April 27, 2019
It has been two years and the family of Dr. Mustafa Al Mutawakel lives in darkness and suffers the pain of his absence.
On April 27, 2017, while Dr. Mustafa Al Mutawakel was on his way returning from Sayoun following an international participation in a conference in Morocco, soldiers loyal to President Abdrabu Mansour Hadi government boarded the bus he was riding in Al Falaj checkpoint, Mareb. They took him into an undisclosed location and denied him any visits or communication with his family.
Dr. Mustafa travelled to Morocco to attend the Annual Conference for Investment Institutions, responding to an invitation he received in his capacity as the Chairperson of the General Investment Authority in Sana’a. His family says that he passed through areas controlled by Hadi government, boarded a plane from Sayoun Airport and returned through the same airport. Then, he traveled by land on a public bus towards Sana’a not imagining that an academic and a civilian person like him would be detained.
His family was not even given the right to grieve his disappearance. His detention was associated with a massive media campaigns from political parties inciting against him and encouraging his continued disappearance although arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance crimes cannot be justified under any circumstances.
On May 15, 2017, his wife, the university professor Dr. Elham Al Mutawakel, travelled to Mareb with a legal team to demand her legal right in visiting him. She was accompanied by three members of the Sana’a University Faculty Staff Syndicate, including the Head of the Syndicate, in solidarity with their abducted colleague.
In Mareb governorate administration, she was treated as a guilty person, though she was just looking for her husband. “I never imagined that ill treatment by officials in Mareb. I was treated as if I am Abdul Malik Al Houthi himself. I was just a panicked wife searching for her life mate” Elham says.
Although she endured the long travel between Sana’a and Mareb, all doors were shut in her face and her suffering never subsided.
Before she leaves Mareb, she received a phone call from an anonymous phone number. The caller told her that Dr. Mustafa is no more in Mareb and that he was handed over to Saudi Arabia. The caller added “You shouldn’t make it difficult for yourself and for us. It is better for you to leave”. She did leave Mareb after two weeks of futile search.
Dr. Mustafa has three daughters and two sons. One of his sons passed away in Malaysia due to a medical mistake after a car accident. Al Hussein, his name, died few months after the enforced disappearance of his father. Dr. Mustafa daughter says, “It was a catastrophic year for us; the disappearance of my father and the painful death of my brother.” “We had to smuggle the corpse through Oman fearing it will be stopped in Mareb, as the case was with my father” she adds.
Hadi government and the Saudi-Emirati led coalition must release Dr. Mustafa Al Mutawakel, as well all those forcibly disappeared people.
The UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance rejects any extraordinary circumstances, such as war or political instability, to justify enforced disappearance. This crime was listed as a crime against humanity in Rome Statute on International Criminal Court in 1998.
A forced disappearance (or enforced disappearance) occurs when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned 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, as defined by the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance.
With the eruption of war in Yemen, enforced disappearance cases remarkably increased, with all parties to the conflict in Yemen blamed for this crime.
