National 8 (Spotlight Weekly)

Pangs of Disappearances

Although most of the disappeared are men it is the women who suffer the most.

By SHREE BHAKTA KHANAL

On the day of tika last Dashain a woman along with her son and daughter arrived at Bhairbnath barracks at Maharajgunj in search of her husband. She went there with the hope of receiving tika from her husband who had gone missing for a long time. But that day her grief became too intense to bear when, as on many occasions before, security personnel in the barracks told her that her husband was not in their custody. She cried and begged with them to allow her to meet her husband who she believed was kept hidden somewhere in the barracks.

“This year’s Dashain failed to generate any enthusiasm in me,” remembers Durga KC, 29, who runs a small restaurant in an alley in Bagbazaar and is doggedly searching for her husband, Krishna KC, who went missing at the hands of security forces 14 months ago. Krishna KC is an active member of All Nepal National Independent Student Union-Revolutionary (ANNISU-R), the student wing of CPN (Maoist).

According to National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), as of November, 1191 people have gone missing at the hands of the state, 405 by the Maoists and 69 at the hands of unidentified groups, taking the total number of disappearance cases to 1665.

The majority of people gone missing at the hands of both the state and the Maoists are men. In a patriarchal society as ours a man is head of the family and also its breadwinner. So women whose husbands have been arrested suffer much economic, political and social hardship. A case in point is Durga KC. “After my husband’s arrest people stopped coming to my restaurant to eat. Friends with whom I went to buy vegetables began distancing themselves from me. I also had a misunderstanding with my landlord for some time,” she says.

Likewise, Sita Thapaliya of Phutung VDC-6, Kathmandu is in search of her missing husband, Shailendra Kumar Maskey, for the past five months. Maskey, coordinator of Newa Khal, a sister organization of CPN (Maoist), was arrested while preparing to give a list of Maoists "disappeared" by security forces to the government. The government has yet to admit to Maskey’s detention, but Sita, who works at District Development Committee, Kathmandu, claims that he is being kept at an army barrack.

She says, “The entire family should not be tortured because of the husband. I do support my husband’s political views. I oppose violent politics. The state should treat him in accordance with the law or send him to jail but should not keep his whereabouts secret. If the government does not make public his whereabouts I will also be forced to take up arms.”

Devi and Maya’s stories are more heartrending than that of Durga's and Sita's. Devi and Maya (names changed) are characters of a true story. Hailing from Dolakha, area number 2, Devi can usually be found in the office of the Maoist Victims’ Association. It is not without reason that she is afraid of telling even the name of her VDC and ward number and is reluctant to talk with the media. She has been twice evicted from her rented residence by her landlords after newspapers and TV published and broadcast news about her. Her husband (whose name she does not want to be published) was kidnapped by Maoists three years ago and she has not heard of him since. As she could not continue staying in her village for fear of the Maoists and thinking that it might be easier to search for her husband from Kathmandu, Devi came to the capital immediately after her husband’s abduction. But there was no one in Kathmandu to help her. “Whenever news (about us) is published in newspapers I am frightened that Maoists might kill (him). People won’t give you work if they find out that you are a Maoist victim,” she says.

Devi has a five-year-old daughter and is struggling to make two ends meet. “I wash dishes in two households and earn a thousand rupees. When I was with my husband in the village we sold food grains but now in Kathmandu it has become difficult to even pay for gruel. I don’t believe God has cursed anyone as severely as me,” she says, tears streaming down her face.

Maya’s condition is even more pathetic. She comes from the same place as Devi. She and her family came to Kathmandu two years ago, unable to pay the ransom of Rs 50,000 demanded by the Maoists. Her husband, who drove taxi in the capital, was kidnapped by the Maoists a year ago while on his way to Dolakha. No one has heard of him since then. Maya is living with her one-year-old daughter in a rented room at Koteshwor. At the time of her husband’s abduction she was six months into her pregnancy. Thanks to a bad experience she has had, she trusts and speaks to few people. A few months ago, she says, a man took her to a human rights organization with the promise of locating her husband. Suspicious of his motive she started inquiring about his background. Only later did she find out that he was an agent involved in trafficking girls to Mumbai. “Those who scorn at us socially make comments against us behind our backs. It is not only my case, many others are suffering this kind of mental trauma,” she says.

Durga KC’s experience tells her that such a stigma haunts all women, young or old, rich or poor, literate or illiterate. On the one hand is the grief caused by one’s husband’s forced disappearance, while on the other is the tension over how to protect oneself while leading a lonely life from ill-intentioned advances of men. She cannot afford to mull over things like her profession and career advancement.

According to the Protection Division of NHRC, it is more difficult to search for citizens gone missing at the hands of the Maoists than those kept in secret detention by the state. Says Yagya Prasad Adhikari of the Division, “Correspondence and dialogue with the government is possible but regular dialogue with the Maoists is not possible except during field visits for monitoring.” Maoists do not pay much heed to appeals made by human rights activists for immediate release of people they have abducted, whereas it has become a routine for the government to claim that people known to be in military detention have not been arrested in the first place. Thus, lots of women whose husbands have been abducted are forced to live in grief for years due to fear of the party involved in the abduction, face financial problem and lack legal help.

(The article is courtesy by - Sancharika Lekhmala /Sancharika Samuha)