Former Bangladesh ambassador M Maroof Zaman, a survivor of enforced disappearance, has accused sections of the country’s human rights establishment of sidelining actual victims while using their suffering to gain influence, positions and political power.

In a sharply worded Facebook post on Sunday, marking the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Zaman said people who survived secret detention and torture were increasingly being reduced to props at programmes ostensibly organised in their name.

“Those who are truly persecuted are the ones deprived everywhere,” he wrote.

Zaman alleged that people who had never experienced enforced disappearance or torture had emerged as representatives and leaders of victims, while survivors and their families remained largely excluded from decision-making.

He criticised what he described as expensive programmes at five-star venues where VIPs and international guests deliver speeches, attend seminars and pose for photographs, while impoverished families of disappeared people sometimes struggle even to afford transport to Dhaka.

“Once the photographs are taken and the event is over, so is the responsibility,” Zaman wrote, saying some victims were handed little more than “a packet of tehari” after being brought to such events.

He questioned whether the years taken from a disappeared person, the anguish of a mother, the uncertainty endured by a wife and a child growing up without a father could be reduced to such treatment.

Zaman also alleged that victims with access to influential people were treated as “important victims,” while those without political connections or lobbying power continued to be ignored.

“This is not merely deprivation. It is the victimisation of victims for a second time,” he wrote.

He accused some individuals of using victims’ “wounds, tears and identities” to advance their own careers, saying some had subsequently become lawmakers and ministers.

“This has become a ladder for fulfilling political ambitions. This is profiteering from the suffering of victims,” Zaman wrote.

Disappeared for 467 days

Zaman’s criticism carries particular weight because of his own experience during the Awami League government.

The former ambassador to Qatar and Vietnam disappeared on December 4, 2017, after leaving his Dhanmondi home to pick up his younger daughter from Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport. His car was subsequently found abandoned in Khilkhet.

Three masked men were also captured on CCTV entering his home and leaving with electronic devices.

He returned home on March 16, 2019, after being missing for 467 days — more than 15 months. Human Rights Watch later listed his case among Bangladesh’s enforced disappearances.

Zaman has since publicly described his captivity. In a 2024 first-person account, he said he was taken to what he believed was a detention facility inside Dhaka Cantonment, where he was beaten and held incommunicado.

He has also publicly described conditions inside what he identified as the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence’s Joint Interrogation Cell.

In Sunday’s post, Zaman demanded that genuine survivors be placed at the centre of organisations working on enforced disappearances, including in leadership and decision-making roles.

He said victims themselves should also be given opportunities to speak at international forums rather than having others routinely speak on their behalf.

“Memorising stories of enforced disappearance and delivering speeches about them is not the same as being disappeared and left in a dark cell,” he wrote.

“Writing research papers about torture is not the same as carrying the scars of torture on your own body.”

Zaman said survivors were not seeking sympathy, charity, political patronage or positions, but recognition, representation, independent investigations and justice.

“People must stop turning our tears into PowerPoint presentations and making a business out of human rights,” he wrote.

“We came back from enforced disappearance. We did not return to become subjects of your speeches — we returned to tell our own truths in our own voices.”

“Our suffering belongs to us. Our stories belong to us. And ownership of those stories has never been leased to anyone else.”

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