Why the missing went ‘missing’ from records in Bangladesh

Denials occupy a strange space in politics. Saying that something didn’t happen can (and often does) make people sit up and take notice of that which is being denied. So, when the Bangladesh government denied the occurrence of any enforced disappearance for years — calling some cases “comical”, and dismissing others as those of debt-ridden businessmen and philanderers on the run — it never seemed to land.Human rights bodies kept compiling reports of people who disappeared after a brush with State agencies, news organisations documented stories of those who made it back, and international organisations repeated mildly chastising statements urging Bangladesh to either acknowledge the cases as violations or to let external bodies come in and assess the allegations. Not much happened, though, as the government responded the way it always had — with denial and finger-pointing.Now, the interim government that has taken charge of Bangladesh after the collapse of the Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina has said it will investigate every single case of enforced disappearance and that it will form a commission to do so.Bangladesh is also expected to finally sign the United Nations (UN) convention on protecting people from enforced disappearance, which came into force in 2010 and has 98 signatories so far, by the end of this week.If the interim government were to follow through on its promise, what would be the scale of this undertaking? What could we reasonably glean from the untested compendium of reports from non-profits? And why has it been so hard to secure a credible response from Bangladesh to the allegations for well over a decade? !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r What do we know of these disappearances?The nature of the violation means that concrete evidence or hard data are difficult to come by or even assess. What has accumulated over more than a decade is a series of accounts by those who were detained or their families. One such case, reported by AFP, is a fairly unsettling example of how enforced disappearance cases are said to unfold.It is the story of Ahmad Bin Quasem, a lawyer. His father was a senior member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Islamist party of Bangladesh, and was accused of and then indicted for running a group that tortured people who supported the call for independence in what was then East Pakistan. Quasem was his father’s legal counsel.One night, he told AFP, men in plainclothes picked him up from his house, threw him into a car, and whisked him away to a location he could not identify. His father was executed a month later. This was in 2016. For three years after that, Quasem did not know his father had been hanged — he came to know only because a jailer told him by mistake.Quasem said he was detained in solitary confinement, with no contact with anything that might give him a sense of the passage of time or the world outside. Then, one day, he was blindfolded and handcuffed before being led out of his cell. He was certain he would be executed. Instead, he was bundled into a vehicle and dumped somewhere outside Dhaka. He had survived, and it had been eight years since he was picked up. Hasina had fled the country hours ago.In an account recounted to Human Rights Watch, Quasem’s sister said that the men who had picked him up did not have an arrest warrant. When his wife filed a complaint with the police, his sister added, she was not allowed to mention that the men who took her husband away were law enforcement officials — she had to say they were men in civil clothes.At the heart of this account, and that of many whose loved ones were taken away, is the shadow of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) — Bangladesh’s elite paramilitary force, set up in 2004 with members of the police, armed forces and intelligence services.A 2017 broadcast by Sveriges Radio, Sweden’s national radio, played a recording of a high-ranking officer talking about the enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings the RAB undertakes.In 2021, the US imposed sanctions on the RAB and seven of its current and former officers for being complicit in or engaging in “serious human rights abuse” — referring to, among other violations, the hundreds of cases of reported forced disappearances. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/obBWyiVaft8?si=v6x6RzoZFCGsK5P8The other unit often named in these accounts but not as often under the international scanner is DB, or Detective Branch, a branch of the police that deals with “serious” cases. Of the 700-odd enforced disappearance cases documented since 2009 by the human rights non-profit Odhikar, 204 were of people believed to have been picked up by the RAB, 232 by the Detective Branch and 12 by both or either.Accounts compiled by Human Rights Watch give an indication of how things are said to unfold. A factory worker, Mohammad Hasanul Islam Hasan, was allegedly picked up by men who identified themselves as members of the RAB in 2012 days after an altercation with RAB officials. His bike had hit an RAB vehicle and broken the rearview mirror. Hasan entered into an argument with the men, and the RAB filed a case against him. Hasan went into hiding, but was found by unidentified men and detained.His family never knew what happened to him, and police reportedly refused to file a complaint. And, his family said, the police and the RAB denied that he had been picked up at all. He was never found. Nor were two others who were with him when the altercation happened — Mohammad Bozlur Pradhan and Mohammad Mintu Prodhan.But where do the men go? The solitary confinement that Quasem referred to is believed to be one of the secret prisons that Bangladeshi rights bodies and media have often referred to as the Aynaghar, or house of mirrors — a wry reference to the detention facility where all you see is yourself.After Hasina’s exit, Bangladesh’s The Daily Star published four accounts from people who said they had been detained in these secret prisons. One of those is of Bangladesh’s former ambassador to Vietnam and a retired captain of the