Eight years after her husband was allegedly abducted by the then Royal Nepali Army at peak of the country’s 10-year civil war, Siwa Devi Tharu of Bardiya in western Nepal, still hopes that he is alive and will return.
Siwa Devi is one of the six families depicted in Shadows of
Hope, a film released by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) this month, to highlight plight of families of Nepal’s missing citizens.
“More than 1350 persons who went missing are still unaccounted for and their families still wonder whether they are dead or alive,” says Rafiullah Qureshi of ICRC-Nepal.
In the peace agreement signed in 2006, both Maoists and the government had agreed to publicize details of those disappeared or killed within 60 days. That list is still to be prepared.