In September 2026, against the backdrop of a nation slowly unearthing decades of systemic state impunity, a boatman named Abbas Mallik stood before Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal. In a steady voice, Mallik described what he stated he had witnessed more than fifteen years earlier on the dark, murky waters of the Baleshwar River, near the sprawling expanse of the Sundarbans.
According to Mallik’s testimony before the court, operatives of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB)—an elite paramilitary force long feared across Bangladesh—would regularly arrive around midnight with detainees whose hands and eyes were tightly bound. Local shopkeepers along the riverbanks were routinely ordered to close their businesses immediately and switch off their lights, plunging the area into enforced darkness. The detainees were then forced onto boats and taken out into deeper water.
There, Mallik testified, an officer he personally recognized as "Zia sir"—identified as former RAB officer Ziaul Ahsan—would execute some of the captives at close range. Their bodies, Mallik alleged, were systematically weighted down with heavy cement sacks and hurled into the river to hide the evidence. Other victims, he claimed, were transported deeper toward the Sundarbans, killed away from the immediate riverbanks, and later presented to the national press as casualties of armed "gunfights" or crossfire encounters with security forces.
Yet, buried quietly within Mallik’s extensive testimony before the tribunal was a second detail, one that speaks volumes about the mechanical precision of how enforced disappearances are executed and subsequently covered up at the institutional level. His younger brother, Alkas, had vanished without a trace in 2011 after speaking out publicly about RAB operations and security abuses. The family began a frantic, agonizing search, visiting RAB offices in multiple cities to demand answers. When they finally attempted to file an official police report regarding the disappearance, Mallik testified that local police officers flatly refused to record the names of Ziaul Ahsan or the Rapid Action Battalion, despite repeated, desperate pleas from the family. During the proceedings, the defense counsel strongly challenged Mallik’s credibility, leaving the tribunal to carefully weigh the legal and evidentiary value of his harrowing account.
For anyone who has spent years documenting human rights abuses, the brutality detailed in the courtroom is only one layer of a much larger, more insidious mechanism. For more than a decade, human rights monitors and researchers tracking violations in Bangladesh have observed a recurring pattern that operates with almost mechanical regularity: the systematic, institutional denial that these violations ever took place at all.
Sociologically, this pervasive denial deserves intense scrutiny in its own right. An enforced disappearance does not simply conclude with the physical trauma and psychological suffering of an individual who is abducted and held for months or years in an undisclosed, secret detention cell. Similarly, an extrajudicial killing does not end when a mutilated body is eventually recovered and falsely described in the morning newspapers as the outcome of a legitimate shootout with law enforcement. Instead, an entirely second struggle begins immediately afterward—a fierce battle over whether the victim’s account will be believed by the public, whether the family’s collective memory and grief will be formally recognized, and whether the event itself will be allowed to survive in the public historical record.
This complex, destructive process is known as epistemic erasure: the gradual weakening, discrediting, or outright removal of accessible, verifiable knowledge about a historical injustice. The initial violence acts directly on the physical body of the victim. The subsequent denial then targets society’s fundamental capacity to know, remember, and understand what actually happened. When that institutional denial becomes powerful enough, it hands the perpetrators an extraordinary, unassailable advantage. If official narratives maintain that nothing happened, then legally speaking, there is no crime to investigate, no victim whose testimony merits judicial recognition, and eventually, no perpetrator left to hold accountable before the law.
This dynamic is especially potent and dangerous in cases of enforced disappearance because disappearance is designed, by its very architecture, to create a permanent absence of knowledge. In such cases, the victim’s family knows full well where the person was last seen or taken, while the authorities flatly deny ever detaining him in the first place. Because the abduction is unofficial, no formal arrest record ever exists. Terrified by the reach of the state, potential witnesses are often too frightened to speak out. Furthermore, if a disappeared person miraculously survives their ordeal and returns years later, the very absence of an official detention record can be weaponized against them, turned around to cast malicious doubt on their own lived experience and testimony.
The absolute absence of evidence thus begins to masquerade as definitive evidence of absence.
Even after Bangladesh’s historic July uprising ultimately brought down the previous government, opening a window for accountability, this defensive mechanism persisted. Survivors bravely began speaking publicly about clandestine detention facilities that had long been shielded by official denials and brushed aside as conspiracy theories. When some of these notorious secret sites were finally opened to official inspections and media visits, a rival narrative immediately began to circulate across digital platforms and political circles: the claim that the facilities had been staged for political theater, or that some of the disappeared individuals had never been detained by the state at all, but had simply chosen to hide abroad and had now reappeared opportunistically after the regime’s collapse.
