Archive · 2022 · From the print edition of Tuesday 13 September 2022, Vol. 30, No. 9,236
Across IradFifteen years on, the mothers come back to Qara-Chik
On the anniversary of the 2007 ceasefire, the mothers of the missing stood at the checkpoint again with their sons' photographs.
QARA-CHIK — About sixty women stood at the Qara-Chik checkpoint yesterday morning, on the fifteenth anniversary of the Bishkek ceasefire, holding photographs of sons who went missing in the war of 2007. Most were from the villages of Kara-Buura District. They have come every 12 September since the ceasefire.
Some of the photographs are faded school portraits. Others are laminated, and a few now carry a small black ribbon: since 2012 the Missing Persons Commission, which meets at Kara-Oi, has been finding graves, and the International Committee of the Red Cross has matched remains against the DNA samples given by families on both sides of the line. The first grave, of eleven men in a ravine above Merke, was found ten years ago.
"When they find him, I will come with the ribbon," said a woman of 71 from a Kara-Buura village, whose son was 19 in 2007. "Until then I come without it."
Gendarmerie officers at the checkpoint brought the women tea, as they do every year. Mothers from the tribal side, who have their own missing, stood at the other end of the crossing. At ten o'clock both groups stood in silence for a minute, and then went home.