Hartal shuts down Sri Lanka’s north-east

Protesters seek answer from the central government to questions about their missing relatives

Sri Lankan demonstrators hold portraits of missing relatives during a protest outside the United nations office in Colombo on March 13, 2013.

Sri Lanka’s north and east shut down on Thursday following a hartal call by protesters demanding an answer from the government to questions about their missing relatives. Shops remained closed all day and transport services were minimal, media reports said.

Over the last few months, families have been protesting in different places across Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority areas, voicing concern over the allegedly enforced disappearances of their relatives during the three-decade war and the years that followed.

Amnesty International estimates that since the 1980s, there have been at least 60,000 and as many as 100,000 cases of enforced disappearance in Sri Lanka, including Tamils, who went missing during and after the war, and Sinhalese, who were disappeared around the time of the JVP youth uprisings.

Support from parties

For thousands of Tamil and Muslim families in the north, who are trying to resettle after the war ended in May 2009, questions over enforced disappearances loom large. Almost all political parties in the north supported Thursday’s hartal. Nearly eight months after the Sri Lankan parliament voted to set up the Office on Missing Persons (OMP), little progress has been made, families point out.

Northern Province Chief Minister C.V. Wigneswaran said protesters demonstrated for over 50 days, with no response from the government. “Out of sheer frustration, they have asked the public to support them by staging a hartal. We have obliged,” he told

The Hindu .

However, certain sections in Colombo had a distorted view of the problem, reading their protest as being politically against the government, the Chief Minister said. “That is not true. It is a reaction to the lethargy and indifference on the part of the powers that be in dealing with the people’s problems.”

The Chief Minister has written to President Maithripala Sirisena, raising the matter. Observing that demonstrators were not protesting “emptily”, Mr. Wigneswaran said there was reason to believe that many missing persons were somewhere ascertainable. Unless the government responded positively, with an independent investigation, a durable solution for the ethnic question “would be a mirage”.