Gone but not forgotten

It is an undeniable fact that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in Pakistan ‘disappear’ every year. Sometimes they reappear hours, days, weeks, months or even years afterwards. Few if any are on record as to what happened to them during their absence or who they thought abducted them. Some never show up and some show up dead. The relatives of the disappeared are usually the only people to raise their voices in support of lost loved ones and hitherto they have largely been ignored. That may be changing.

The Supreme Court on Sunday 24^th June ordered that a special cell be set up to investigate the complaints of relatives after Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar had received complaints from them during his visit to the district courts at Larkana on Saturday 23^rd. The CJ has ordered law-enforcement agencies to keep the SC human rights cell fully briefed in the course of these investigations and has further pushed the envelope of transparency by ordering the heads of all the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to attend his court — which they duly did.

The hearing is unprecedented in that it brings into the open a matter that has festered for years and been denied public examination on the grounds of ‘sensitivity’. Unfortunately the hearing was marred by protesters, most of them relatives of the missing; raising a hue and cry in and out of the court and the CJ had stern words for them. Given the heightened emotions that are in play, it is unsurprising that the pot boiled over as many of the protesters have had no chance to have their pleas heard. Despite the hearing it is unlikely that in the near term the relatives are going to get much by way of satisfaction. No agency is going to put its hand on its heart and say ‘Yes it was us’ and produce the missing yet the question of ‘who’ hangs in the air. Disappearances are not some supernatural phenomenon and if it was not agents of the state then who? We may never know, but at least questions are at last being asked.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 26^th, 2018.

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