Not forgetting the victims of enforced disappearances

The International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, which fell on 30 August, should be more than a day of remembrance in Sri Lanka. It should be a day of reckoning. Few countries carry a burden of unresolved enforced disappearances as devastating as ours. Since 1971, thousands upon thousands of people have been subjected to enforced disappearances by the State. Estimates of the total number of enforced disappearances vary, with credible international sources placing the figure between 60,000 and 100,000, while the true number remains impossible to establish.

The first large-scale wave followed the suppression of the JVP insurrection in 1971. The second, and arguably most horrific, occurred during the 1987–90 period, mainly young Sinhalese men suspected of supporting the JVP were killed or forcibly disappeared. Amnesty International has estimated that between 30,000 and 60,000 young people may have been killed or forcibly disappeared during this period while Sri Lanka’s own commissions of inquiry have recorded 43,000 cases.

The irony is that the JVP, whose own members and supporters were among the greatest victims of State repression during that era, has now been at the centre of Government for nearly two years. This should have presented an historic opportunity for a Government with roots in a movement that experienced the brutality of enforced disappearance to become the Government that finally broke the culture of impunity. Yet there is little evidence that this opportunity has been seized.

It may be due to the fear of confronting the military and security establishment or political caution, or even the passage from victim to Government simply made the past more inconvenient.

The excavation of the Chemmani mass grave in the North makes the question even more urgent. The discovery of the remains of more than 400 people, including children, has reopened one of the conflict’s darkest chapters. The lack of both the technical capacity and political will to properly investigate mass graves, has resulted in the loss of evidence and the failure to identify victims. Despite the dire need, Sri Lanka still lacks the comprehensive forensic infrastructure necessary to identify the dead. A properly managed DNA database of victims and close family members, applied systematically to Chemmani and other mass graves, should have been an obvious priority. Instead, another opportunity for truth risks being lost.

There is also a deeper principle at stake. Justice for the disappeared cannot be selective. The Sinhalese youth who vanished during the JVP uprisings, the Tamil civilians who disappeared during the war, journalists and activists who vanished in the post-war years, and all others taken from their families deserve the same answer. They have a right to know what happened to their loved ones, who was responsible, and if possible, a return of their remains. Since signing onto the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and ratification through an act of parliament in 2016 these are now obligations of the State. According to international law and now the domestic law of Sri Lanka, as long as the cases of victims of enforced disappearances remain unresolved, they are considered as ongoing violations. Therefore, any attempts to burry these are crimes of the past will not suffice.

On this International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, Sri Lanka must therefore remember not only the disappeared, but the responsibility that remains with the living. The Government has an opportunity to change the national discourse on State violence, not through rhetoric, commissions that gather dust, or promises of closure, but through credible investigations, forensic identification, prosecutions and accountability.