13 Min Read • From Beirut
The future of Lebanon lies in its past
The stories of the missing and forcibly disappeared in Lebanon are far from being close ended. Still, engaging with them is one of the keys to imagine the future.
By Anna Illing
August 25, 2026
It took 30 years and the continuous pressure and fighting of hundreds of women and the civil society who supported them to establish the National Commission for the Missing and forcibly Disappeared (NCMFD), a body intended to investigate, asses and be responsible to deal with and close any matter concerning people missing and forcibly disappeared. The scope is not time-limited by law, but the legacy of the legacy of the civil war (1975-1990) with its estimated 17,000 people who went missing remains at the core of matter.
In November 2025, the second set of members took over the NCMFD, with the objective “to preserve institutional memory and ensure continuity. This is especially important for a mandate that extends over many years and cannot depend solely on the individuals serving at a particular moment”, Zeina Chamas, current Executive Director of the NCMFD, says.
As Lebanon faces questions on how to build a state beyond armed conflict and on how to implement economic and political reforms needed to overcome years of economic crisis, war, corruption, and public distrust, the NCMFD might just be one of the best entities to turn towards to envision the country’s future.
Before the NCMFD
The Lebanese civil war reached an end in 1990 with the Ta’if Agreement. A year later, the law 84/91 was passed, commonly referred to as the general amnesty law, as it provided amnesty for all crimes committed between 1975-1990.
This decision to opt for amnesia meant that “nothing has been done, of course, to address the issue of the missing and disappeared. Nevertheless, the families continue to ask for their right to know and the whereabouts of their dear ones who went missing”, says Carmen Hassoun Abou Jaoudé - political scientist, researcher, university professor and expert in transitional justice, who worked for the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) and was a member of the National Commission on Missing and Forcibly Disappeared between 2020 and 2025.
“The families began this fight long ago”, she continues, “In 2000 they did a national campaign, called ‘Our Right to Know’. It was actually the first public, national campaign. A first committee was established; it was supposed to investigate the cases and give answers to the families. In reality, it will issue a two-page report saying that all those missing are dead”. Without intending to look any further into them, this first report mentioned three mass graves. This number is deemed “much higher”, by Act for the Disappeared (ACT), an NGO that has worked since 2010 to create a database on all the information it could gather on those who have disappeared. “After a decade and a half of war between militias across the country, it is impossible to believe that we would only find three mass graves. And some of their locations are fairly well-known”, its staff explains.
The matter goes even a little more back, to Law No. 434 passed on May 1995. Under this law, relatives of someone missing for at least four years could start all the legal procedures to have that person declared legally dead. As ACT’s staff recalls, it was meant to resolve inheritance, remarriage, property and other administrative difficulties originating from having a family member having disappeared. “Many families perceived it as an attempt to close the file without investigating what had happened”, ACT says.
Five years later, a newly built commission encouraged this approach by concluding that people who had been missing for more than four years should be considered dead under the same law.
For the families this was not a satisfying answer, especially after, just a couple of month later, 53 Lebanese were released from Syrian prisons, “some of which were on the list of the missing people”, professor Abou Jaoudé emphases.
From this first commission to the one currently in place a number of bodies were established and dismantled, without any real work being done to achieve any results. Professor Abou Jaoudé believes that the reason for this lies in the nature of these previous commissions: “All these official entities were always led by people who are officials of the security sector, not by the civil society who was pushing for answers”. For her, the independence, the fact that the member of the NCMFD are appointed outside state functions, is what made a difference.
For ACT, seeing an such an institution taking charge of the issue meant finally achieving one of its goals: “we had developed our documentation work with the understanding that it should eventually support an independent national institution”, the staff recounts. Before the NCMFD, ACT basically did not have interactions with the state, “we occasionally engaged relevant ministries and municipalities to implement certain awareness-raising campaigns but there was no cooperation in uncovering the fate of the missing”, the staff recalls.
What is there and what is not
It was a bumpy start for the NCMFD, as professor Abou Jaoudé, a commission member at the time, describes: “we had no resources, the country was in the middle of a war and an economic crisis that led to a total collapse. We didn't have an office, a headquarters. We didn't have a budget, staff or a DNA bank”.
With positive pride, professor Abou Jaoudé affirms that still, the first NCMFD did not back down: “we wanted to put the foundation and the bylaws to start the relationship and cooperation with the different institutions in the state”. From this Chamas recognizes, the current NCMFD could move on to render its work substantially more operational. For Chamas, this operationalization takes the form of more trained personnel, frameworks for informational management and protection and for cooperation with families, civil society and competent state authorities.
How to practically achieve these goals is trickier, as numerous crucial challenges still exist. For one, the information is dispersed across different institutions and organizations, and access to relevant records and archives is, thus, not a given, according to Chamas. Moreover, the forensic capacity is still limited, and an integrated national system for managing and identifying human remains is still missing.
“No single institution possesses all the information or capacities required” notes Chamas. Which makes cooperation another major challenge. “Clarifying fate and whereabouts may require cooperation among the Commission, the judiciary, ministries, security institutions, hospitals, forensic professionals, local authorities and, in some cases, foreign counterparts”, she elaborates. On top of it all, the NCMFD still needs “sustainable staffing”, Chamas adds.
All the other priorities
Nevertheless, professor Abou Jaoudé maintains a positive take on NCMFD’s future: “the current government actually believes in this cause. There is support, and the budget we asked for, they gave us, knowing that also the state doesn't have the resources”. The fact that political will does exist, according to her, means the now the NCMFD can go even further and take the opportunity to build the resources, expertise, capacity building needed to create an institution, which will be able to consolidate and increase its impacts with time.