Bangladesh Army, M Maroof Zaman.He said he was detained in a small room with a wooden bed and a CCTV camera. There was little for him to guess where he was, but he latched onto whatever he could. For instance, any medicine he was given had ‘defence medicine, trading prohibited’ written on them, he said. The Quran he got upon request was marked ‘Section Headquarters Library’, he added.He heard planes go by, as well as trains. Names and dates had been scratched onto the walls, probably by past prisoners in desperation for a sense of grounding — but they had been painted over. He was released after a year and a half, in 2019, and dropped off near his house in the dead of the night.But there are many whose families say are yet to be traced. In Bangladesh’s colloquial usage, those who go missing after a brush with State-backed agencies are said to have gone “goom”, or vanished. As of now, Human Rights Watch estimates suggest 86 people picked up by security agencies remain missing. medium nocaption112360475When is the case of a missing person one of ‘enforced disappearance’?By the internationally accepted understanding of enforced disappearance, it is when there is a degree of involvement of the State and its agencies. The term ‘disappearance’ was recognised as a State-backed practice in the 1970s, when a group of lawyers in Chile realised that many prisoners they were representing simply fell off the radar.Around the same time, what was then East Pakistan fought the battle that came to be known as the Bangladesh Liberation War — during which enforced disappearances were one of the many war crimes that took place.It could even be argued that enforced disappearances as a feature of the political space in most regions of the world, including South Asia, is hard to contest. But the scale on which cases were reported in Bangladesh 2009 onwards brought it up on the global rights radar prominently.The UN convention (the one which Bangladesh has not signed so far and the interim government says it will) says an enforced disappearance is:“the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorisation, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which places such a person outside the protection of the law.”The thing is, Bangladesh doesn’t acknowledge the difference. In its report submitted for the Universal Periodic Review (a peer review of human rights records of UN member states) in 2013, Bangladesh had said that its own legal regime “does not contain any reference to ‘disappearance’/‘enforced disappearance’.” The legally recognised term, it added, was kidnapping or abduction.It referred to a “tendency” to imply that State-backed agencies like the RAB were behind these abductions but qualified this by saying that the RAB had arrested more than 500 people impersonating law enforcement officials, including those who had been involved in such abductions.When the UN wanted a team to visit the country and assess the findings, Bangladesh refused. And in any case, then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina had told her country’s parliament in 2017, citizens vanish all the time. Hundreds of thousands of people in the UK disappear, as do those in the US. Bangladesh, she argued, was in no way unique.By the following Universal Periodic Review in 2018, the narrative of the fake security official who abducted people was anchored further. Bangladesh said 267 “impostors” who pretended to be police officers had been arrested, while also listing instances of its own errant security officials whom it had punished for criminal behaviour. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/OUILCXGGoHY?si=GCKBXFvrG1D9VpgqTill 2023, a large part of the basic argument remained the same — the country’s penal code covers all abduction cases (including those by law enforcement officials), any law enforcement official suspected to be involved in a crime is prosecuted (with a reference to 1,692 criminal cases filed against them between 2015 and 2023), and the prevalence of “miscreants” disguising themselves as law enforcement officials to kidnap people.In that report, Bangladesh did say it was engaging with the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance on a list of 76 cases of enforced disappearance that the panel had shared. Nine persons had been found.For the rest, Bangladesh added the caveats some accusations were too old (up to 27 years), two were foreign nationals about whom there was little information, families of 10 people did not cooperate with investigating officials, and 28 had been accused of crimes before they went missing.This last group of people, the government added, was that of people who had been charged with criminal cases and, so, it presumed they were “absconding to avoid justice”.Months later, Hasina stands accused of abduction and torture by a lawyer who says he was abducted by security officials, detained, and tortured for six months. And it is Hasina who is absconding.Meanwhile, Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Hasina’s party Awami League’s rival, is in a position of power after Hasina’s departure, with palpable influence over the interim government.The interim government’s announcement about investigating each case of enforced disappearance may have come from a position of a moral high ground, but it was the BNP that set up the RAB — then-prime minister Khaleda Zia had praised the RAB for its “courageous and non-partisan campaign for curbing terrorism”.At that point, the Awami League was not keen on the idea of a force with sweeping powers and had said: “There is a widespread saying, ‘How can a man be certain that his death is imminent? The answer is, when he is caught by RAB or other special forces of the ruling party’.”When the Awami League came to power, it did nothing about the RAB while the number of enforced disappearances went up. The BNP started demanding that the RAB be disbanded. Now that the BNP is close to power, will it actually do something to get it disbanded? It will not be surprising if it doesn’t — the clamour for human rights issues in South Asian politics has always been the strongest when a party is in the opposition, and seldom when it is in power.