This is another kind of sit-in. Its protestors are calling for another kind of international tribunal, and in the words of one spectator, its goals are “bigger than politics. Our demands are humanitarian.”

Everyone here has a story. There is Audette Salem, whose son and daughter went missing in 1985. There is Michel Aoun, whose father Naji left home to never come back when he was just two years old. There is Zena Darazi, whose brother Fadi Habbal went missing following a 1986 Dar al-Iftaa - Lebanese Forces prisoner exchange. And there is the weary yet hopeful Samia Abdallah, who after having received letters from her imprisoned brother Imad, still believes that he will, one day, return. The state may have forgotten these stories, but these families certainly have not.

Family members of the missing at the Gebran Khalil Gebran garden during a SOLIDE press conference on Friday. (NOW Lebanon)

At the Khalil Gebran Garden, in front of the United Nations’ ESCWA building -- just meters away from the opposition’s disheveled sit-in -- the bereaved mothers have been protesting in small, tidy tents for three years now. They carry old, black and white pictures of their missing loved ones. Some mothers sob, still others refuse to surrender themselves to the idea that their brothers and husbands may never come home.

They come from all across the country, areas as far as Tripoli and Jbeil, united in their demand that the government take responsibility for the some 17,000 persons who went missing during Lebanon’s civil war. In the absence of any serious governmental initiative to address the issue -- namely the establishment of a national commission of investigation -- the mothers have been forced to plead to the international community.

“Lebanon is party to this crime, in its refusal to take the issue seriously,” said Ghazi Aaad, Director of the organization Support of the Lebanese in Detention and Exile (SOLIDE). “Any attempt to transfer this issue to the Arab League,” he continues, “will be considered a means of running away from the issue.”

Though SOLIDE spends its time lobbying on the political level, the voices of its members have thus far fallen only on deaf ears. Even after Syria’s departure from Lebanon in 2005 and the onset of the protest, the state has yet to meet any demands. “They listen to us now, at least,” says Secretary General of SOLIDE, Wadih al-Asmar, “but they don’t do anything. It’s not in their interest to,” he said, referring to the former militiamen, now in power, who would rather not revisit their war crimes.

Chronic amnesia

According to official figures, there are some 17,000 citizens who went missing during the civil war. Many of the unaccounted for are considered deceased -- most likely buried in one of Lebanon’s mass graves.  Some, however, are convinced that around 700 of them are alive, likely in Syrian prisons.

Samia, for example, tells NOW Lebanon that her family knows exactly where her brother Imad is, as they have been in contact with him through letters. “They say he’s not [in a Syrian prison],” she laments, “but we know he is. His name was even published in a Jordanian newspaper in 1998, among the names of other prisoners.” Imad, who fought alongside the PLO during the war, was abducted by the Marada party in 1984 and then transferred to Syria when he was just 24.

Some pseudo-serious efforts, conducted mainly under the governments of Salim Hoss and Rafik Hariri, brought to the surface some initial issues, among them whether or not the 17,000 should be declared dead (to speed up inheritance procedures), in addition to how to deal with the issue of those detainees held in Syria and/or mass graves in Lebanon.

Over the years, demands by NGOs working with the families of the missing include one to establish a commission of inquiry; another that a social program be instituted to assist relatives of disappeared; and also that April 13 be set as a day of remembrance for the disappeared. There are also plans to build a monument commemorating the victims. None of these demands, however, have yet been met.

Dead or alive?

The underlying question remains: are any of the disappeared still alive? And if not, where are the bodies buried?

“The numbers are a difficult issue. As a human rights organization, we don’t have the technical ability today or the legal rights to go around the country and figure out how many missing there are, let alone, where they are and if they are alive,” said Asmar.

It is clear, argued Asmar, why the successive governments have been trying to ignore this issue. “But this is not about recrimination,” he says, as much as it is about the rights of mothers to know the fate of their loved ones. “There should be an official policy on the matter,” he says, “and the Lebanese should familiarize themselves with the concept of accountability.”

Asmar noted that if just one za’im (leader) came forward, and revealed where a mass grave was and who was buried there, “this might put 1,000 families to rest.” Developments must occur soon, he said, particularly as the parents of the missing are now old and many have started to pass away. “A DNA database should be created,” he argued, and the state must provide some form of compensation to those who have suffered.

Nonetheless, the biggest reparation, he says, is the truth, which lies at the bottom of the issue, for “if the state does not admit to being responsible for the missing, then how can citizens have trust in it?”

A collective memory

The government, many would say, is preoccupied with today’s political turmoil so as to render yesterday’s turmoil -- and all of its baggage -- a moot point. But its failure to address this issue merely reinforces a culture of self-imposed national amnesia, whereby justice and accountability are sacrificed for fear of recrimination.

There is no war memorial in Lebanon. This is a clear indication that there has, thus far, been no coming to terms with the gruesome realities of the war. The 1991 Amnesty Law, which absolved those guilty of many a murder, is a painful reality for many.

The state, nonetheless, has a responsibility to deal with the memory of the war. By not taking this issue seriously, it is, as Aad noted, implicitly party to an ongoing crime. At the very least, some headway must be made in forming a parliamentary investigative committee.

“In truth,” says Al-Asmar, ‘we can’t overcome the war before we deal with [the issue] of the kidnapped. Our situation is like a person who was sick, and they [the leaders] only closed the wound without giving him medicine.”