Behind the Screen of Hate

Dr. Michel E. Abs

Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches

The faces of loved ones disappeared, vanished in time and place, in circumstances that we do not know, and for reasons that, in most cases, are mysterious to us.

Disappearance, abduction, forced absence, call the phenomenon whatever you like, but the action is the same, the actor is the same, and the results are close, or the same.

Thus, quite simply, a person is among his family and loved ones, and suddenly he is not there anymore.

He becomes a remembrance, anguish, longing, anticipation, and even waiting, feelings known to those who suffer in vain.

When a person is immersed in activities of a conflictual nature, he must not rule out a fate of this kind, abduction or enforced disappearance. But why should a person who did not indulge in this fray reach such a fate?

Is it the collateral damage of the conflicts of rival, contradictory, disparate groups?

Collateral damage! How easy and painful at the same time is  this expression!

The meaning of this statement is that innocent victims are cheap losses when no voice is louder than the sound of battle. They are unaccountable results when the clanging of swords, the roar of bullets, or the thunder of cannons intensify.

A prisoner during the battle benefits from internationally agreed upon laws that protect prisoners of war. As for the missing person, whether he was abducted or forcefully absented, what does he benefit from?

What protection is he provided with? and the one who abducted him or absented him does not recognize any such right if there is one thus clearing himself from any legal accountability.

During the battles, the one who took prisoners cannot deny their presence with him, in the light of international treaties. As for the one who took "prisoners" outside the battlefield, through abduction, luring, or setting up intrigues, what is the way to hold him accountable?

Poor are the missing, the abducted and the forcibly absented, or those who disappeared by similar means.

Political or social leaders blame the others, and washes his hands like Pilate, making that families and loved ones of the abducted do not reach any conclusion.

It is a Golgotha trail the end of which no one knows. Only those who trod such a trail looking for a loved one who has disappeared in dubious circumstances know the oblivious end.

Painful and humiliating at the same time are the sights of families holding the pictures of those who are missing, with which they confront those who were entrusted with the responsibility to search for them however with no avail.

How do the members of such families spend their days and nights? How do they live, how do hours, days, months and years pass for them? How do they bear the pain of the knife moving in their wound whenever they mention a loved one who is absent, or whenever memories move them to remembrances ? ... Are they blessed with moments of forgetfulness?

It is the kind of pain that has no equal!

In the first periods of absence, loving persons are blessed with some hope, the hope of the return of the beloved, even if he bears the psychological and physical effects of detention. They accept him whatever his health condition is... They are ready for providing him with rehabilitation. The important thing is that they are waiting, in one way or the other, for news that may be joyful or that may calm them down.

But when waiting gets long, expectations become a mix for happy news, painful news, and no news. And the latter adds to the pain the burden of being lost, the burden of walking in a desert of wandering, the burden of waiting endlessly.

Here a different set of the same questions are asked, not from the victim's side, but from the executioner's side.

How can he continue with his life he who has abducted another creature like him, especially if he abused him before killing or mutilated after killing?

Don’t pictures of the events of which he was the "hero" inhabit his imagination?

Don't sounds of screaming, groaning, and the death rattle inhabit his memory?

Does he remember his victim's last looks before finishing him off?

These questions may be naive if we remember that the one who is responsible for such a task is a creature whose very profession consisted in humiliating the human spirit and killing the human soul.

But such questions must be raised, in order to ask what kind of creature is the one who commits such acts.

Yes, it seems that the human being is still prone to become a creature ready to be stripped of all humanity, and to indulge in actions that do not befit those who are supposed to have been created in the image and likeness of God.

Shall we forget the mockery and flogging to which the Master was subjected on His way to Calvary?

Do we forget the nails slashing the body of the Incarnate Master and the spear with which His side was pricked?

The scene has been repeated for thousands of years, and it does not seem that it will stop, as the media surrounds us daily with scenes from all over the world dating back for centuries.

Woe to you, O human being, from your “brother”!

You are transformed into a monster that has just emerged from the ages of the beginnings of humanity and this in a fraction of a second.

Abduction, detention, or absence, this slow killing, the perpetrator must be carrying mental illnesses that are difficult to treat, especially after this creature persists in his heinous actions, as the more he persists with this act, the more these practices become part of his pathological entity.

Tell me, you mean creature, what kind of relief did you feel when you captured, abused and destroyed a human being?

We, in the Middle East Council of Churches, and based on our Christian faith, reject any practice of this kind, whatever its motives or reasons are.

It is, first, a dehumanization of man, second, an affront to his human dignity, and third, an insult to the entire human race.

Beyond international laws and covenants, our reference is the human being with his inherent humane values ​​and his social value that cannot be defined in words, and are not spelled out by texts, be they legal or scientific, but expressed in the practices of love upon which our Christian and, of course, human faith is built.

This is the ninth symposium of human dignity which we have organized, and with the blessing and guidance of the MECC leaders, we transformed the memory of the abduction of the two Archbishops of Aleppo to a commemoration in which we include everyone who was abducted or forcibly absented. Moreover, we have held it on the twenty-fourth of April which commemorates the Armenian Genocide in addition to the genocide of the large human groups of Syriacs, Greek Speaking Christian Anatolians, Kurds, Alawites and Yazidis, in Anatolia and the north of the Antiochian Levant.

How many million people were abducted and forcibly absented before they were put to death at the hands of assassins there?

Nobody dares to admit!

Between the absence of the Lebanese Imam beloved to the hearts of the Lebanese and the Levantines, and the abduction of the two prelates of Aleppo beloved by their people throughout the Antiochian Levant, lies the destruction of a nation, its fragmentation and loss, and the displacement of its people to all corners of the globe. From Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, and before them Palestine, the path of destruction is the same because the source of the conspiracy is the same and the goal is unambiguous to all.

Among the afflicted people who suffer greatly from the absence of the one they have lost, and who may depart from this world bearing the heartburn of loss, and the disappeared loved ones whose fate is unknown, there is a veil of hatred that can only be lifted by love, this supreme value that the executioners did not come to learn from the Master who forgave His executioners on the cross.

That which we fear most is that humanity will have to tread a long way before it deserves the Clemence of Him Who is the Most Merciful.