JAFFNA/ MULLAITIVU/ COLOMBO: There is a sameness to the manner in which families affected by enforced disappearances in 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. The families 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 the 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 the LTTE have also been accused of such crimes.
There is no official estimate on how many people have disappeared in Sri Lanka; reports by human rights organisations like Amnesty International place the number at between 60,000 to 1,00,000 between the 1970s and 2009. The Office on Missing Persons (OMP), an agency formed in 2017, alone received around 15,000 complaints, a majority of which were from Tamil families.
While such disappearances have stopped since 2009 -- barring a few isolated and serious incidents -- 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.
Between December 2008 and May 2009, her family, who is from a place near Oddusuddan in Mullaitivu, had shifted 14 times as the Sri Lankan army took control of hitherto LTTE-controlled regions and pursued the Tigers further north. Rajanidevi and her family were among the thousands, the majority being civilians, who ended up in Mullivaikkal, 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 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 the LTTE, even for half a day, to surrender. They assured that they would be let off after an inquiry and warned of severe consequences if the army found out later that someone was associated with the organisation.”
She hesitantly urged her husband and brothers to surrender; they refused her plea to come with them. 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 and 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 have continued their struggle for justice as part of the Association of the Relatives of Enforced Disappearances (ARED) despite overt and covert intimidation and threats by state agencies.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have set up mechanisms with the 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 that can happen only when there is an acknowledgement of what happened to those who disappeared and those responsible for the disappearances are held accountable.
While commissions set up by successive governments have failed due to lack of political will, the wheels of justice have also moved slowly due to entrenched institutional conflicts of interests and other reasons, says Ratnavale.
Thurairasa Ravikaran of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi, who was elected as an MP in the recent elections, has stood with the families in their fight for justice. “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.
Pointing out that there are around 250 women-headed families in just two small villages of Thevipuram and Vallipuram in Mullaitivu district due to the disappearances of the men, he says 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 heed his appeal to give up the protest, which has invited trouble to the family from state agencies.
She regularly travels to the Sabarimala Ayyappan temple in India, praying for justice. 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?”.