The Promise Yet to Come A story of memory, disappearance, and the unfinished road to justice in Nepal

On the 29th of April, Ram sent me old photos. Just faded digital images, yet they all carried the smell of dust, the taste of sweet milk tea, and the weight of everything we tried to do thirteen years ago. It was from 2012—our first campaign. The one we named Invisible No More.

Back then, we were younger, lighter, but not Ram though.

Photographers, writers, activists, human rights students, we all were in Nepal from different parts of the world, looking at what the ten years conflict left for us to pick up.

Some of us decided not to speak for anyone—but to sit beside those who had been silenced. To help tell the stories of families torn apart by enforced disappearances during the People’s War, the Maoist insurgency. They were waiting not just for truth, but for recognition. Not just for bodies, but for justice.

We started with a hazy plan. A loose idea around a table. But once we met the families, listened to their stories, drank tea in their courtyards, and stood in their fields, the haze cleared. The project took shape—photos, interviews, memory work, and advocacy. We wanted everyone to see what the state refused to name: that the disappeared were not gone. They were alive in memory. Alive in longing. And their absence shaped every inch of their families' daily lives.

There’s a photo I took from those early days.

A little girl sits cross-legged on her bed. Around her are albums—one open to photos of her rice feeding ceremony. This is a Pasni ceremony, a deeply symbolic moment in Nepali culture. It marks the first time a child eats solid food—a rite of passage celebrating nourishment, growth, and family. Mothers dress their babies in new clothes, relatives gather, elders bless the child with wishes for a long life.

In the photo, her father is there, smiling. When I took this picture, the girl kept returning to that image—searching, not just for a face, but for something deeper: evidence of love, of being held, of being known.

This is how memory becomes resistance.

I do not know if she ever saw her father again. What I do know is that children of the enforced disappeared often grow up not only in grief, but in a kind of social invisibility—treated with suspicion by neighbors, forgotten by the state, denied even the right to call themselves sons or daughters of the disappeared.

And yet, in that quiet room, with that open album on her lap, she resists at that time—gently, defiantly.

Another photo: Ram and I sit with cups of tea in our hands, in the courtyard of a farming family in Banepa. The midday sun filters through a canopy of branches above us, casting green-gold light across the earth. Across from us sit the parents of a young man who disappeared during the conflict.

The tea is simple, steaming, served without ceremony—but offered with a trust that humbles.

The mother, dressed in red, is not a woman broken. She is a woman who has waited too long for truth and has learned how to carry silence like a shield.

She speaks in short, measured sentences. Her husband sits beside her, silent, nodding only when the pauses grow too heavy to hold. She doesn’t cry anymore. The tears, perhaps, were spent long ago.

By now, she has likely told this story a hundred times—to NGOs, to journalists, to officials who shook their heads but changed nothing.

Still, she tells it again. Because as long as the story is spoken, her son remains—not in the past, but in the air between us.

In 2006, when the war ended, Nepal promised its people truth. It promised justice. Two commissions were established: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP).

But promises, like fog over the Kathmandu Valley, disappear with the morning sun.

For nearly two decades, the process was stalled—undermined by political interference, impunity, and an institutional lack of will. Over 60,000 complaints were submitted. Thousands waited. Some died waiting.

Then, in August 2024, something shifted. After years of delays and disillusionment, Nepal passed a revised transitional justice law. It was far from perfect—still carrying compromises—but it echoed, at last, the language survivors had long been using. For a brief moment, hope returned. Civil society believed: perhaps now, the country is ready to listen.

But the relief was short-lived.

Within weeks, the government released a shortlist of commissioners to lead the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission on Enforced Disappearances. The list was not built on independence or merit. It was shaped behind closed doors—rooted in political favors, not in justice. Some nominees had even publicly defended alleged perpetrators. And the families? They hadn’t been consulted at all.

Thirty-eight victims’ groups rejected the list outright. They issued a powerful joint statement. They warned: “We have waited long enough. If you will not create a credible process, we will build our own.”

The international community took notice. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the International Commission of Jurists stood behind the victims. Their message was clear: a justice process that excludes survivors is not justice—it is betrayal.

Now, in May 2025, the government stalls again. Appointments remain unresolved. Promises hang in the air like fog refusing to lift. Survivors, who have carried this struggle for nearly two decades, ask the most basic and damning question:

Do we believe the law—or the silence?The promises—or the politics?

The campaign we began was never just about raising awareness. It was about livelihoods for women left without support. About education for daughters who had been sidelined. About psychosocial healing in communities fractured by stigma. And above all, it was about memory—because the pain of disappearance does not end when a name is recorded. It only begins there.

Today, we are standing at a threshold.

It could become another betrayal, written in the same tired ink of political compromise.Or it could be a rare turning point—a moment to finally center the truth, the victims, and the dignity they have protected so fiercely.

The law exists. The demands are clear.What’s missing is political courage, and the will to listen.

Until that day comes, we continue.

We witness.We remember.We fight.

Because memory is resistance.Because a photograph is testimony.Because no child should grow up pointing at ghosts in an album, asking questions the state refuses to answer.

Because they are Invisible No More.

Through all these years, Ram Bhandari never stopped.

What began as his personal search for truth became a national movement. He helped grow NEFAD—the Network of Families of the Disappeared in Nepal—into a space of solidarity, dignity, and resistance.

And from there, he reached even farther, helping to co-found INOVAS—the International Network of Victims and Survivors of Serious Human Rights Abuses. A global effort, led not by experts or officials, but by survivors themselves.

I look at where we are now, and I feel not only sorrow, but gratitude for all the stories that shaped me.

Is because of them—because of these stories—that I find myself back on the frontline, still demanding what was promised: truth, accountability, and dignity for every family still waiting.

Z.Liew