Families of victims of enforced disappearance continue to be persecuted in Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of enforced disappearances in the world, with thousands of victims gone missing during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna uprising and the civil war with the Tamil Tigers. Human Rights Watch denounces the ongoing persecution of victims' families through monitoring, intimidation, and arbitrary arrests. Despite the existence of an Office for Missing Persons, almost no cases have been solved. Families have asked for international intervention.
Colombo (AsiaNews) – Sri Lanka has one of the highest rates of enforced disappearances in the world, including people who went missing during the insurgency of the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (1987-89) and the civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers for the liberation of Tamil Eelam (1983-2009).
For decades, Sri Lankan authorities have refused to reveal the whereabouts of missing persons or to prosecute those responsible, prompting the UN human rights office to call for international prosecutions.
Instead, the Sri Lankan government continues to persecute the families of victims of enforced disappearance who seek to assert their rights, Human Rights Watch said yesterday.
“Security forces persistently harass families through surveillance, intimidation, false allegations, violence, and arbitrary arrests," HRW said on International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearance, yesterday.
A day earlier, a court in Trincomalee agreed with the police's request to prohibit relatives of missing persons from organising a procession on the day of remembrance.
“The relatives of the disappeared experience the daily torment of not knowing what happened to their family members, which state agencies have cruelly compounded by trying to silence them,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at HRW, who added that many have passed away without knowing the truth or obtaining justice.
On 22 August, in his annual report on Sri Lanka to the UN Human Rights Council, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, described, “a persistent trend of surveillance, intimidation and harassment of journalists and civil society actors, especially those working on enforced disappearances … and reprisals against family members of the disappeared engaging with the UN or international actors, including members of the diplomatic community.”
In May, HRW met with relatives of missing persons in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, mostly wives or mothers of the victims, who “described a pattern of ongoing abuses. Several are facing court proceedings after being arrested at protests, including three who had been hospitalized as a result of police violence against protesters,” HRW lamented.
Speaking about the bitter experience of a woman from the Eastern Province struggling to know the fate of her husband, the group noted that she believed she was regularly monitored by security agencies, including the police Criminal Investigation Department, the Terrorism Investigation Division, the Special Task Force, and the army.
"We can't raise our voices, we have no freedom to move," said another woman from the Northern Province, whose husband has not been seen since his arrest in 2008. “They [security agencies] threaten us, and even take action against our family members. We have no freedom to do anything.”
The women say that police routinely hand them stay orders — which prohibit them from attending memorial events or protests — in the middle of the night, when they are dressed in nightclothes and take pictures.
“If my gate is locked, police climb over the wall or cut the fence to deliver a stay order,” one said.
Several mothers of the missing said the most frightening threats are aimed at their other children. One said that when she participates in protests, the police tell her: “You have to look after your child who is still alive.”
Another said that just days after she was arrested during a protest in 2023, her son was arrested over a fabricated drug offence and was sent to “rehabilitation”.
In 2017, the Sri Lankan government established the Office for Missing Persons (OMP) to determine the whereabouts or fate of missing persons, but it has hardly solved any case so far.
Families accuse the OMP of pressuring them to agree to compensation, which they fear will lead to their cases being dismissed without further investigation.
“Earlier we trusted the OMP but after they recruited certain commissioners, we lost our faith,” said the mother of a missing person from Mannar, northwestern Sri Lanka, referring to the appointment of former senior security force officials to the body.
She said she turned down offers of compensation because "I need to know what happened to my son.”
Many relatives of the missing are sceptical of the current government's proposal to establish a new national truth and reconciliation commission, after similar bodies failed to find the truth or account for the past.
“We don’t accept it. We don’t have faith in it,” said one of them.
For the families, international involvement, including in criminal investigations, is important.
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30/08/2021 17:09
05/04/2023 16:04
