Political kidnappings

Mulyana W. Kusumah's article titled 'Stop political kidnappings' in the May 12 edition of your newspaper provided a degree of chilling insight into the ugly reality of political kidnappings which now plague Indonesia.

According to Mr. Mulyana, the Spanish have coined a special word to describe politically inspired disappearances. The word, he writes, is decaparacido. This is incorrect. The correct word is desaparecido, which is both the past participle of the verb desaparecer (in both Spanish and Portuguese for that matter) and an adjective. As a verb, desaparecer just means "to disappear, vanish, go missing". As an adjective, it also serves to refer to missing persons, hence the form that has gained no notoriety under the despicable military regimes of Chile and Argentina in the late 1970s and 1980s: los desaparecidos, or those reported or found missing. Desaparecido, therefore, can only qualify the condition of a missing person, and it cannot be the act of disappearance, which would be desaparicion in Spanish and desaparimento in Portuguese.

Let us hope that the Indonesian people will never need to coin a word in their language to refer to that abominable practice. Hopefully, it will desaparecer for ever from this country in the near future.

J. PAUL BRAIBANT

Jakarta