They will wear black bands to symbolise their suffering, and will raise placards bearing but a single question: Where are our children? As they have for years past, on 29 August, on the eve of the International Day of the Disappeared, scores of people, mostly women, will gather at Sher-e-Kashmir Park in Srinagar to demand to know the whereabouts of their missing family members. Since the conflict in Kashmir began in 1989-90, thousands of 'enforced disappearances' have taken place, affecting nearly every family in the Kashmir Valley. The victim's family and friends are deliberately denied knowledge of the individual's arrest or detention, and are subjected to slow mental torture as they await information on the fate of their loved ones. This year's Day of the Disappeared marks the 25th anniversary of this annual observation, and some families have gathered in August of each of those years without news.
Traumatic though it is, confirmation of death tends to provide closure to the interminable wait. Facts Underground, a report released in March by by Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, a constituent of Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, claimed that nearly 1000 unmarked graves had been found in 18 villages of Uri, Baramulla and Boniyar of northern Kashmir. The report, which estimates that around 10,000 people have gone missing since 1989, surmises that many of the missing would have ended up in these unmarked graves.
According to the report, nearly 200,000 relatives of the disappeared have been involved in tireless effort to ascertain the whereabouts of the missing. Successive state governments in J & K have made contradictory statements regarding the number of missing persons. Both the state and central government have claimed that most of these individuals, mostly young men, have crossed over into Pakistan for arms training. The families vehemently contest these claims. It is clear that, in the vast majority of cases of so-called enforced involuntary disappearance, people were detained during crackdowns and cordon-and-search operations.
The stories are thoroughly disturbing. In one case included in Facts Underground from 1991, the people of Chandanwari, in Uri, found five bodies lying on the river shore, which they took to the local graveyard. Ali Akbar Khan, a resident of Chandanwari, began the task of collecting donations for the burials – until he took a look at the bodies, and realised that his young son, Bashir Ahmad Khan, was among them. Bashir had been picked up by the army the previous week.