Three people close to me have gone missing in recent weeks. Two remain unfound for nearly a month. The third was my driver's son, found alive about fifty kilometers from the neighborhood where he disappeared. Relief could have ended the story there, but yesterday my driver said something I can't get out of my head: "Madam, it's easy to tell when you haven't lived through it. But I have lived it. If I were in the place of parents who still haven't found their child, I wouldn't even have a reason to live anymore." I found nothing to say in response, and I think there was nothing to say. He had the luck to get his son back, but he knows better than anyone what those weeks of waiting mean, and that's why he measures what others continue to endure without him. Writing a well-crafted column about insecurity remains easy as long as you're not on the other end of a phone that never rings with good news. That day, it's not just a mother who loses sleep, it's also a father, a driver, a man you see every day, who has known fear to the end and who now thinks of those who still have it ahead of them.
The overall tally is stark and chilling: 200 disappearances recorded across the country since the start of this wave, 175 people found alive, and at least eight minors among the victims. In markets, courtyards, neighborhood groups, and on social media, the wildest theories circulate, for lack of certainty about the exact causes. When uncertainty is total, imagination replaces information, and parents take over from the State.
The authorities in power describe these acts as destabilization, orchestrated according to them by enemies of the Nation. Whether this explanation is true, partial, or one lead among others, one thing should take priority over political disputes: conspiracy or organized crime, it is ordinary children and families who pay the price, and it is on them that every resource and decision should focus.
Credit must be given to what is being done on the ground. More police, military and gendarmes already patrol the capital with limited means and under additional pressure: that of a population at the end of its rope, increasingly inclined to take justice into its own hands. Yet these are the same forces who, in early July, intervened to prevent several lynchings, even if, sadly, a man was burned alive by a crowd in Maintirano for lack of being protected in time.
Mid-July, an institutional voice came to support this call for calm. The Conference of Bishops of Madagascar broke its silence, speaking of a climate of terror, demanding transparency on the causes of this wave of disappearances, and urging the population not to give in to revenge. A message that law enforcement carries themselves, often unheard.
As fear grows, parents do daily the work that no one else can do in their place: group trips for travel, outings banned after four in the afternoon, phone on at night just in case. This constant vigilance has a price that no one counts, exhausted mothers and fathers who add fear for their children to an already endless list of burdens.
And as if to prove everything above, I learn at this very moment news that chills me: the only son of a close friend was kidnapped and killed under horrible conditions in early July. I feel guilty for only knowing now, as if the pain of our loved ones must also get lost somewhere between two official figures before reaching us. That flag at half-mast is no longer, for me, an abstract symbol.
So, destabilization or not, the urgency remains the same: concentrate all State efforts on protecting a people who are today the prey of malicious networks, and give law enforcement the means to do their job without also having to contain the anger of those they are trying to protect. As long as a father must say he would have no reason to live in another's place, the priority can only be there: find every child still missing, and restore to the Malagasy people the right to no longer be afraid.
Mbolatiana Raveloarimisa