KATHMANDU, NEPAL – Chandra Kumari Basnet, 63, stands outside the central office of the Maoists, the Communist Party of Nepal, in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, to address a group of fellow protesters.
“Where are my sons?” she asks them with moist eyes. “What is their condition? Let me know!”
Basnet is wrapped in a red saree. Bangles clink on her wrist, and glass beads adorn her neck. Dried tears stain her wrinkled face.
And she is not alone. Hundreds of protesters carry photographs of their missing family members. Some carry red banners that read: “Give us information about the missing people.” “Punish the perpetrators.” “Basic needs for the families of the missing people.”
Eventually, the protesters’ eyes and faces show their tiredness. They lay down their placards on the ground in font of them, tired physically and emotionally of having to fight six years after the war ended.
Basnet too holds photos of her two sons who went missing during Nepal’s civil war.
“Why does nobody understand our pain and plight?” she asks.
Back in 2003 when Nepal’s civil war was escalating, her sons, Puspa Basnetand Dhirendra Basnet, 26 and 20 at the time, were studying in Kathmandu.
“I thought my sons would have a better future if they studied in colleges in Kathmandu,” Basnet says.
But in November of that year, both of her sons disappeared. She has not heard from them since and doesn’t know their whereabouts – or whether they are even still alive.
“They left home for better education, but I don’t know in what state they are in,” she says, choking up.
Both of Basnet’s sons were involved in student groups affiliated with the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) political party that led the prolonged civil war against Nepal’s ancient monarchy. Basnet says she used to endure sleepless nights thinking of the dangers awaiting her sons because of their involvement with these groups.
When she heard that the Royal Nepalese Army had arrested her sons, she says she felt relieved, believing that her sons would not die in the fighting. But then, she never learned where the army took them.
Basnet started living on the hope that they were alive in prison somewhere and would be released some day. The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) became the ruling party during 2008 after the Constitent Assembly declared Nepal a republic and removed King Gyanendra Shah from power.
She came to the capital eight years ago from her hometown, Damak, which lies nearly 400 miles east of Kathmandu, in search of her missing sons. Yet nearly a decade after leaving her house, farm and livestocks behind, she still does not know where her sons are.
“Every morning, I have a hope that my sons will be found,” she says. “And at the end [of] each day, the hope dies. I have been living in the same condition for the last eight years, and I even don’t know whether my sons are alive or dead.”
She says the government disbursed some funds for the families of missing people.
“The government has provided some relief, but that was not enough for us to sustain our lives,” Basnet says. “Therefore, I sold my land to survive.”
Basnet says she and others have visited government offices and met political leaders of different parties, all who showered her with promises that they never kept. So the families of the missing people have united to form the Missing Family Society, a support group that organizes protests and demonstrations to pressure their nation’s leaders to listen to them.
But Basnet says she’s not sure how effective their efforts are.
“Whatever we do, they do not listen to us,” she says with dismay.
Since her sons went missing, Basnet says there is no happiness in her life. She does not celebrate any of the national festivals and hasn’t even cooked a proper meal for herself in years.
“If it was death, I could have overcome it in few months or a year,” she says. “It is the uncertainty that is insufferable.”
Tears well up in her eyes again.
“Give me my son[s] or give me [their bodies],” Basnet pleads.
Six years after the civil war here formally ended, families of people who went missing during it say they are still waiting to hear whether their loved ones are alive or dead. Many mothers and wives have indebted themselves in the seemingly endless search for their children and husbands. International human rights organizations note that the government has yet to make good on two promises in the peace agreement ending the war: to publish the status of all missing people and to seek justice for the disappeared. Government officials say that they’re in the process of writing a law to create the commissions to pursue these goals.
In February of 1996, the political party that came to be known as the Maoists began an armed insurgency against the government, which led to a civil war. The war came to an end in November 2006 after the Maoists and the government signed the Comprehensive Peace Accord. Nepal is now in a state of transition, and the peace process is ongoing.
But there is still no comprehensive list of the people who went missing during the war. The Informal Sector Service Center, a nongovernmental organization working for human rights and social justice, reports that the former government is responsible for 825 forced disappearances while the Maoists are responsible for 112. The National Human Rights Commission, an independent and autonomous constitutional body, has reports of 845 forced disappearances by the government and 166 by the Maoists. The official data posted on the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction website puts the disappearances at 1,500, without attributing numbers to either side.
While Basnet attributes the disappearance of her sons to the army, Purni Maya Lama, another mother, says her husband was disappeared by Maoists.
Lama, who is from the district of Kavre, says that her husband, Arjun Lama, went missing in April 2005 during the civil war. After he was elected as chairman of their village’s school management committee, three people he did not know in the village asked him to follow them for an important task. Lama says that she hasn’t seen him since.
“What had my husband done?” she asks vehemently. “Why did they make him disapear?”
Lama led a simple life as a homemaker. Her husband was the breadwinner for the family. For the first few days after he disappeared, she says she felt as if her whole world had crumbled around her. She soon realized, though, that she needed to be strong and build it back up for her children.
But with the only economic support for their family gone, her children had to drop out of school.
“Our tears flowed like this river,” she says, pointing to the Bagmati River.
She treasures the letter sent by her husband a few days after he went missing that said: “I will be back soon. Please don’t worry about me.” The words filled her with hope. But after months of waiting, there was no sign of him.
