I’ve already posted this on Kos and elsewhere. I’m dissapointed at the near silence on this, and just want to raise the issue. -MfM
Further evidence that our government’s sense of shame has been fatally wounded comes today from new frontpager the stormy present at European Tribune. The Stormy Present links to an Al Jazeera article noting that the US has refused to sign a treaty banning forced dissappearances, defined as instances where state agents detain individuals then deny holding them.
Philippe Douste-Blazy, the French foreign minister, told reporters after the signing at his ministry in Paris: “Our American friends were naturally invited to this ceremony, unfortunately, they weren’t able to join us.”
In Washington, Sean McCormack, a US state department spokesman, declined to comment except to say that the US helped draft the treaty, but that the final text “did not meet our expectations”.
It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that our country refuses to sign a document that would ban the state from engaging in programs to snatch citizens off the streets and send them to secret prisons. We all know that our government has been engaged in precisely this sort of behavior running secret prisons in Europe, but this treaty is about more than that
When I first saw that the title of this treaty included the term “disappeared”, what immediately sprang to mind for me was the story of los disaparecidos, the men and women kidnapped and in some case killed by the military governments of Argentina and Chile during the 70s and 80s. Not only did the governments of those countries kidnap their own citizens, when the mothers, daughters, and wives of the men taken went to the authorities to ask where they were, they were simply told that their loved ones had dissappeared.
Left with no other recourse, these women took to the street and they danced alone. If you’ve ever heard the Sting song of the same name, this is what he’s singing about.
“They Dance Alone”
Why are there women here dancing on their own?
Why is there this sadness in their eyes?
Why are the soldiers here
Their faces fixed like stone?
I can’t see what it is that they dispise
They’re dancing with the missing
They’re dancing with the dead
They dance with the invisible ones
Their anguish is unsaid
They’re dancing with their fathers
They’re dancing with their sons
They’re dancing with their husbands
They dance alone They dance alone
Unable to protest any other way the mothers of the dissapeared would gather every Thursday and walk around the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires for half an hour. They became know as Mother of the Plaza de Mayo. Several of the founders of the group would later meet the same fate as their children.
Dissappeared.
Sent to secret prisons, tortured, killed, then buried in an unmarked grave.
And our government refuses to recognize the evil of this. They insist that the simple acknowledgment of this of governments decide to kidnap and murder their own people does not meet their expectations.
In Argentina, not only where men and women taking from their homes and murdered. The military government would take the detained, drug them, them drop them from planes into the ocean. And even more insidous, there’s evidence that before being killed several pregnant prisoners gave birth to children who were taken from them and given to military families.
Does the Bush administration really support the taking of children from their mothers arms? The murder of those same mothers? The “right” of the state to pretend it never happened?
Have we as a nation lost any any sense of shame?
