Sri Lanka’s tragic history of involuntary disappearances can hardly be told using dry statistics. Amnesty International estimates 100,000 disappearances during armed internal conflicts. The International Committee of the Red Cross claims it maintains records of 16,000 missing persons, a few of them journalists and human rights activists, mostly young men and women who disappeared without a trace.
Whichever figure one wants to take, though, each disappearance is a tale of personal loss laced with political barbarity; some families have spent years in searching for their missing loved ones.
One of the tireless and feistiest campaigners for the missing is Sandya Ekneligoda, the diminutive wife of journalist and cartoonist Prageeth Ekneligoda, who has been missing since January 24, 2010. At the time of his disappearance, Prageeth, was developing “a booklet entitled Pawul Gaha (Family Tree) on the nepotism prevalent within the Rajapaksa administration,” reports The Guardian. His abduction took place two days before the election that Rajapaksa won.
Never-ending protests
Since then, his wife Sandya has been counting the days. On September 2, 2020 — 3,873 days since the father of her two sons went missing — she appeared in court to testify on the abduction. “Yesterday was the most satisfying day without Prageeth, because I was summoned as the 1st witness to the case filed by Sri Lanka republic on his disappearance,” she tweeted the day after.
Other families of the missing have engaged in a continuous public protest in the northern town of Vavuniya, once the gateway to the island’s protracted civil conflict. They have held the protest on the side of the main road for over two and half years and only stopped when COVID-19 disrupted public life like never before.
The statistics are waypoints in the island’s history of ethnic war and two uprisings, together costing thousands of lives. Since the end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war on May 18, 2009, hope for those searching for their missing loved ones has been ebbing and flowing. In the immediate aftermath of the war, as the former Mahinda Rajapaksa government began to assert its control over areas formerly dominated by the ideological rhetoric and armed presence of the separatist Tamil Tigers, human rights took a backseat to other concerns.
In 2015, when Rajapaksa was defeated and Maithripala Sirisena was elected on a reformist platform, hope was reborn among the families. A day after the Sirisena victory, tens of thousands gathered at the sacred Madhu Shrine in the northern jungles to hear Pope Francis.
Extending dynastic power
“There is hope again,” said Ramsiyah Pachchalan, a minority Tamil, while waiting to hear the pontiff. “We can believe again.” But that hope was never fulfilled in the next four and half years, as the rivalry and political skulduggery between Sirisena and his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe crippled the administration.
Now the Rajapaksas have returned to power. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Mahinda’s younger brother and the last war-time defense secretary, is the president. Mahinda Rajapaksa is the prime minister.
On the back of a sweeping victory at the general elections on August 5, 2019, which gave it an unprecedented two-thirds control in parliament, the government is about to enact constitutional reforms aimed at undoing the transfer of some powers from the executive presidency to parliament in 2015. “Critics fear the siblings … want to end presidential term limits, bring the judiciary and police under their direct control, and extend their dynastic power to a new generation,” reports Al Jazeera.
The grieving families of the missing defied police restrictions and proceeded with their protest in eastern Batticaloa on August 30, 2020. Source: https://www.vikalpa.org/
“There is an air of self-censorship,” said Ruki Fernando, an advisor to Inform, a Colombo-based human rights documentation center. “Everyone is just in a holding pattern.”
It was in such an atmosphere that the families of the missing gathered in Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka on August 30 to demand information on their missing loved ones. As the families gathered, so did the police.
Broken promises
An officer handed a letter to one of the organizers informing them of a court order preventing the procession. However, the order named only one of the organizers, who was not even at the site of the protest. After several tense minutes arguing with the police, the protestors proceeded with the procession. The police allowed it.
“There was no physical violence,” Fernando said. He feels that it is not likely that the country will regress into an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. The more probable scenario is that the government will use administrative means to scuttle rights investigations and pesky interlocutors demanding answers.
In February 2020, the government withdrew support to commitments made under the Sirisena administration to the UN Human Rights Council. The Office of Missing Persons set up to investigate cases of missing persons only began work in February 2018. The last two years have seen a series of political upheavals, including one government being dismissed and another reinstated within a month in October 2018, and the Easter bombings in April 2019.
While the Office of Missing Persons has been working to issue certificates of absence, Gotabaya Rajapaksa has publicly supported the issuance of death certificates. State officials have also lobbied families to opt for death certificates.
Activists and families have also reported increased surveillance by state security agencies. In one instance, an official working with a women rights’ organization in the North Western Mannar District received many calls from someone who she thought was a journalist. The caller first requested the official to give details of the organization’s work portfolio. The requests turned to coercion when the official expressed reluctance.
Unwelcome visits
She was later told that the information had to be given at a regional police station. Her caller thereafter revealed that he had maintained the cover of a journalist to carry out his surveillance work till 2019 and that now he had been asked to do his work more openly.
In the northern districts of Kilinochchi, Mullaithivu, and Vavuniya, family members with missing loved ones have been organizing a continuous sit-in protest for over two and half years. In this span of time, they have witnessed increased visits by government officials and security forces personnel.
Organizers of the protests have noticed that members who are either from remote villages or are not part of the core organizing group have received the highest number of such visits. The visits also increased when prominent protest organizers were traveling, as when several of them were away in Geneva, Switzerland, attending the sessions of the UN Human Rights Council in February.
In late August of this year, family members who were planning to take part in protests from the same area received phone calls discouraging them from attending. In another instance, the owners and drivers of buses rented by families to travel to the protest sites also received similar calls.
Since the November 2019 presidential election, two journalists, who received threats to their safety, have left the country. In post-conflict Sri Lanka, justice and peace remain elusive. There is still no telling if enforced disappearances now belong to the past.●
Amantha Perera has over 15 years of experience as a journalist. His work has appeared in TIME, Reuters, the Guardian, and the Washington Post. He also works as a regional coordinator and trainer for the DART Centre Asia Pacific. He is currently pursuing post-graduate research on online trauma threats faced by journalists and their impact at the Central Queensland University in Melbourne, Australia.
“I can’t bring back the dead”: Closure remains elusive for many grieving families
By Asia Democracy Chronicles
In January 2020, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced that people still missing after Sri Lanka’s civil war will be declared dead. The New York Times quoted him as saying, “I can’t bring back the dead.”
Rajapaksa made the announcement during a meeting with the United Nations’ resident coordinator in Colombo in January 2020. He said that the tens of thousands of people still missing from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century civil war will be formally declared dead “after the necessary investigations.” Steps would then be taken to issue death certificates, and their families would “be given the support they need to continue with their lives,” he said.
“Under Sri Lankan law, not having death certificates means that families cannot access property deeds, bank accounts or inheritances left by those missing relatives,” reported BBC News. However, not all Sri Lankans missing relatives are ready to accept that the cases are closed.
Some people are still searching for answers, and they have decided not to accept a death certificate. Jadusan*, 19, is one of them. His father went missing in Batticaloa District in Sri Lanka’s east in March 2009, two months before the war ended. Jadusan has decided not to accept a death certificate, afraid it would hurt any chances of an investigation in the future.
Rajapaksa did not explain how he came to the conclusion that all the missing persons were deceased. The president was defense secretary during the last years of the civil war. He was accused of gross human rights abuses as he crushed the insurgency and brought the conflict to an end. Rajapaksa has consistently denied any wrongdoing during his time as defense secretary.
* The name has been withheld to protect the person’s identity.
