JAFFNA/MULLAITIVU/COLOMBO: There is a sameness to the manner in which families affected by enforced disappearances in Tamil-speaking northern Sri Lanka narrate their stories: names, dates, documents. The homogeneity arises not just from the similarity of their experiences but also from the countless times they’ve had to tell their stories over the past decade – to journalists, human rights activists, law enforcement agencies and commissions of inquiries – in their elusive pursuit of truth and justice for their loved ones, who disappeared during the armed ethnic conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government which ended in 2009.
“Can I bring the pictures?” asks 48-year-old Sasikumar Ranjanidevi at the beginning of her conversation with TNIE in Mullaitivu last month. This is how a conversation with almost every affected person begins -- they all have laminated photographs of their disappeared loved ones.
The Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances of the UN Human Rights Commission defines enforced disappearances as the “arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty” by the state, followed by a refusal to acknowledge such action and concealing the whereabouts of those disappeared.
Sri Lanka has ranked among the countries with highest rate of enforced disappearances, owing to the three-decade-long violent ethnic conflict and the two unsuccessful armed uprisings by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which heads the present ruling National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. While the majority of disappearances have been attributed to the Sri Lankan state, outfits like LTTE have also been accused of such crimes.
There is no official estimate of how many have people have been disappeared in Sri Lanka; reports by human rights organisations like Amnesty International place the number between 60,000 to 1,00,000 between the 1970s and 2009. The Office on Missing Persons (OMP), an agency formed in 2017, received around 15,000 complaints, a majority of which were from Tamil families.
While such disappearances have largely stopped since 2009, the largest case of en masse disappearances likely occurred when the war ended on May 18, 2009.
Ranjanidevi, who was in the third trimester of pregnancy with her second child, vividly remembers that fateful day when her husband Manickam Sasikumar and her brothers Murugan Selvakumar and Murugesan Rajapulendran, all low-rung cadres of the LTTE, voluntarily surrendered to the Sri Lankan army along with hundreds of others at Mullaitivu, the final theatre of war.
“We all lived in a bunker to escape the army’s shelling. I had not eaten for a week when we heard we were being allowed safe passage to the army-controlled area,” she recalls. Hers was among the thousands of families who crossed the narrow and blood-stained Vattuvakal bridge separating Mullivaikal from Mullaitivu, bodies lying all around. “The army, which had lined up several buses, repeatedly called for all those associated with LTTE, even for a half a day, to surrender. They assured they would be let off after an inquiry but warned of severe consequences if the army foud out later that someone had been associated with the organisation.”
She hesitantly urged her husband and brothers to surrender. While they were taken in one bus, she was taken in another to a camp. Innumerable retellings over the years have not shorn her of emotion as she recalls the moment. She tears up when she says, “That was the last time I saw them.”
Even children were not spared. Sivapatham Ilankothai (64) from Jaffna, was in a refugee camp in India when the war ended. Her daughter Parameswaran Sasikala (31), son-in-law Chinnathambi Parameswaran (40), and three grandchildren, aged between eight months to 10 years, surrendered and have not been seen since.
“The last time I managed to speak to my daughter over phone, I asked her to at least send the children with someone to India in a boat, but she said it was not possible,” she says.
Ranjanidevi and Ilankothai are among the hundreds of women who struggle for justice as part of the Association of the Relatives of Enforced Disappearances despite overt and covert intimidation and threats by state agencies.
Successive Sri Lankan government have set up mechanisms with avowed intention of providing these women justice, but none have led to any meaningful resolutions. “Now, they want us to take compensation and go silent. We do not want money. We want to know where our dear ones are or what happened to them,” says Ilankothai.
KS Ratnavale, a senior human rights lawyer who has represented several families of disappeared persons in the courts pro bono, says many of the families may not believe their loved ones are alive. “What they want is closure,” he explains, adding that can happen only when there is an acknowledgement of what happened to those disappeared and those responsible are held accountable.
While government commissions have failed due to lack of political will, the wheels of justice have also moved slowly due to entrenched institutional conflicts of interests, says Ratnavale.
Thurairasa Ravikaran of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi, who was recently elected an MP, has stood with the families. “The Sinhalese see the army as heroes who won the war. So, how will an elected government make the army accountable for such human rights violations,” he asks, adding that justice can be attained only with the intervention of the international community.
Ilankothai’s husband stopped talking to her seven years ago as she refused to to give up the protest. For her it is not only a matter of closure. She believes her grandchildren at least might have been kept alive somewhere. Pointing out that her youngest grandson Piraiyalagan was eight months old when her daughter’s family surrendered to the army in 2009, she asks, “No one will be so cold-hearted to kill a baby, don’t you think?”.
Sasikumar Ranjanidevi,
who was in her third trimester of pregnancy with her second child, said her husband Manickam Sasikumar, Murugan Selvakumar, and Murugesan Rajapulendran, all of whom were lower rung cadres of the LTTE, had voluntarily surrendered to the army
Sivapatham Ilankothai
(64) from Jaffna, was in a refugee camp in India when the war ended. Her daughter Parameswaran Sasikala (31), son-in-law Chinnathambi Parameswaran (40) and three grand children, aged between eight months to 10 years, surrendered and disappeared