To an outside observer unfamiliar with the mechanics of authoritarian cover-ups, such claims might initially seem too implausible or absurd to warrant serious attention. However, after more than a decade of observing firsthand how institutional denial operates around grave human rights violations, human rights defenders recognize this phenomenon as something far more consequential than mere political spin.
Repeated, systematic denial actively reshapes the very conditions under which truth is recognized and validated by society. A returned victim is suddenly forced to carry the burdensome burden of proving they were actually a victim in the first place. Their family must endlessly prove that years of agonizing searching genuinely took place. Journalists find themselves forced to constantly defend reporting that was published years earlier under immense pressure. Human rights organizations are compelled to endlessly reproduce and re-verify documentation they have already compiled, vetted, and published. Slowly and imperceptibly, the burden of proof shifts away from those accused of carrying out mass disappearances and onto those who stubbornly insist that the disappearances actually occurred.
This creates a structural problem that extends directly into the realm of documentation and historical preservation. Since 2017, long-term documentation projects tracking human rights violations in Bangladesh have recorded hundreds of incidents and meticulously preserved the digital sources through which those events can later be independently verified. Yet, returning to some of those case files years later reveals a disturbing reality: the original digital pages no longer exist online.
The historical incident itself has not necessarily vanished from human memory. What has truly disappeared is the foundational evidence through which any ordinary researcher, journalist, or judge could independently verify it.
This vulnerability is by no means unique to Bangladesh; rather, societies around the globe experience the exact same digital decay and information loss. Independent documentation projects exist precisely because societies eventually come to realize that justice and accountability depend heavily not only on whether an atrocity was once recorded, but fundamentally on whether that record manages to survive over time.
Modern digital documentation frequently treats a hyperlink as though it were a stable, permanent academic citation. In reality, it is nothing of the kind. After a period of years, due to a combination of technical obsolescence, server failures, website redesigns, political motives, or targeted pressure, old news articles, press releases, and databases are routinely removed, rendering entire digital archives inaccessible. A citation that functioned perfectly when a human rights report was first compiled may lead completely nowhere a decade later.
The consequences of this digital erosion are far more serious than an inconvenient broken link on a webpage.
Suppose a researcher, years from now, attempts to examine a recurring, systemic pattern of political violence in Bangladesh. If twenty distinct incidents originally occurred, but digital reports documenting half of them have since disappeared from the internet, the researcher may only be able to identify a fragmented portion of the actual pattern. The historical events themselves have not fundamentally changed. What has changed is their retrievability and visibility to the world.
A deeply distorted history can therefore emerge without anyone needing to actively invent false events. It can emerge simply because real, documented events become progressively more difficult to recover, verify, and piece together.
It is true that not every missing webpage is the result of deliberate censorship. Digital journalism and archiving everywhere suffer from broken links, outdated content-management systems, unexpected server failures, and routine website redesigns. However, in environments where political pressure, state intimidation, or deliberate administrative removal also exist, the mysterious disappearance of public information acquires an entirely different and darker significance.
This underlying reality explains why archives are never politically neutral warehouses. They actively help determine what future generations are permitted to know about their own national history.
Decades ago, author George Orwell famously imagined a "memory hole" into which inconvenient historical documents were physically dropped and destroyed so that yesterday’s truth could be seamlessly replaced by today’s official, state-sanctioned version. Modern digital societies do not require such a dramatic, physical mechanism. A vital investigative report can disappear quietly because of censorship, political pressure, commercial decisions, technological decay, or simple administrative negligence. While the underlying causes may differ vastly, for the researcher or investigator who arrives twenty years later, the end result looks remarkably similar: the evidence is gone.
This reality matters profoundly for societies emerging from periods of authoritarian rule, civil conflict, or mass political violence.
True justice depends heavily on more than just punishing perpetrators in a courtroom. It also depends entirely on preserving the fragile conditions under which historical truth can remain knowable to the public. Courtroom testimony, forensic medical evidence, newspaper archives, victims’ personal accounts, photographs, videos, and human rights documentation together form the foundational evidentiary memory of a society.
An enforced disappearance violently removes a person from the visible, physical world. Subsequent denial then attempts to scrub the violation from accepted public knowledge. If the documents, records, and digital links that could establish what truly happened also disappear into the ether, the victim risks being erased a third and final time—this time, from history itself.
This is precisely why preserving digital memory is not merely a technical archival problem. It is a vital component of the infrastructure of justice.
(The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance, values, or position of Daily Sabah, which provides space for diverse perspectives as part of its commitment to open and informed public discussion.)