ACT is more relucent, as to them there always seems to be some other urgent issue, some other pressing priority to allocate money to. “We may be biased, but healing this wound is fundamental for Lebanese society”, the staff claims.
Chamas believes that this situation is “inevitable” for an institution such as NCMFD in a country such as Lebanon, undergoing successive economic, political and security crises. The competition for limited public resources to meet urgent and highly visible needs is a common struggle, accentuated for the missing person file as it’s a long-term project “whose results may not always be immediate or visible”, she reflects.
Yet “I think it is important not to frame the right of families to know as something that can indefinitely be postponed until all other national problems have been resolved” she adds. Afterall, the commission was entrusted with a mandate, and for to be meaningful and for the members to fulfill it, she claims, “the institution must eventually have the human, technical and financial resources necessary to exercise it”.
Comparing to what?
In this context, professor Abou Jaoudé does point out to the priority to tackle “a comprehensive database collecting all relevant information around the missing and disappeared, including the DNA. It is imperative because you cannot start any exhumation, any identification process without a strong and robust database”.
ACT, who, among the other things, calls to build a collective DNA database, shares the same opinion. “At the moment, we cannot do anything with it. There is no central database to compare samples to. This means that we are still not able to identify the bodies that are found”.
For Chamas, the forensic challenge is not only a question of DNA, although it is an important element. It is also a question of conducting proper forensic archeological and anthropological investigations and ensuring proper preservation of human remains. In her words: “the problem is not simply that remains may be recovered and there is nothing against which to compare their DNA. If a burial site is not properly assessed, if remains are recovered without appropriate forensic procedures, if associated evidence is lost, if remains cannot be adequately examined or preserved, or if information from families and information derived from the remains cannot be systematically compared, important opportunities for identification can be lost”.
Acknowledging this, she adds to ACT’s statement for the need of a central database: “what Lebanon still needs is an integrated humanitarian identification system connecting the different stages of the process”.
It is an issue of fear, ACT argue, fear that blame and accountability will follow this documentation work. “Missing and disappeared came from all sects, from all militias involved in the war, but nobody was held responsible”. The general amnesty law, they say, “is one of the reasons why some believe that uncovering the past, as we do with our work, may lead to a second civil war”.
Yet, ACT states that families merely want to know what happened to their loved ones and the NCMFD does not have a judicial role anyway. “Its mandate is strictly humanitarian: to work towards clarifying the fate and whereabouts of missing and forcibly disappeared persons and to uphold families’ right to know. It does not determine criminal responsibility or assign blame” Chamas clarifies.
No one really knows how many mass graves still need to be discovered. ACT brings up the instance of the Lebanese University (LU) in Hadath, Faculty of Science. Based on a testimony presented in the movie “Sleepless Nights" by Eliane Raheb, one mother planted an olive tree there. She thought her son had gone missing at the university during the war, but no exhumations have been performed, nor bodies have been found at the site. To this day, students walk pass that olive tree, without knowing why it stands there. “It is hard to imagine but, at times, in Lebanon we may be very well walking on a pile of bodies without knowing. I was a student at LU, but I didn’t hear about this story until I joined ACT”, an ACT staff member remembers.
To complicate things even further, not all the bodies are to be found in today’s Lebanon. “We know many were also arrested and detained in Syria, who was militarily active in the conflict”, ACT continues, “when the Bashar al-Assad was overthrown in 2024, some Lebanese bodies were discovered in the regime’s prisons”.
The NCMFD & the State
The NCMFD defines its mandate as strictly humanitarian, centered around giving answers to the families. For Professor Abou Jaoudé the NCMDF's truth-seeking efforts embody the principles of a reconciliation and transitional-justice body.
Both agree that its work impacts the state's mechanisms and how they are perceived. As Chamas puts it “a state that recognizes families’ right to know, preserves records, cooperates across institutions and provides reliable answers demonstrates that it is capable of addressing the consequences of past and present conflicts through law and public institutions”. Professor Abou Jaoudé builds on this saying that it boils down to a matter of trust in institutions and “in working for a future that is peaceful, that is just, between the Lebanese”.
Thinking of state reconstruction, and going beyond the physical aspect of it, Chamas thinks “it must also involve rebuilding the capacity and credibility of public institutions”. And that is where the NCMFD’s mission could play a role. “By developing professional systems for information management, humanitarian identification, institutional coordination and family engagement, the Commission can help demonstrate a form of state action that is lawful, humane and continuous”, she explains, contributing to state building.
Because of this, professor Abou Jaoudé says: “the issue of the missing is really part of any reform. It is so because it forces us to deal with our past, with the violence, and also to build trust between the citizen and the state and to be able to start this also reconciliation process between the Lebanese that didn't happen at the society level”.
And it may even go further than that. One institution cannot put an end to the cycle of conflicts Lebanon has experienced. But it can help it “respond differently to the human consequences of conflict”, Chamas adds. The NCMFD’s work of preserving records, acknowledging families' rights and building insitutiont capable of responding cross political and sectarian devisions can, she states, sontribute to public trust. “That alone will not end cycles of conflict, but it is one of the institutional conditions needed for a state that protects people and learns from the consequences of its past”.
For the time being, Chamas believes that socially some steps forward have been taken as it has become clear to a larger part of the population that prolonged silence has not resolved the issue. What is still missing is “a space in which information can be provided and the fate and whereabouts of missing persons can be clarified professionally, confidentially and without politicizing the families’ rights”.
Professor Abou Jaoudé concludes with a fitting image: “mass graves are actually very symbolic of this healing process. We want to exhume to bodies but as well exhume what we are hiding to break the silence and amnesia around the past”.