Nakkali Budhamagar had given birth to her first child, when the ‘people’s war’ was launched in Rolpa in 1996. She was so focused on raising her child that she hardly noticed the rebellion around her. It was only when her husband Buddhiman, a school teacher, was interrogated by security forces on charges of being a Maoist sympathiser that they decided to move to Kathmandu in 2003.
Buddhiman left for Malaysia after that. However, when he returned in 2005, he could not make it beyond the airport. His whereabouts remain unknown to this day.
Nakkali’s story is one of the 932 cases (INSEC data) of disappearance during a decade-long Maoist insurgency. According to a report of the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) released on the eve of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on Thursday, about 90 percent of the missing are males, while 66 percent of them were married when they disappeared.
Seven years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA), the government has not made public the whereabouts of the missing. Although families of the disappeared find the government’s interim relief package ‘ridiculous,’ the bankrupt wives of the missing men are left with no option but to accept it. “I had to take the money despite that fact that I lost my husband. It was never a bargain for money but the state treated like one,” she says. “Accepting the amount was painful, but I had no other option.”
The CPA had committed to make public the whereabouts of the disappeared within six months of the signing of the accord. However, nothing of that sort has happened so far. The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) identified 846 cases of disappearance s and recommended the government take action, but in vain.
The bill for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was brought in through an ordinance. However, that too landed into controversy for failing to meet international standards. Legal experts and rights activists say the bill is fraught with problems.
A group of victims jointly filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court in March, challenging the ordinance. Among other things, they demanded that the provision of blanket amnesty on serious human rights violations be scrapped. The SC has postponed hearings on the case five times.
International rights institutions, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights‚ Human Rights Watch and International Commission of Jurists, have already objected to the ordinance.
“We are not hoping for anything to happen from the government side as the chief justice himself is the executive head,” says Ram Kumar Bhandari, founder of the National Network of Families of Disappeared and Missing. Bhandari’s father was detained and disappeared by the state in 2001. “The government has violated our cultural rights and snatched away our dignity by not making public the whereabouts of our family members,” he says.
While the families of the disappeared are in a limbo as they don’t know whether they should be performing the last rites of their loved ones, this fact has exposed women in particular to abuses and social discrimination.
The ICTJ report says that the wives of the disappeared are considered neither ‘wives’ nor ‘widows’ and that they lack a ‘recognisable social status’ in Nepali society.
“It is hard to accept that my husband is dead until I see his body,” Nakkali says.
Transitional Justice Advocacy Group, a loose network of NGOs, INGOs and victims’ groups actively working in the field of human rights and transitional justice, is organising a series of programmes to commemorate the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Through the programmes, it plans to raise awareness on the issue of enforced disappearance s.
“Political parties tried to protect their interests instead of protecting the rights of the victims,” NHRC member Ram Nagina Singh told an interaction organised by the NHRC here on Thursday.
And now with the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, there is no parliament to discuss the non-compliance of recommendations made by the NHRC to take action against those responsible for the disappearances, Singh said.
Friday 30 August 2013
http://ekantipur.com/2013/08/30/headlines/Disappeared-mens-wives-bearing-the-brunt-Report/377222/
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