Ankara
At least 99,479 people in Syria went missing from March 2011 to August 2020, a human rights watchdog said Sunday. In a report released on the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) said a vast majority of these people were picked up by the Syrian regime forces, followed by the ISIS/Daesh.
A total of 84,371 were forcibly disappeared by the Syrian regime forces, including 1,738 children and 4,982 women, it said.
An additional 8,648 individuals, including 319 children and 225 women, were disappeared by ISIS [Daesh], the report added. Stating that disappearances were on the rise since 2011, the report said 991 people according to the Syrian regime died in detention. This figure included nine children and two women, the regime said.
The report noted that the regime ‘demonstrated a lack of commitment to the international agreements and treaties it has ratified’ and that ‘approximately 65% of all detainees have become enforced-disappearance cases as the Syrian regime has never informed their families of their whereabouts.’
Syria has been ravaged by civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protesters. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced, according to UN estimates.
Today, there are organised international efforts to determine the fate of missing individuals around the globe. In the Western Balkans, for example, the ICMP pioneered the use of DNA matching and strict database informatics to locate and identify thousands of missing people. And today, 70 percent of those who disappeared following the conflicts of the early 1990s have now been accounted for.
In Libya, the ICMP said it has made remarkable progress since signing a cooperation agreement with the government in November 2012.
Alongside the Ministry for the Families of Martyrs and the Missing (MFMM), the ICMP helped develop the Libyan Identification Centre to act as a focal point for investigations across the country.
And since then, the ICMP has significantly enhanced the technical and scientific capacities of the MFMM by providing specialised training courses in forensic archaeology, crime-scene management, and DNA reference-sample collection. Altogether, the ICMP has helped authorities identify 150 individuals, and collect genetic reference samples representing more than 2,500 missing people from all over Libya. Given the political instability sweeping across the country, this is a significant result.
However, much of the organisation’s work is “intelligence-based”, meaning a lot of time is spent interviewing witnesses and survivors of political crimes before heading out into the field to search for physical evidence.
Since the outbreak of civil war in 2014, the continued threat of violence has made such operations incredibly dangerous, forcing the ICMP to suspend its Libyan mission. International organisations have come to expect such challenges in their line of work. But these difficulties have only been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic that has swept across the globe.
It is now impossible for ICRC analysts to gather large groups of people to listen for names or look through photos, and with many countries suspending travel between states or provinces, it has become extremely difficult to undertake large-scale searches.
So the ICMP helped pioneer the use of satellite imagery and spectral analysis to identify the boundaries of mass graves. According to the ICRC, their family links-tracing websites – Trace the Face Southern Africa and Trace the Face Europe – have been useful amid the limitations associated with COVID-19, as relatives can now continue their search remotely using a vast database of digital photographs.
These tools help keep the search for the missing alive. But, despite the best efforts of the ICMP and the ICRC, thousands are still left wondering about the fate of their loved ones.
It is not just about closure for the families of missing persons, but about government responsibility, justice and societal healing.
Alongside obvious ethical obligations, states also have a legal responsibility to account for the missing.—Agencies
