Thousands attended the World Social Forum in Tunis last month. But, says Giedre Steikunaite, we mustn’t forget the absent, the missing, the disappeared.
A mother holding a framed picture of her child walks the streets in protest. She knocks on institutional doors; she seeks. She is Honduran, Guatemalan, Tunisian, Algerian, Aboriginal, she is Saharawi. Her tragedy is personal, yet shared the world over by thousands of mothers and fathers whose loved ones have been made to vanish. They disappeared in narco villas in Mexico, in interrogation and detention centres in North Africa and southern Europe, at the bottom of the Mediterranean in unmarked graves. They disappeared in the system.
It was those who were absent who were the most relentlessly ‘present’ at the 2015 World Social Forum in Tunis. The event gathered hundreds of activists and organizations; but thousands more could not attend, for their whereabouts are not known.
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