A RETIRED SRI LANKAN Muslim civil servant who investigated mass enforced disappearances of mainly Sinhalese people in the 1980s will go to his grave haunted by what he heard. Physically fragile and living abroad, he recalled stories of headless bodies on stakes, survivors hiding beneath corpses and people spared because the bullets ran out. The grief and fear of the Sinhalese women who testified about these events remains vivid in his mind.
The International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), an INGO we run outside Sri Lanka, has worked for more than a decade documenting serious human-rights violations in the country. It has tried to preserve the civil servant’s memories, and to understand why multiple presidential commissions of inquiry into disappearances in Sri Lanka have so rarely delivered justice. This has meant finding undigitised reports, scanning them and comparing thousands of names. The researcher who has done most of this painstaking work on disappearances of Sinhalese people, in the shadows and largely unseen, is a Sri Lankan Tamil.
Enforced disappearance occurs when state officials, or people acting with state authorisation, support or acquiescence, take someone away and then conceal their fate or whereabouts, or refuse to acknowledge holding them. It places people beyond the protection of the law. The state has an obligation to investigate enforced disappearances, establish the fate and whereabouts of those taken, bring those responsible to justice and provide redress for the harm. Those in Sri Lanka who testified to state officials in the wake of loved ones being disappeared expected the state to preserve their evidence and act on it. Naming the disappeared, recording what happened, asserting the truth of their experiences and honouring their memory are the minimum that the state and society owes them. Instead, many families are now expected to prove their losses again.
Tens of thousands were disappeared during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrections of 1971 and 1987-1989, and during Sri Lanka’s civil war, fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in 2009. In 2015, the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances recorded its second largest outstanding caseload in Sri Lanka, behind only Iraq. For families, according to the UN, an unresolved disappearance is “slow mental torture” and a “living wound”: no certainty, no body to bury and no end to the search.
Sri Lanka’s Day of Commemoration for the Disappeared is marked each year on 27 October. It is rooted in the violence surrounding the JVP insurrections and the state’s brutal counter-insurgencies, which left tens of thousands young Sinhalese in the country’s South dead or disappeared. But the struggle to establish the fate of the disappeared extends beyond this period, this place and this community. The country’s Tamil minority, concentrated in the North and East, has also suffered gravely, both during and after the civil war. So have Sri Lanka’s Muslims.
Decades of campaigning by Tamil and Sinhalese families of the disappeared helped establish the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) in 2017. The question is whether the OMP is an institution created to recover and assert the truth, or instead to help erase it.