Is OMP too being disappeared?

The Office on Missing Persons (OMP), a transitional justice mechanism set up to investigate enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka and recommend reparations and compensation to victims of the crime and their families, has long faced an uphill struggle in its task.

Indeed, even its installation was no straightforward matter; the OMP, although legislated in 2016, only became operational in early 2018. And prior to this, since the early ’90s in fact, at least 10 Presidential Commissions of Inquiry have been launched into the matter of enforced disappearances with little by way of recompense.

The final report of the Paranagama Commission – appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to look into disappearances – was tabled in Parliament and hosted on the web site of the Secretariat for Coordinating Reconciliation Mechanisms web site then is no longer available and the website appears to be defunct. The final report of the commission appointed by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga – the Commission of Inquiry into the Involuntary Removal or Disappearance of Persons (All-Island) – is however available in the National Library. In it, it is revealed that 90% of disappearances at the time were attributed to the Sri Lankan Military and Police, while the remaining 10% were chalked up to paramilitary groups such as the LTTE.

In fact, the report named several Police and Military personnel whom there was enough evidence on to prosecute. That, out of the 21,215 verified cases of enforced disappearances in the report, less than 500 have resulted in indictment, is damning.

The OMP finally coming to pass was meant to be a game-changer in this sense. While the commissions that preceded it merely handed over its findings to the Government – though successive governments have failed to act on these findings – the OMP was set to investigate on its own further findings uncovered by it or any previous commissions. However, the latest move by the Government – the appointment of former war-time Police Chief former IGP Jayantha Wickramaratne as a member of the OMP – has seemingly made this task even harder.

Activists and victims alike have expressed concerns over his presence, stating that it might undermine the office and put witnesses and complainants at risk of reprisal. And it’s hard to argue against these worries when the history of the OMP and the investigations that preceded it are looked into.

Witness protection is one of the most essential aspects of such reconciliation efforts, especially given the sensitive nature of the investigations and the fact that it could implicate very powerful people, who could in turn intimidate or threaten witnesses or otherwise sabotage the investigative and trial process. Without such safeguards in place, it is unlikely that the legal process will be considered fair and competent. In this context the fact that Wickramaratne, who had been in charge of three Police units named by the United Nations investigation as involved in mass enforced disappearances at the end of the war, is now being tasked with investigating the disappearances himself, is incredibly problematic.

And preceding this there was the appointment of retired Judge Upali Abeyratne to the post of OMP Chairman, following the resignation of Saliya Pieris in 2019. This too was a move that raised alarm bells, as it was Abeyratne that had previously exonerated military officials accused of abduction and murder in several emblematic disappearance cases.

The OMP was put in place to improve accountability, but it is seemingly being systematically defanged. And whether that is indeed the case or not, the fact remains, if the Government was trying to go about covering up past crimes, this is precisely how it would go about it.