Waiting decades for bodies of those taken in the night

After thirty years, the body of Charlie Armstrong has finally been found. The Northern Irishman was on his way home from mass in 1981 when Irish Republican Army carjackers approached him and demanded he get out of his vehicle.

He refused and they shot him. A search this past July turned up the body near the town of Colgagh, in northeast Ireland. “We have longed for the day when we can bring Charlie home to give him a Christian burial,” said a family member.

Charlie Armstrong was one of 16 people abducted and killed by republican paramilitaries at the height of the violence in Northern Ireland. This group of abductees is referred to as The Disappeared, and while their lives often ended with a bullet, the families they left behind have been grieving for decades, awaiting the chance for a final farewell and a proper burial.

One of the more famous cases was that of Jean McConville, a mother who was abducted in December 1972 by the IRA and killed with a single bullet to the back of her head. The IRA claimed she had aided a dying British soldier outside her home following a fierce gun battle with the IRA, but records show no such battle existed. Her body was buried secretly on a beach fifty miles from her home. In the early 1990s, the IRA admitted involvement in the murder and revealed the whereabouts of the body. Yet a search by the Irish police service found nothing. It was not until August 2003 that a member of the public accidentally came across the body, sticking up through the sand on the beach.

Most of the disappeared victims were abducted in Ireland, but not all; in May 1985, 33-year-old Seamus Ruddy went missing in Paris. Ruddy was teaching English in France but was also involved in arms smuggling. A few days later, his blood-covered clothes were found in the nearby city of Rouen, but his body was never recovered. It was later revealed that Ruddy was secretly buried in an arms dump in the woods of Normandy. In 2000, the French authorities, acting on new information, searched a precise corner of the forest for Ruddy’s body but turned up nothing. His body is yet to be recovered.

Disappearances are not unique to Northern Ireland. In Thailand, the accomplished Muslim human rights lawyer Somchai Neelapaijit disappeared in March 2004. At the time of his disappearance Neelapaijit was representing five Muslims accused of terrorism-related activities in Thailand’s southern border province. He had become a focus of the regime of ousted Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who many believe played a part in the disappearance. Neelapaijit had disclosed to close friends that he had been receiving anonymous threats. He was last seen in Bangkok, being forced into a car with a group of men. When asked of his disappearance, Shinawatra replied, “Oh, don’t worry. I understand he had a fight with his wife, and will probably be back home in a day or two.” His body has not been found.

Disappearances were common in Stalin’s Soviet Union; one of the more notable ones was Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov, a senior figure in the Soviet secret police. He was a loyal follower of Stalin and during the Great Purges of the 1930s many people were executed under his orders. In April of 1939 he was arrested and put in prison, where he quickly broke under torture and confessed to a series of unfounded crimes that included, official incompetence, theft of government funds, treasonous collaboration with German saboteurs and wrecking, an ambiguous violation common under Stalin that included “giving deliberately wrong commands” and “careless execution of one’s duties”.

Yezhov begged for several minutes alone with Stalin, a wish he was not granted. He was sentenced to death, and upon hearing the sentence fainted and had to be carried from the room. He was executed in the basement of a secret police station in Moscow then cremated. His ashes were dumped in a common grave in Moscow’s Donskoi Cemetery. The execution was kept secret and even as late as 1948 TIME magazine continued to report that “some think he is still in an insane asylum.”