‘Enforced disappearance’ has frequently been used as a strategy to spread terror within the society by a state or political organization, or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law. Subsequently, it forms a chilling effect on political freedom, civil society, independent media, and human rights advocacy. And it is always a crime under international law.
This atrocious apparatus has become a global nuisance in the contemporary political scenario. Once largely used by military dictatorships, disappearances now happen in every region in the world and a wide range of contexts; from Mexico to Syria, from Bangladesh to Laos, and from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Spain. Recently Amnesty International has documented disappearances carried out by some of the worst offending states where this strategy is commonly carried out by authoritarian rulers. This strategy indicates the prevalent culture of impunity, which effectively undermines sufferers' and their families' rights to truth, justice, redress, and guarantees of non-recurrence.
At such a dire junction, this work vocalizes the tale of the ‘Enforced Disappearances’ of Bangladesh in recent years.
Bangladesh has been experiencing the authoritarian methodology since its birth following the 1971 secession from Pakistan. BAKSAL (Bangladesh Farmer's and Worker's Party) era became the face of Bangladeshi authoritarianism in 1975. It was the central pillar of the one-state approach to governing newborn Bangladesh. They were armed with a militia named the ‘Jatiyo Rakkhi Bahini’, regularly accused of torturing and murdering political dissidents and individuals from diverse beliefs. From then until today, numerous rulers have employed the process of enforced disappearance under different regimes.
Subsequently, since 2009, the number of enforced disappearances has begun to rise again. According to experts, the contemporary emergence of enforced disappearances is taking place to silence dissenting journalists, artists, free-thinkers, civil society actors, human rights activists, political activists, and dissidents opposed to Prime Minister’s ruling party-led government.
At the same time, national and international human rights groups have published dozens of reports on the issue in which they claim that Bangladesh's law enforcement agencies are carrying out enforced disappearances. Between 2009 and September 2021, at least 605 people in Bangladesh were sufferers of enforced disappearance, according to the Bangladeshi human rights organization named Odhikar. Additionally, the organization stated, among those who disappeared, 81 were found dead and 154 people remain missing.
Upon such terrain, 'Interlude' is a corroded-monochromatic yet interweaved visual fabric that will evoke a sense of abstractness and translucent factualness. At times, the trajectory invites the viewers to consider the tale of 'Enforced Disappearances' in Bangladesh from spirituality, materiality, and psychologically. This correspondence employed the archival images of the sufferers of the enforced disappearance of Bangladesh, which were re-photographed sunkenly to outline their condition of agony and abeyance from mother or father, daughter or son, wife or sister, or friends. Parallel to this, an ocular constellation of cybernated maps of their final departure, red-threaded stitched missing posters, and moving snippets of their family's collected colloquy probes the same narrative with disparate notions.