Editors’ Note
Special Project: Disappearances
MARCH 5, 2024
Dictators have always known that the quickest way to stifle dissenters is to make them disappear. Today, enforced disappearances are among the most popular tools of repressive regimes, and new technologies can aid the commission and cover-up of these crimes. The United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances has documented over 60,000 cases in which citizens have been illegitimately arrested, detained, or abducted and their whereabouts concealed from the public since it was founded in 1980. At least 47,774 cases of enforced disappearance remain unresolved. Yet while the total number of disappeared is unknowable, it is undoubtedly far greater: the Syrian Network for Human Rights logged 102,287 cases in Syria from March 2011 to August 2021.
This week, we bring you a special project about survivors and victims of enforced disappearances around the world. Jack Styler documents how Tajikistan has sought to silence any and all critics of the regime both at home and abroad, sometimes resorting to kidnapping and murdering Tajik dissidents in exile. From Mexico, Lillian Perlmutter and Jared Olson report on how brigades of the bereaved risk their lives to search for their loved ones’ remains. “So-called ‘enforced disappearance’ has become a ubiquitous tactic used to hide one's crimes from view, because the Mexican criminal justice system, resting on a tight-lipped culture of impunity, almost never investigates missing persons reports,” they write. “In many areas, military and non-state armed groups are difficult to distinguish from each other, so many families are unsure whether their loved-one was killed by police, military, or cartel actors.”
And in a moving essay on the “Three Pillars of Enforced Disappearance,” Syrian writer and political dissident Yassin Al Haj Saleh writes of the toll that this tactic exacts upon everyone it touches. “The second and harshest pillar of enforced disappearance is the fact that their fate is unknown,” he writes. “We do not know if our loved ones are alive or have been killed. If the latter is true, then when, how and where? Where are their bodies?” His essay, translated from Arabic by Cara Piraino and published here in English for the first time, forces us to confront the uniquely awful power of these campaigns. With the “three pillars” of enforced detention that he identifies — detention, unknown fate, and the denial that inevitably follows — “disappearance becomes an act of annihilation, in that it cuts off all trace, completely extinguishing the disappeared person, as if they never existed at all.”
– The Editors