She began to search for him and has visited all the nearby villages. She even searched the local forest, thinking he had been killed there, but to no avail.
Lama sought the help of local Maoist supporters, who demanded money in exchange for the return of her husband. She sold her jewelry and borrowed money to pay them 500,000 rupees ($5,700). But this didn’t get her husband back. Instead, they threatened to kill her.
Scared, she ran away from her village. Since then, she has been living in Kathmandu with her children.
“We never did anything wrong to anyone,” she says. “So why are we made to suffer?”
She has knocked on the doors of countless human rights activists and agencies but with no luck.
“My conviction that my husband will be back safe has started to waver,” she says with tears in her eyes.
Lama has been borrowing money to search for her husband and is now in heavy debt.
“Even my relatives do not lend me money because I have no means of paying them back,” she says. “The perspective of people changes towards a young mother with her husband missing.”
The hope that her husband will be back someday motivated her for six years, but now it has started to falter. At present, her priority is to make ends meet in order to maintain the roof over her children’s heads.
She says although the government promised to pay the families of the missing people 1 million rupees ($11,350), she has only received 200,000 rupees ($2,270) to date.
“I think we will end up begging in the streets,” Lama says.
Kamala Limbu says these disappearances are not only difficult on women, but also on children. A young mother when her husband, Nischal Nakarmi, disappeared in December 2003, she couldn’t tell her son his father was missing. Instead, she told him that his father had gone abroad.
Now, every time an airplane flies by, the child runs after it exclaiming, “My father is back!” Limbu hasn’t brought herself to tell him the truth yet.
Like Basnet and Lama, she has also started to lose hope.
“From human rights agencies to the streets, the society has shared our pain with everyone but has not received any kind of help from anyone,” Limbu says. “We shed tears everywhere we could, but we never got answers.”
It has been six years since the government parties signed the peace agreement, yet the whereabouts of the missing people remain unknown, confirms Rameshwor Nepal, director of Amnesty International Nepal.
The accord stated that authorities would publish the status of all missing people within 60 days of its signing. But the publication is now more than 2,100 days past due. The Interim Constitution of Nepal also outlined the formation of a commission to investigate the cases of missing people. But authorities have completed neither of these measures, Nepal says.
“The inability of the government to publish the whereabouts of the missing person in six years when they had promised to do it in 60 days shows the government’s lack of accountability and loyalty towards its people,” Nepal says.
As the status of missing people remains unknown, families can’t obtain death certificates, which are necessary for legal processes such as transferring the property of missing relatives to their names in order to use it, he says. They are also deprived of their cultural rights, as they can’t perform death rites without knowing whether their relatives have died.
The families, who have already suffered the mental trauma from losing family members, are revictimized when they ask for justice, Nepal says. They suffer harassment, receive threats, and have no personal or social security.
Lama, tired of searching for her husband, tried to file a case against six Maoist leaders. Even if she didn’t receive the full relief fund promised to families of the missing people, she believed she would get justice. But the Kavre District Police Office declined to file her case. The Supreme Court intervened, and then the case was filed.
Lama won the case. But the man convicted of murderering her husband, Agni Sapkota, was appointed as the minister of information and communication in 2011. Lama says this disheartened her.
“How do people like me get justice in this country?” she asks.
Human rights defenders opposed Sapkota’s appointment, according to a 2012 report by Amnesty International. Citizens petitioned the Supreme Court, but judges ruled that it was up to Sapkota to resign on moral grounds.
Lama said that she received threats when she filed the case and also when she won it. So she doesn’t pick up any phone calls from unknown numbers and distrusts strangers. She rents rooms for her and children to live in, but they don’t stay in one place for more than a few months.
“Nobody understands my pain,” she says.
The nongovernmental agencies working on human rights issues have been organizing programs to pressure the government to publish the whereabouts of missing persons, Nepal says. But there is still no official record of the total number of persons disappeared from all over the country. In addition, only educated families know how to file for compensation.
Basnet, who left everything back in Damak to search her missing sons, struggles to read and write. Yet she has been closely following the political situation in Nepal.
She says she was hopeful that she would find her sons when the Maoists came to power after elections in 2006. But she is disapointed because neither the previous governmment led by Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda, nor the present government with Maoist Baburam Bhattarai as prime minister showed any concern about missing people like her sons.
“Maoist[s] are as guilty as the government of Nepal in forced disappearance,” she says. “Therefore, they are not investigating.”
The political parties are in consensus on the formation of the Truth and Reconcilation Commission and the Missing Person Investigation Commission under the Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction, says Bharat Prasad Paudel, joint-secretary of the ministry. They are in the process of writing the necessary law to form these commissions.
“The formation of commission has taken longer than as stated in the CPA because the country is still in the peace process,” Paudel says. “And the government cannot make solitary decisions without consulting the political parties.”
The commissions will be able to investigate the truth and penalize the perpetrators, lawyer Hari Phuyal says.
“It is necessary to establish the rule of law and show that the crimes are punished,” Phuyal says.
But Basnet and Lama and other families of the victims of the forced disapparances say they suspect that the government is planning to acquit the perpetrators through the commissions. They say this would be unacceptable.
“My husband was abducted for no reason,” Lama says. “I can never agree to acquit the perpetrators. They should be punished for what they did.”
Lama says she at least wants to know whether her husband is alive or dead.
“If he is dead, show me his grave and tell me why he was killed,” Lama says. “Or else, give my husband back to me.”