In search of the missing thousands

February 19, 2017 12:25 am | Updated 12:34 am IST

The small group of Tamils that met top Ministers in Colombo on February 9 conveyed one thing emphatically— their patience was wearing thin. All the members of the group that had travelled nearly six hours by bus from Sri Lanka’s Northern Province to Colombo have been searching for their missing relatives for many years. Their sons or daughters or spouses went missing during, and in some cases, after May 2009 when Sri Lanka’s civil war ended.

The meeting was fixed following a fast unto death they had begun in the Northern town of Vavuniya late January. After State Minister of Defence Ruwan Wijewardene went up to Vavuniya and invited them for a high-level meeting in Colombo to discuss their grievance, the protesting family members agreed.

Around 15 of them came to Colombo with more disillusionment and anger than hope. Local media reports indicated that the discussion was heated, with the family members demanding that the Tamil lawmakers present in the room leave immediately. “We have no faith in them,” one of them told the Ministers.

After nearly three hours of deliberation, it ended with Ministers and Sri Lanka’s Inspector General of Police promising action, reportedly prioritising the 15 families’ cases.

Tamil National Alliance (TNA) parliamentarian M.A. Sumanthiran said the families had struck a “private deal with the government”. However, human rights lawyer K.S. Ratnavale, who has represented some of the families in court and attended the Colombo meeting, told The Hindu that the families were unconvinced with the government’s response and might resume their fast unto death.

According to Amnesty, the Sri Lankan state has received 65,000 complaints of disappearances since 1995. There have been at least six commissions appointed by the government since the 1990s to look into disappearances but none has made a difference to the families. “In many cases, relatives give very specific details of where the missing person was last seen and even name the suspected perpetrator,” a community worker in Batticaloa told The Hindu recently. They would often provide names of members of the security forces or LTTE cadre who they charge with the abduction, and share details of when their relatives surrendered to the Army, or were seen at a particular detention centre.

Reliving trauma

However, such details have at best remained in government files, with every panel raising hopes and making families relive the trauma as they recount what happened. While families continue their search, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has observed that the missing persons are “most probably dead”.

Following the 2015 UN resolution, Sri Lanka promised in Geneva that it would establish an Office on Missing Persons. “While the Sri Lankan Parliament passed a bill to that effect last August, efforts to actually operationalise the Office has progressed at a glacial pace,” said Yolanda Foster, Sri Lanka expert, Amnesty, emphasising that the government should acknowledge the need for interim relief.

Families also accuse the government of failing to come up with a sound economic programme. Even their demand for “certificates of absence” that might help them access some government schemes is yet to be met. The TNA and the Northern Provincial Council could do a lot more, families note. It is this sentiment, say observers, that other political forces among Tamils exploit. “For the families, it is yet another platform to air their grievances. But the so-called organisers of these protests use them mainly to attack their political rivals,” said a community worker in Jaffna.

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