Disappear

From Wikinfo

Forced disappearance

Disappear (as a transitive verb, as in "to disappear someone") is a doublespeak euphemism for the murder of political opponents. Typically, the murder is surreptitious, and the body disposed where it will (hopefully) never be found. The person simply vanishes. The party committing the murder has deniability, as there is no dead body to show the victim is actually dead.

The method was widely used in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge. When someone was purged, state police would take him away to be killed, usually in the night. For important people, artists would literally airbrush them out of photographs. It was as if they never existed. Some victims were sent to Gulags as forced labor.

During World War II, Nazi Germany set up secret police forces including branches of the Gestapo in occupied countries, who they used to hunt down known or suspected dissidents or partisans. This tactic was given the name Night and Fog to describe those who disappeared after being arrested by Nazi forces without any warning. The Nazis also applied this cruel policy against political opponents within Germany. Most victims were killed on the spot or left to die in concentration camps.

In Argentina, political dissidents were forced to jump out of airplanes far out over the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously, their bodies were never found. Without any dead bodies, the government could easily deny they had been killed. People murdered this way are today referred to as "the disappeared" (los desaparecidos). They were the inspiration for a U2 song of the same name.

In other cases, it is not the government, but private individuals committing the murder. In the vernacular, the mafia is said to have "disappeared" U.S. trade-unionist Jimmy Hoffa – killing him and doing away with his body in a way that ensured it was never found.

Disappearances in human rights law

In international human rights law, disappearances at the hand of the state have been codified as enforced or forced disappearances. For example, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court defines enforced disappearance as a crime against humanity, and the practice is specifically addressed by the OAS's Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons.

Disappearances work on two levels: not only do they effectively silence those opposition members who are disappeared, they also sow uncertainty and terror in the wider community in general, thus silencing other opposition voices, current and potential alike. Disappearances entail the violation of a series of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms. For the disappeared person, these include the right to liberty, the right to personal security and humane treatment (including freedom from torture), the right to a fair trial, to legal counsel, and to equal protection under the law, the right of presumption of innocence, et cetera. Their families, who often spend the rest of their lives in fruitless searches for their loved ones' remains and for emotional closure, also become victims of the disappearance's effects.