While visiting home during a holiday in 2002, Rajendra Tharu awoke in his parent’s house to find himself surrounded by childhood classmates. But they had not come to welcome him back. Since finishing school, Tharu had joined the police; the others, from the same farming village in Bardiya, had become supporters of the Maoist revolutionaries fighting against the government. As far as they were concerned, Tharu’s job made him complicit in the state’s hard-handed counterinsurgency. “They ran after him and I then ran after them,” recounts Rajendra’s mother, now 42. “They caught up with my son in a field and tied his hands. I told them to stop but it didn’t matter at that point.” The young man was marched away, disappearing before his mother’s eyes.
Today, Nepal’s government officials classify Tharu and the many hundreds of others taken in similar encounters during the country’s civil war as “missing persons,” or “the disappeared.” These euphemisms demurely describe those who, between 1996 and 2006, were abducted — and likely tortured and murdered. In the decade of fighting between government troops and communist insurgents, thousands of suspected civilian partisans were targeted by each side. Now, more than four years after a peace accord was reached, at least 1400 remain unaccounted for. The missing are largely assumed to be dead by the general population, but little has been done officially to acknowledge their fate.
