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Culture and Conflict
No. 13/14, Spring-Summer 1994
Forced Disappearances
Disappearances have hardly made the object of specific analyses contrary to problems of genocide, crime against the humanity or extra-judicial execution. Nevertheless in the international context, it is feared that some regimes today use this specific practice in a more systematic manner. If disappearances are often numerically unspecified due to the incapacity to accurately discern the victim's fate, and therefore record other forms of violation of human rights, it is necessary to destroy this approximate acquired way of thinking. Disappearances are indeed a specific strategy that adds its symbolic violence based on the invisibilisation of the body and the process of ignorance that accompanies it, to the physical violence of imprisonment, torture or death. If, in certain cases, disappearances are related to a number of missing bodies or are the result of warfare, in others it is a practice of coercive policy whose action aims not for the total elimination but for the division and classification of individuals and groups in order to destroy their social and political cohesion. Ignorance is therefore a strategy, not a result. Furthermore, this explains why governments often prefer to create within their armed or police forces, or even within extreme political parties or secret organisations, death squads which undertake kidnapping, round-ups and establish unofficial detention camps. This strategy initiated by governments has never been truly efficient because if the aggression against individuals or groups have been attempts to hide the evidence of prisoner's bodies, they have also created confusing conditions under which what should be dissimulated became evident, as the example of the Argentinean women dancing with their husbands, supposedly eliminated, in the " Plaza de Mayo " showed, through the assertion of their existence implied by the presence of their absence. Finally a third case can be identified where the disappearance without trace of a person is not the simple consequence of a deliberate policy or of an overwhelming force to impose a power structure but, on the contrary, of battles between various forces for the domination of one group over another. The disappearance is not therefore reducible in all cases of figures in a " technology of State power ", to a repertory of coercive action, it is also a " product " of relation.
Situated in China's Northwest, and a communist guerrilla base before Mao arrived, Yan'an constituted for a long time, officially at least, the moral moment of the Chinese Revolution. The events on Tiananmen square in June 1989 finished off what had already become the myth of Yan'an. But the reality had disappeared much earlier. In its day, Yan'an radiated outward towards revolutionary bases all over China under conditions of both war and revolution during the difficult years of 1936-1947. It was the resonant point of transition from failure to success for both Mao Zedong personally and for his ascendancy within the Chinese Communist Party, and marked both the low and the high point for the CCP itself. More than anything else, words and language were crucial. Mao, as a mythmaker, storyteller and moral architect, created both the logic and the text for the Revolution. Mao was able to both create and then symbolise the hegemonic discourse of the Chinese Revolution as a unique political culture. Struggles for power were literally over the monopoly of a cosmos defined by Mao himself in terms of ideology (Sinified Marxism), and military, administrative, and intellectual power and domination. For Mao represented a remarkable blend of analytical and tactical shrewdness, both of which he used to establish his authority and much more, as well as for the substantive basis for his texts, these struggles each involving a different dimension of what came to be Mao's monopoly of power, military, administrative, ideological, and intellectual. Each was a necessary ingredient of this monopoly. Together they were insufficient as conditions for power without the final ingredient : symbolic capital.
Instead of producing an essay on the idea of Human Rights, which constitutes the usual procedure, the author proposes a sociological approach. Political disappearances are either war-related violences associated to other massive repression practices aimed at arousing fear or even threat of extermination, or deliberate violences for which the object is less to kill than to destablise a political opposition. Nevertheless, in both cases disappearances are justified by emphasising the wartime friend-versus-enemy relationship. It is this political justification that gives its logic to disappearances and not the analysis aimed at opposing police practices to military and para-military governmental repression. Inscribed in a global repression policy, disappearances are related to a governmental political strategy, but in contrast, when violence is carried out by individuals, it is fundamentally within an interactive dynamic. However the coherence of disappearances must not be simply measured in relation to the victims or their adversaries, it also concerns the rest of the population and helps the repression of opposition. The dissimulation of violence encourages the development of indifference within the local population. Inversely, if disappearances become known, this leads to a loss of legitimacy on the government's side. " Destructive " information concerning the government may show the paradoxical nature of relations to violence and to legitimacy which are at the heart of disappearances.
How to define disappearances ? As a violation of human rights which " would only be” a form of assault among others or as a specific phenomenon which would substitute other forms of repression considered rightly or wrongly as less " efficient " ? What bonds are there between forced disappearances and extra -judicial execution ? What is the influence of the political context ? Each of these questions raise a problem which must be confronted in order to understand the " phenomenon " of forced disappearances. The declaration on the protection of all person against forced disappearances adopted without vote by the UN on December the 18th, 1992 implies four main elements : the loss of liberty ; the responsibility of States or of groups or individuals acting under its control or with its endorsement or, at least, with its consent ; the total absence of information on the victims' fate ; the denial of responsibility on the part of the State. Essentially associated during the 60s and 70s to military regimes or to dictatorships (Argentina, Chile, Haiti, etc. ), the situation has actually became more complex. Indeed, if disappearances continue characterising dictatorial or military regimes, they also concern countries whose political situations widely vary. In addition, many organisations for the defence of human rights have long concentrated their efforts on governments. However, the emergence of armies advocating political opposition on the international scene has widened the field of investigation of organisations such as A. I. concerning forced disappearances .
The author recalls the fact that in spite of the numerous eye-witness accounts of life in South Africa, political disappearances have never been central to the political struggle against Apartheid. The contrast does not arise from a desire to dissimulate the death of political victims but from the difficulty in constituting a uniform statistical list. There are four reasons for this circumstance : the laws obliging all blacks to have a passport when entering a white zone ; the extension of the state of emergency - these conditions increase the number of temporary arrests and prevent a systematic count of those who are dead or absent ; exile to the anti Apartheid front-line states on the South African frontier ; the entering of clandestinity. The latter factor results from the simple mobility of the black population and the loosening of family ties provoked by the rural exodus.
Sri Lanka is a country where disappearances constitute the extension of other forms of political assassination and collective violence. In a first stage, disappearances are decided upon, and are aimed against the militants of clearly identified organisations and their associates. Their goal, once the information required obtained, is the elimination by the least evident method possible of those who are tortured. This is done in such a manner as to avoid any repercussions abroad and prevent any extension of militantism. In a second stage, the evolution is towards a deceptive terror aimed at destabilising those who sympathise with real or suspected extremist organisations, leaving them in a state of uncertainty about the fate of victims taken as long-term hostages. This psychological warfare is generally practised by governmental forces as well as by groups of militants against their rivals or opponents. This type of political disappearances is common in the army's battle against the Tamoul separatists. Finally, the extent of uncontrolled disappearances related to the interactions between local society and the armed forces is recalled, in addition to the multiplication of the armed police forces located in southern Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990 or located today in the eastern provinces.
Investigating four themes drawn from the Colombian case, the author undertakes to show that violent acts end by radically confusing not only the markers but even the boundaries of politics and by blocking the expression of belonging to a society which is the foundation of politics. The reference to the fundamental friend-versus-enemy division in global political relationships has been transposed, at the same time as the phenomenon of violence diversified, so as to characterise a multitude of small conflicts and has thus lost its political significance (first theme). The lack of global methods to regulate society leads to the joining of populations in a sort of Hobbesian pact favouring a local sovereign - holding an armed network or a guerrilla force - capable of ensuring a minimum order (second theme). This produces a situation of flowing networks holding diverse sources of power (third theme). The author concludes by showing that these complex circumstances prevent any essay from globally assessing the situation of violence (fourth theme).