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 Enforced disappearances were, in the past, not
associated with the world’s largest and most populated continent of
Asia in contrast to Latin America whose years of dictatorship and
whose victims’ families have brought to justice the perpetrators of
this most heinous of crimes. While some Asian countries were already
notorious for their bad human rights record, the Asian continent, in
general, was not blacklisted for its huge number of cases of
enforced disappearances.
Developments in recent years, however, show Asia
as the continent which submitted the most number of cases to the
United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary
Disappearances (UNWGEID). This reality prompted the UNWGEID to hold
its 75th session in May 2005 in Bangkok, Thailand. This decision was
a serious response of the UNWGEID
to the alarming phenomenon in Asia. Significant to note is that the
partial list of cases from the nine Asian countries mentioned in
“Reclaiming Stolen Lives” would have consumed over four hundred
pages of the book and this prompted us to put them into statistical
graphs to provide a bird’s eye view of the situation. The long list
of individual cases is saved on a compact disk (CD).
Prior to the birth of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary
Disappearances (AFAD), organizations working directly on the issue
were already established to respond, to varying degrees, to the
phenomenon of enforced disappearances. But they were not yet
federated to strongly respond to the problem. A close linkage with
organizations of families of the disappeared from Latin America,
Africa and Europe was not yet forged. With Asia’s diversity
in culture, religion, language, in many respects, the varying
responses of human rights organizations and families of the
disappeared were also diverse. Apart from such diversity was the
lack of cohesiveness in action as there was no unified regional
response to the
situation.
The imperative of a stronger impact and the inspiration of the Latin
American Federation of Associations of Relatives of
Disappeared-Detainees (FEDEFAM) prompted the AFAD core group
members, e.g. the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance
(FIND) in the Philippines, the Association of Parents of Disappeared
Persons (APDP) in Kashmir, India and the Organization of Parents and
Family Members of the Disappeared (OPFMD) to conceive and give birth
to their Federation.
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