Ram Kumar Bhandari was a student activist during his university studies in Nepal when his father was forcibly disappeared by the state. It was 2001, more than halfway through the country’s 10-year (1996-2006) armed conflict between Maoist rebels and pro-government forces. Some 18,000 people were killed, thousands injured, tortured, raped and over 13,000 disappeared. He also was detained and tortured, arrested several times for short periods, and displaced from his rural village of origin located in the hilly area of western Nepal.
“During those years, the government was really oppressing people: disappearing, killing and abusing many human rights,” he remembers. “My father was arrested and he just never appeared. He disappeared.”
“I visited different human rights organisations, the local courts, the Supreme Court…[trying] my best to find information. Nothing worked,” says Bhandari. “But then later, I met other families who had experiences like mine.”
Bhandari became a rights activist, organising among people like himself—the families of the disappeared—to demand and receive answers.
“I began to think that we needed to build a small group through which we can work collectively and bring more people together to create some form of solidarity and to encourage us to fight against injustices.”
A small family association was established in 2006, followed by others. Bhandari explains how they then started “building our network from the local level up to the national level,” until a national network of families of the disappeared was formed in 2009.
A police officer following Ram Bhandari during a street protest in 2013 in NEPAL – The logo on the t-shirt says: Where are the disappeared?
Bhandari went on to launch a local community radio station, a network of families of the disappeared (known as NEFAD), the Committee for Social Justice, the Conflict Victims’ Common Platform for Transitional Justice, the Conflict Victims National Alliance, the National Memory Network, the National Network of Victims and Survivors of Serious Human Rights Abuses and the several community groups. He has also led petitions to the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, and the Nepali Supreme Court. He now has well over a decade’s experience working with marginalised communities and their networks in Nepal and South Asia—particularly among the families of the disappeared, victims of conflict, ex-combatant youth, ethnic minorities and rural women groups—to facilitate participatory action research, develop campaign models and advocacy strategies that advance truth-telling, justice and community memorialisation, grassroots movement and social transformation.
Wife of a disappeared in Nepal
That first experience “push” became a watchword for the kind of activism and advocacy that Bhandari has pursued ever since: organising and network-building from the grass-roots up, from local to national to international. “The solution is always at the local level, but that informs the work at the national and international levels,” he believes.
In part motivated by Bhandari’s research on the need for victim participation in justice processes, that work ultimately gave him the idea of an international network for victims and survivors of serious crimes. Bhandari remembers meeting activists from different parts of the world at conferences, “and I always used to think: ‘Maybe one day we could all have a stronger representation, something trans-regional, trans-continental’.”
The idea for INOVAS was born.
Bhandari describes the idea behind the network as aimed to “build a collective activism to represent our voice at national and international levels” and “reinforce participation at the national and international levels for policymaking and decision-making.”
“We came together to re-empower ourselves,” he says. “And that’s an empowering experience.”