Capturing the Void
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In June 2009, human rights organisation Memorial Grozny received information that Apti Zainalov, a victim of abduction who had been reported to them earlier that year, had been spotted in Atchko-Martan Hospital with multiple bullet wounds. Apti was unconscious and being kept under strict police surveillance. Memorial launched an immediate inquiry, but the organization lost access to Apti after the authorities noticed activity around the hospital. Memorial employees managed to trace a car that moved Apti to a secure facility in Gudermes, but they were unable to gain further access. The whereabouts of Apti remain unknown. In the Caucasus region, local groups have reported 5,000 disappearances, less than half of which are acknowledged by the government. Families of the disappeared have opened 1,814 investigations, resulting in no convictions.
From the Photographer: Mari Bastashevski
People were disappearing, boys who grew up reading the same books as I did, watching the same news programs. The information void on Chechnya added allure to the mystery; I'd been meaning to go for years. I called Natalia Estemirova, the head of the Russian human rights organization Memorial Grozny, and told her that I had read her reports and would like to photograph the disappeared. I had it all wrong back then, but she said “Good,” and told me I would be staying with her. It wouldn't be safe otherwise.
On my first day in the North Caucasus region I met six families. One of the mothers, Tumisha, had been coming to Memorial every other day for four years, asking for bodies. The other said that both of her sons are still alive in secret prisons. The relatives of Zelemkhan Murdalov and Elza Kungayeva did not succumb to self-delusion. They kept on through threats and assassination attempts, and, against all odds, they brought the perpetrators to justice.
In the ensuing year, I must have met hundreds of families. The first thing all of them said to me was: “He is not guilty, he hasn't done anything.” The concept of "presumed innocent" had long been forgotten here, there are no means of recourse. Even the boys who joined the ranks of Ramzan Kadyrov's security forces weren't immune. Two of the Nenkayev brothers were abducted while working for the local police.
On January 20, 2009, Natalia picked up the phone and screamed “It cannot be! Not Stas!” Stanislav Markelov, a lawyer who had dedicated his career to representing the disappeared, had been assassinated in Moscow. On January 21 she returned to work at Memorial. Her unflinching dedication earned her respect, not only among the victims and colleagues, but among the people who genuinely disliked her: the generals, the contractors. This respect was her safety net, but it wasn’t enough. She was abducted, driven across the regional borders demonstratively, and shot dead on July 15 of the same year.
There are no exceptions to the “counter-terrorism” abduction strategy in North Caucasus. As an observer, an outsider, there is nothing you can do to change this, only something to remember it.
About the Project
There are few crimes with such devastating and far-reaching impacts as enforced disappearance. Innocents taken from their homes vanish to secret locations known only to the perpetrators. Imprisoned, tortured, and often killed for dubious reasons, their disappearance leaves a void in which families struggle to understand what has happened to their loved ones. In this limbo of not knowing, they exist condemned to days, months, and sometimes years of searching for clues and bits of information, left vulnerable to discrimination and abuse by the same people who disappeared their kin. Sometimes their search leads them to a grave with remains that can be identified by a personal detail, a key their child had when her life was taken or a DNA sample from a single bone. Some end up living in this limbo for the rest of their lives, unable to reconcile that their loved one is dead, desperately clinging to hope, against all odds, with the absence of the disappeared palpable every day of their life.
To help depict the impact of disappearances on families, we solicited the help of some of the world’s leading photographers, whose photos bring to life the universality of the plight of the families of the disappeared. For this unique project, Rodrigo Abd, Mari Bastashevski, Marcelo Brodsky, Ziyah Gafic, Dalia Khamissy, Susan Meiselas, and Gervasio Sánchez have shared some of their most poignant images and thoughts about their experience of working with the families of the disappeared and its impact on them.
The motives are as diverse as the dimensions of the pain suffered by the families. From empty rooms echoing with the voices of the taken, to personal artifacts exhumed with remains hidden by killers, to the endless conflict between despair and hope on the faces of parents who cling to the photo of their disappeared children. However, all of the images, without exception, capture the void that dominates the lives of those left behind. It is images like these that make the horror of this crime visible and real.
On this International Day of the Disappeared, we invite you to take a moment to consider the awful impact of this heinous crime that has scarred numerous societies around the world and stand in solidarity with its victims in their struggle for truth and justice.
