IMG_1124-1
Six Years with No Answers
Six years now, Dr. Mustafa al-Mutawakel’s family has been living in the darkness of his absence, suffering from the cruelty of not finding answers. What’s the point of it all? During the long wait, his wife and one of his sons lost their lives.
On 26 March 2023, his wife Dr. Elham al-Mutawakel died after long difficult times and health issues. The last post she wrote on social media was a complaint that her husband was not included in the exchange list.
On April 27, 2017, while Dr. Mustafa Al Mutawakel was on his way returning from Sayoun following international participation in a conference in Morocco, soldiers loyal to President Abdrabu Mansour Hadi’s government boarded the bus he was riding in Al-Falaj checkpoint, Marib. They took him to an undisclosed location and denied him any visits or communication with his family.
Dr. Mustafa traveled 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 the 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 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, traveled to Marib 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 Marib’s 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 Marib. I was treated as if I were 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 Marib, all doors were shut in her face and her suffering never subsided.
Before she leaves Marib, she received a phone call from an anonymous phone number. The caller told her that Dr. Mustafa is no more in Marib 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 Marib 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 died a few months after the enforced disappearance of his father. Dr. Mustafa’s 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 Marib, as the case was with my father” she adds.
The internationally recognized Yemeni government and the Saudi-Emirati-led coalition must release Dr. Mustafa Al Mutawakel, as well as 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.
