“In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vapourized was the usual word.”

(George Orwell- Nineteen-eighty-four)

Some things are simply absurd. No matter how and from which point of view you try to look at them, they don’t make sense. But, anyhow, they happen.

A few days ago, I came across a report published by Nonviolence International; it was about disappearances of persons in Burma.

According to the report, “political activists, human rights defenders, farmers,  people belonging to ethnic minorities and other civilians have disappeared after arrests, detentions, abductions and forced labor. The perpetrators of the disappearances are State authorities and the security forces of the military. Extra-legal arrests and detentions in order to extort money and resources during which officials deny the incarceration or information about the locations of the incarcerated leads to situations where detainees are prone to disappearing. Arrested and detained individuals who are at risk of disappearing include those who have failed to pay military taxes and/or shares of crops. Prisoners, who have been forced to undertake labor inside or outside of prisons from which military units profit, along with other civilian laborers seized by the military have gone missing. Reports of disappearances during forced labor are revealed from the testimonies of fellow prisoners/laborers who have managed to escape or are released from the labor camps and prisons. “

What happened to all of these people? We don’t know if they are tortured, if they are imprisoned, if they are dead or alive. Somewhere, near or far, but separated by darkness, there is a crying mother, wife or child.

Remember the “Black Friday” of the Depayin massacre, in 2003. As many as 100 people have disappeared that day. Maybe even more-but how can we know? Their families and loved-ones are prohibited from uniting to pressurize the regime for any kind of information. For dictators that have been ruling the country for years with a shameless and consequent disregard for human dignity, one hundred lives do not mean too much. For their mothers and fathers, their children and their lovers- it means the whole world. And for the world, it means one less chance and one more victim of the system.

Does anybody care?

There were people…. People who had hope in their souls, people ready to risk everything for justice, people fighting for their rights. A dictatorial system always functions on the belief that people like this and their dreams can be simply annihilated, reduced to zero, forgotten. We try to believe in authentic values, to raise our children the way we decide to, to do the right thing and to protect our minds from indoctrination. We refuse to become part of the system that is breaking us down. We remain PEOPLE. Real people. A dictatorship’s indoctrination would show us in every way that, whatever we do, it does not matter.

But it does matter. It is our duty towards humanity, towards those who gave their lives in hope that their children would be allowed to express their thoughts freely, toward those who lost their dear-ones; it is our duty as people not to remain silent. We have the right to know what is happening. We have the right to speak up. We have the right to live.

One hundred people no one knows anything about, since May 2003. God only knows how many families, how many friends, more hopeless with every second of sorrow. It is absurd. And it is not to be accepted.