RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Justice Eludes Victims Of Gov’t Crackdown

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

BADDEGAMA, Sri Lanka, May 27 1999 (IPS) - The waters of the beautiful Gin Ganga river, as it glides past her home in this southern Sri Lankan village, never lets 63-year-old M.P. Somi forget the terror of 1989.

Her 23-year-old daughter’s mutilated body was found floating in the river after she had been picked up by security forces at the height of a bloody anti-government uprising by radical leftist student members of the JVP or People’s Liberation Front.

No one dared to take the body out of the water for fear of the security forces coming after them. Thousands of people were killed as the army and the police tried to contain the revolt between 1988 and 1990.

“First they took my son in April 1989. Then they came to the house next door where my daughter Sandhya was spending the night with two elderly aunts and took her away in the middle of the night,” Somi recalls.

“I didn’t have the heart to go and see her. But her brother did and he came back angry – her mouth and throat had been slit. We were scared to take her body out of the river, for fear of the army coming after us,” the mother weeps as she talks.

Memories of daughters, sons and parents who went missing or whose bodies were found dumped in rivers and on roadsides still haunt families across southern Sri Lanka, the scene of the uprising.

At least 60,000 disappeared, according to estimates by Amnesty International, during the counter-insurgency operations ordered by the then United National Party (UNP) government.

Tragically most of the victims were unconnected to the JVP, according to evidence presented at three presidential commissions appointed by President Chandrika Kumaratunga to probe the disappearances. They were mostly relatives or friends of JVP activists or political opponents of the ruling party.

The Kumaratunga government, which came to power promising to order investigations, paid Somi 25,000 rupees (some 360 dollars) for each of the three children she lost. But Somi says the loss and pain can never be compensated.

Her neighbour Danawathie Palliyaguru, 45, has lit a lamp under a black and white framed photograph of a young man – her dead husband.

It was the night after Christmas in 1989, she remembers. “They threatened to break down the door if we didn’t open up. When we opened, four armed men rushed in. They made us kneel, even my youngest child who was three.”

Then they took away my husband, who was the ‘grama sevaka’ (top government official in the village), she said, and though her in-laws and she combed the village, they never saw him again.

“There was no trace of him. We went to the police that night but they refused to take our statements. They recorded it only a day later,” she recounts.

Some years ago, Palliyaguru wrote to the government’s Human Rights Commission and was paid a compensation of 50,000 rupees. But she still does not know what happened to her husband.

“Life is hard … the children’s education was disrupted,” she wearily admits. “My eldest son, who was 10 at the time his father was taken away, refuses to stay at home. How can you bring up children, especially sons, without their father?”

Baddegama, near Galle, considered a “hotbed” of the JVP, paid a high price in the counter-JVP campaign. Many young people were taken away in the village – only a few survived.

“They took me to a camp and I was interrogated and released,” said a carpenter, who says he willingly helped the rebels like many other villagers as people were fed up with the UNP government. “I must be one of the few detainees lucky to be alive.”

President Kumaratunga, whose People’s Alliance coalition triumphed at the 1994 polls, appointed three commissions to investigate and ascertain what happened to the missing persons.

The commissions appointed in May 1995 – for different regions – received more than 30,000 complaints from families of victims. About 19,000 cases were investigated and the commissions presented their reports to Kumaratunga in September 1997.

In June 1998, another commission was appointed to probe the remaining cases and its probe is still on.

Though the commissions have identified many of those

responsible for the murders and disappearances, government lawyers have been slow in filing cases against them.

Mohamed Iqbal, a retired civil servant and secretary of one of the commissions, told IPS his commission investigated 8,000 cases, but little or no action has been taken on the report.

“We visited 25 areas in four regions in Sri Lanka, and in our report we have identified 600 people – soldiers, police, former ministers, members of parliament and local government officials – who were responsible for the disappearances,” he said. Ten years later, families still wait for justice.