A United Nations expert on enforced disappearances addressed families of the forcibly disappeared in Jaffna last week, as thousands of Tamil families continue a decades-long struggle for truth and justice.
Ana Lorena Delgadillo Pérez, a member of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, was among the key guests at the “Long Road to Justice” International Conference in Jaffna’s Thanthai Selva Auditorium, held to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances.
Before the conference began, relatives and participants gathered at the memorial to those killed in the 1974 World Tamil Research Conference massacre, where they paid tribute to the victims. Participants then marched from the memorial to the Thanthai Selva Auditorium, where the conference formally commenced.
The conference was attended by diplomatic representatives, relatives of the forcibly disappeared from across the Tamil homeland, political representatives, civil society activists and university students.
It comes as families continue to search for thousands of relatives who disappeared during Sri Lanka’s decades of conflict and violence. For many Tamil families, the disappeared include relatives who were abducted, arrested, detained or surrendered to the Sri Lankan military and were never seen again.
Sri Lanka remains among the countries with the highest numbers of enforced disappearances in the world. It has the second-highest number of cases registered with the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, after Iraq. During the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ review of Sri Lanka last year, the Committee noted that the Office on Missing Persons had received 16,966 complaints, but had traced only 23 disappeared persons.
Yet behind those figures are families who have spent years, and in many cases decades, searching for answers from institutions that have failed to provide answers about the disappearance of their loved ones.
In the Tamil homeland, mothers and relatives of the disappeared have taken to the streets for years, demanding to know what happened to their children. Some have died without ever receiving an answer. Others continue their struggle despite harassment, surveillance and intimidation.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have established commissions, offices and other mechanisms to address disappearances. However, families have criticised these mechanisms for failing to establish the truth or prosecute those responsible. The Office on Missing Persons, established as a permanent state institution to determine the fate and whereabouts of missing and disappeared persons, has faced criticism from families who argue that a mechanism without the power or political will to secure accountability cannot deliver justice.
International human rights organisations continue to warn that the crisis of impunity remains firmly entrenched. Human Rights Watch said last year that Sri Lanka had one of the world’s highest rates of enforced disappearances and that successive governments had refused for decades to reveal the fate of victims or prosecute those responsible.
Families of the disappeared say that justice cannot be left solely in the hands of a state that has repeatedly failed to investigate its own security forces and political leaders. Nor can enforced disappearance be treated as a problem of the past, resolved through compensation, death certificates or administrative mechanisms, they say.
At today’s “Long Road to Justice” conference, families also documented the history of their struggle, preserving the stories of those who disappeared and of the mothers and relatives who refused to stop searching for them.
Where are they?
For families of the disappeared, that question has remained unresolved despite successive governments establishing commissions and domestic mechanisms to address the issue.
They have repeatedly argued that Sri Lanka’s domestic processes have failed to establish the fate of their relatives or hold those responsible accountable. They have instead called for sustained international involvement and accountability, demands they have raised repeatedly with the United Nations and the wider international community.
Sri Lanka is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. Tamil journalists are particularly at threat, with at least 41 media workers known to have been killed by the Sri Lankan state or its paramilitaries during and after the armed conflict.
