YET another International Day of the Disappeared has come and gone, marked by protest rallies of people desperately seeking news about their missing loved ones — fathers, brothers, sons. Some disappearances go back to well over a decade, a form of cruel, ongoing collective punishment for their families. Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari said on the day that enforced disappearances have no place in a democracy. Indeed, this execrable practice is taken straight from the playbook of the most repressive regimes in history, and it only earns infamy for Pakistan in the global arena. According to the minister, the government is “moving forward” in its commitment to criminalise enforced disappearances and that the relevant draft legislation had last week been “approved unanimously” by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Interior. The bill, introduced in the Lower House in June this year, distinguished an ‘ordinary’ abduction from an enforced disappearance and stipulated imprisonment of up to 10 years for the offence. Moreover, it described the crime as “particularly heinous … not only because it removes human rights from the protection of the law” but also because of the mental torture it inflicts on the families of the missing.

This is the kind of unequivocal stance that is needed. Many voices, including within the legal community, have been raised over the years against the practice of enforced disappearances, which began taking place in KP and Balochistan and later spread to the rest of the country. The Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances has succeeded, albeit only partially, in tracing the whereabouts of the missing people. But it has failed spectacularly in holding anyone accountable, and thereby left the climate of impunity unchallenged. Speaking of impunity, in the KP Assembly on Monday the MPA from the North Waziristan tribal district brought up the issue of targeted killings in the area. According to him, 42 such incidents had taken place since January, and five people had been shot dead in the last 48 hours alone. No one, he said, had been arrested in connection with the murders and nor did the police investigate them. However, the government seemed curiously disinterested in the issue, neither responding nor rejecting his claims in the assembly. Do the MPA’s words not spark any alarm? A breakdown in law and order is the last thing one needs in an area that has only recently emerged from the grip of militancy.

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2021