Never disappearing issue of enforced disappearances

Every year, 30 August is marked as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. Annually it casts a long and painful shadow over Sri Lanka as a country with an appalling and outstanding record of this horrendous crime. At least 60,000 people are believed to have been subjected to enforced disappearance during the 1987–89 JVP insurgency, in addition to thousands more during the civil war in the northeast.

Through an irony of history, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), once a movement that saw its cadre brutally silenced in the late 1980s, now leads the Government. One would imagine that such a Government, born from a generation scarred by disappearances, would be deeply committed to uncovering the truth and giving closure to the families. Instead, we see no urgency.

Rather than dismantling the structures that enabled mass disappearances, the current administration appears trapped by them. The military apparatus that carried out these crimes still looms large. Any call for justice is painted as an attack on the military, as though the pursuit of accountability threatens national security. This logic is not only false, but also corrosive. Justice does not weaken a country, impunity does.

The Government must recognise a fundamental truth that by delivering justice for enforced disappearances, Sri Lanka can become stronger, not weaker. Justice affirms that the State exists to protect its citizens, not terrorise them. Justice draws a clear line between legitimate security operations and atrocity crimes. And justice, most importantly, prevents the repetition of history. It is only when the State is held accountable that the military can be insulated from political misuse, whether as an instrument of suppression or as hired guns in the service of powerful elites, as witnessed under the Rajapaksa regimes after 2009.

Today, the JVP-led Government has a golden opportunity to change the narrative. For decades, successive administrations chose denial, delay, and distraction. They branded grieving families as foreign agents, traitors, or obstacles to reconciliation. They presented empty gestures to international forums while protecting the same networks of perpetrators at home. If this Government follows the same path, then it too will be complicit in the betrayal of truth.

To date, the signs are not encouraging. In the past year, the Government has repeated the same ethno-nationalist rhetoric on global stages such as the UN Human Rights Council. Its human rights policies are shaped by the same bureaucrats and officials who faithfully served the Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe regimes of impunity. The result is predictably hollow, with recycled statements that ignore victims, avoid accountability, and insult the intelligence of both domestic and international observers.

This must change. The Government cannot simply inherit the script of its predecessors, but it must write its own. And that begins with courage. Courage to listen to the families, in this case of its own comrades, who have waited for decades. It has another opportunity to change course at the 60th session of the Human Rights Council commencing next week. Rather than regurgitating statements written for the Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe administrations the Government can charter a new course by assuring a victim centric accountability mechanism that would deliver justice and also closure to the families of those who had faced atrocity crimes perpetrated by the Sri Lankan State.