Political kidnappings

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