciplinary nature, coordinative national mechanisms are best suited to address those needs in a comprehensive and consistent manner,” he says.

In Nepal, the families of the missing admit that once the national tracing programme began following the 2006 peace agreement, their situation improved slightly.

“I was the only one in my village with someone missing, I felt so alone,” says Mecha. “Now at least there are people who understand my situation.”

Grassroots groups provide families psychosocial support here, something that is yet to take root in Sri Lanka.

“It is imperative that any public process also includes the psychosocial accompaniment of families – with sensitive and skilled practitioners on hand to support families as they prepare for or go through these processes,” says Galapatti.

At the same time, officials with the Nepali Red Cross who work as tracing officers warn that the process of dealing with the families is slow and time-consuming.

“Everyone seeks answers all the time, the state of ambiguous loss is torture,” says Shubadhra Devkota from the Nepali Red Cross.

Nanda Prasad Adhikari and his wife Ganga Maya on their fast in front of the prime minister's residence in Kathmandu. Credit: Bimal Chandra Sharma/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

When the police finally arrested a man this month in the Nepali capital for the murder of a teenager nine years ago, it became a matter of life and death for Nanda Prasad Adhikari and his wife Ganga Maya.

The 18-year-old victim, abducted and killed brutally by Maoist guerrillas in 2004 when the communist insurgency was at its peak, was their son.

Driven by anger and frustration that the killers had not been punished even seven years after the insurrection ended, the couple had been on a fast unto death in Kathmandu, and had to be admitted to hospital.“The era of royal regimes has not ended..."

The arrest, along with an assurance by the interim government that the killing would be investigated and the victim’s family paid compensation, led the Adhikaris to end their fast after 47 days.

But Subodh Pyakurel, head of Nepal’s largest human rights organisation Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), has misgivings about the state’s promise.

“The era of royal regimes has not ended,” Pyakurel told IPS, referring to the two years from 2005 when Nepal’s ambitious king Gyanendra discarded his figurehead role to grab power in an army-backed putsch.

The following two years saw some of the worst human right violations by both the army and the guerrillas and an escalation in killings, abductions and disappearances. Despite the subsequent abolition of monarchy, there is a general feeling that the succeeding elected governments were as dictatorial as the royal regime.

“The Maoists [who came to power after signing a peace pact and winning the 2008 elections] have shown as much disregard for the law as the [ousted] king. They have not only failed to punish cadres responsible for the atrocities during their ‘people’s war’, but also promoted the army and security personnel guilty of similar crimes.”

INSEC’s Human Rights Yearbook 2013 recorded 13,276 deaths in the decade-old civil war that erupted in 1996 when the Maoists walked out of parliament and went underground to wage war against the state demanding equality and the abolition of monarchy.

Over 1,000 people disappeared. None have been found yet.

But not one extrajudicial killing, abduction, rape or torture has been punished though the Maoists and other major political parties signed a peace agreement in 2006 pledging to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to punish war crimes, and a commission to investigate the fate of the disappeared.

Seven years later, the two commissions are yet to materialise.

“As a victim and activist, I am frustrated that not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice so far,” says Jitman Basnet, a lawyer and former editor whose articles earned him the wrath of both the army and the Maoists.

In 2002, the Maoists abducted Basnet for criticising their excesses and their destruction of public property, and threatened him with dire consequences.

The following year, the army came after him for writing about a mass killing that was a deliberate ploy to provoke the Maoists into breaking off peace negotiations with the government.

Basnet remained imprisoned for over eight months in a notorious underground prison run by the army, constantly blindfolded and handcuffed. Along with the other illegally detained prisoners, he was regularly assaulted, given electric shocks and tortured in other ways.

Many of the camp inmates disappeared and have not been heard of since.

After his release, Basnet wrote a book, ‘258 Dark Days’, chronicling the information he had gathered on illegal detention, enforced disappearances and torture.

“I disclosed the names of the army officials involved in human rights abuses at the barracks, hoping it would help investigations into the army’s atrocities and human rights violations,” he told IPS.

The book created a furore and brought him threats, but not one officer was punished.

Basnet then filed three cases in the Supreme Court. One of them was against top army officials as well as King Gyanendra himself. Basnet contended that since the king was the supreme commander of the army, the ultimate culpability for the illegal arrests, torture, disappearances and killings was his.

He also took the cases to U.N. and other international forums. And still, nothing happened.

“No commission has been formed to investigate past crimes,” he said. “The political parties and the government are willing to give amnesty to the perpetrators.”

The army has steadfastly refused to punish its tainted officers. It has only promoted them and given them plum postings. One of them, Col Kumar Lama, served with U.N. peacekeeping forces.

This year, when Lama was arrested for war crimes by British officials while visiting his family in Sussex, Nepal’s government protested, calling it a violation of Nepal’s sovereignty.

The Maoists too have ignored public outrage, appointing at least two leaders as ministers though both were named in torture and murder cases and a court ordered the arrest of one of them.

“We need a relentless campaign for justice,” said Janak Raut, president of the Conflict Victims’ Society for Justice, a platform of about 100 people who suffered either at the hands of the army, Maoists or armed groups and vigilantes that have sprung up in southern Nepal emboldened by the culture of impunity.

After staging public protests and filing lawsuits, society has now turned to social media to widen its campaign with a recently opened Facebook page.

Raut said fresh elections, announced in November to complete the drafting of the new constitution, will not help the victims.

“The election will be won by the same leaders who will keep on shielding the guilty because all of them are involved,” he told IPS. “But justice will be delivered eventually, by the people united against their oppressors.

“It may take time but as history has shown, it will come.”