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Forced-disappearance is a multidimensional crime as it affects, in addition to the victim himself, his family and even his friends. Syria, in particular, has suffered from a very bitter and painful experience in this regard. In February 1982, Hafez Al-Assad perpetrated the horrible Hama massacre where tens of thousands of Syrian civilians were killed and no less than 22,000 were missing or forcibly-disappeared according to estimations at that time. To this moment, those people’s fates are now known as the Syrian government abstained from revealing their fate or conduct an investigation on their fates. Instead, it let the issue’s aftermath gets bigger and bigger to cause harsh social and psychological problems for the Syrian people.
Usually, the victims’ family doesn’t know anything about his fate and they might wait for years hoping that he might come back one day especially that Hafez Al-Assad regime, in order to deepen the suffering, used to release one or several prisoners, who were assumed dead, every few years to ignite the spark of hope and suffering in the hearts of tens of thousands of families. The suffering is even greater when the missing person is a husband who left behind him a wife that doesn’t know if her husband will ever come back or if he is dead already. There were many cases where previously married to missing person got married again before their original husband came back after years of being gone. Sometimes, the forcibly-disappeared person is the one who provide for the whole family.
