Tamil families of the forcibly disappeared in the North-East have announced that they will convene an international conference on 30 August, marking the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, to renew their rejection of Sri Lanka's domestic accountability mechanisms and their demand for international justice.
The announcement was made by representatives of the Association of Relatives of the Enforced Disappeared at a media briefing at the Jaffna Press Club. Across the Tamil homeland in the North-East, and in other parts of the island where Tamils had lived, they said, Tamil youths and young women had been abducted by the state security forces and allied paramilitary groups, many forcibly disappeared after being arrested, others after being handed over to the Sri Lankan military.
The representatives traced the history back to 1948, and said that countless Tamils had been disappeared in the decades since, while the state had remained silent about their fate and failed to hold anyone to account. Sri Lanka has the second-highest number of enforced disappearances in the world, with estimates ranging from 60,000 to more than 100,000 cases, the overwhelming majority of them Tamils, many disappeared during the final phase of the armed conflict in 2009 after surrendering to, or being handed over to, the military on the assurance that they would be returned.
Successive governments, the association said, had established investigative bodies that in effect allowed the alleged perpetrators to investigate their own crimes, and the families had consistently rejected these mechanisms, among them the Office on Missing Persons (OMP), as attempts to mislead grieving families and the international community. The present National People's Power (NPP) government, they argued, was handling the matter more strategically than its predecessors, pointing to the disappearances of Sinhalese youth in the south to press for a single, national approach to disappearances across the country. Such an equation was morally indefensible, the representatives said, treating fundamentally different experiences of loss as though they were the same.
They stressed that the families were not seeking compensation, government employment or the signing of death certificates in return for abandoning their search, and that their sole demand remained to learn the whereabouts of the disappeared and to secure justice.
The mass graves now emerging across the homeland, among them Chemmani, they said, were evidence that many of the disappeared may have been killed and secretly buried, and they accused the government of waging a psychological campaign to push families towards accepting money in place of the truth.
More than 400 mothers and fathers of the disappeared had died over the course of the long struggle without ever learning the fate of their children, the association said, warning that the movement for justice was gradually weakening as more relatives passed away. The families have maintained continuous roadside protests since February 2017, first in Kilinochchi and then across Vavuniya, Trincomalee, Mullaitivu and beyond, in one of the longest sustained protests anywhere in the world, and yet not one of their core demands has been met.
This year's International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the representatives said, would be marked by rejecting the mechanisms established by the Sri Lankan state and renewing the call for international justice, and they appealed to all political parties, regardless of their differences, along with civil society organisations, university students and the wider public, to stand with the campaign.
