Wadad Halawani’s experience as a victim all goes back to one date, one event: September 24, 1982.
A knock at the door, answered by Halawani’s eldest son, then just six years’ old. Men claiming to be from “the government” asked to see her husband, Adnan. The men asked for Adnan to come with them for a routine questioning about a car accident, claiming that he’d be back within five minutes, before taking him away at gunpoint. That was the moment that Adnan disappeared. He has never been heard from since.
Demonstration by the families of the missing and forcibly disappeared at the National Museum in Beirut, which during the war was the green line that divided the capital into two Beirut: the eastern (Christians) and the western (Muslims).
On 24 November 1982, two months after her husband was kidnapped, Halawani founded the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Missing in Lebanon. The committee included the families of victims of kidnappings from across Lebanese society, who grew in number with almost every day that the 1975-1990 civil war ground on. With it, a women-led anti-war movement was formed at the height of wartime, calling for the release of all abducted and missing Lebanese and non-Lebanese residents. That movement has come to represent victims of abductions that began with the beginning of the war in Lebanon in 1975 as well as those that continued after the end of the conflict in 1990, when different parties to the conflict signed the Taif Accords.
The Taif Accords were an indication of what was two come. Instead of dealing with some of the immediate post-conflict concerns such as the fate of the missing and disappeared, Lebanon’s leaders instead sought to protect themselves. An amnesty was passed that protected the perpetrators and marginalised the victims. A policy of obfuscation was pursued to deliberately blur the events that took place during wartime, almost as if they did not happen, inviting everyone to turn a blind eye to what had happened in Lebanon and the tragedies wrought on its population.
According to Halawani, the families’ committee was a direct challenge to this imposed conspiracy of silence. She has long said that as long as the families’ missing and disappeared are not heard from, then they are still at war, then Lebanon’s declared peace is merely a cultivated, fragile peace that would be better understood with the phrase, ‘let bygones be bygones.’
Challenging this has not been easy. Halawani says that the families of the missing and disappeared succeeded in forming a cross-sectarian coalition in a region of sectarian discord, but they have faced myriad challenges and obstacles, not to mention traps and threats. Nevertheless, the families never lost heart or gave up on their right to uncover the fates of their loved ones.
Odette Salem is the mother of two missing persons: Richard (21 years old) and Mary Christine (19 years old). The families of the missing and forcibly disappeared people set up a tent in Gibran Khalil Gibran Public Park in front of the ESCWA building in central Beirut in 2005. The tent became the center of the families’ activities and the starting point for every field movement outside it. Odette left her home and resided in the tent. She was hit by a car while crossing the street towards the tent in May 2009.
Halawai states that they have worked non-stop during Lebanon’s conflict and post-conflict periods. Halawani herself has also acted as a founding member and or a member of several networks and forums including the Euro-Mediterranean Federation Against Enforced Disappearances (2007), Global Solidarity Network of Mothers, Sisters, Wives, Daughters, and Relatives of Abducted or Missing People (2000) and Forum for Memory and Future in the framework of the UNDP Peace Building Project (2019). The families’ committee has also achieved small but symbolic victories, working “at a snail’s pace” (as Halawani describes her endeavours and those of the families) until they managed to push for the ratification of a law on the missing and disappeared in 2018. Law 105/2018 enshrines families’ “right to know” by mandating authorities to form an independent national commission to clarify the whereabouts of those missing and disappeared during the years of conflict in Lebanon.
The law is the product of 36 years of struggle and tears, and decades of waiting. Currently, the families’ committee is striving to implement the law; their efforts have led to the issuance of the first implementing decree of the law, according to which an independent Committee of Inquiry in the Fates of the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared (2020 – 2021) was formed.
The committee is struggling to proceed with its mission despite the reluctance of the Lebanese to allocate a special headquarters for the committee as well as the financial contribution stipulated in the law.
And so the fight continues. Even until today, the wives and daughters of the disappeared still uphold their right to know their fates. Halawani and other relatives of the disappeared were also active during the October 17 Revolution in 2019-2020, raising their original demands to end impunity and implement accountability after war.
“This isn’t just about the families of the disappeared, it’s about all the victims of the war. We want our children to grow up in a state that respects human rights and a genuine peace,” she says.
“I want to be able to know where Adnan Halawani was buried, and be able to go there and tell my grandchildren what happened: there was a war, this happened and your grandfather is here.”
Halawani hopes that INOVAS can serve as a “space for us all, as victims, to share our pain,” and somewhere for victims and survivors from all over the world to “exchange their experiences.”
“Together, we’re producing a new culture for human rights work, one that’ll allow us to come from a place away from activities and theories that are already there,” she says, expressing her belief in the “flexibility” in-built to the INOVAS network.