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Press Freedom and Enforced Disappearances Cries for justice that don’t echo loud

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3 May 2018 12:00 am - 0     - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

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 This article is part of a series of stories and op-eds launched by IPS on the occasion of World Press Freedom Day on May 3.

When Sri Lankan journalist Richard de Zoysa was abducted from his home in Colombo on the night of February 18th, 1990, his family knew there would be dark days ahead. 

The population was still reeling from one of the bloodiest episodes in the island nation’s history – a Government counterinsurgency campaign to crush a Marxist rebellion in southern Sri Lanka, which left between 30,000 and 60,000 people dead at the hands of Government death squads.   

Even more disturbing than the extrajudicial killings was the wave of enforced disappearances that took place between 1988 and 1990; tens of thousands of Sinhalese men and boys suspected of being members or sympathizers of the People’s Liberation Front, or JVP, went missing, never to return.   

At the time of his kidnapping, de Zoysa was a stringer for this publication, filing regular reports on the political violence plaguing the country. He was on the verge of accepting the post of Bureau Chief of the agency’s Lisbon-based European desk when the goons came knocking.   

For hours that bled into days, his mother, Manorani Saravanamuttu had no idea what had become of him. High-ranking officials assured her that he was alive, in police custody, but refused to give her exact coordinates when she asked to be allowed to bring him some clothing – he had been wearing only a sarong when he was kidnapped – or a meal.   

The decisions of Tamil families to spend day after day in the burning sun by the side of polluted, dusty highways and roads is indicative of their lack of faith in Government mechanisms

It later transpired that while she was making frantic phone calls and searching for answers, de Zoysa was already dead, shot in the head at point blank range, and his body dumped in the Indian Ocean, a tactic that had become a common feature of the Government’s systematic abductions.   

A fisherman happened to recognize his face – de Zoysa was also a well-known television personality at the time – when his body washed up on shore in a coastal town just south of the capital. He alerted the authorities who in turn contacted de Zoysa’s mother.   

According to a 1991 ‘Washington Post’ interview with Saravanamuttu, the discovery of her son’s body was a turning point, for her personally, and for the nation as a whole. When she walked out of the inquest a few days after de Zoysa’s abduction, she found herself surrounded by reporters, to whom she made a statement that resonated with countless families across the island: “I am the luckiest mother in Sri Lanka. I got my son’s body back. There are thousands of mothers who never get their children’s bodies back.”   

Mothers of the Disappeared
Saravanamuttu’s statement quickly catalyzed a movement known as the Mother’s Front, which had been a long time coming. Perhaps due to her privileged status as a member of the country’s English-speaking elite, she became a kind of totem pole around which women from the poorer, politically marginalized and largely Sinhala-speaking rural belt could gather, and from which they could draw strength. By 1991, according to the Post, the Mother’s Front counted 25,000 registered members.   
The movement didn’t succeed in bringing justice to many of its victims. To this day, not a single person has been convicted for de Zoysa’s murder. Ministers who opposed Saravanamuttu and attempts by others to seek answers in the murders or disappearances of their loved ones continue to hold positions of power within the Government – Ranil Wickremesinghe, who the Post quoted as brushing de Zoysa’s murder off as “suicide or something else”, now serves as the Prime Minister, the second-highest political office in the country.   

Amnesty International estimates that since the 1980s, there have been as many as 100,000 enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka. The Mother’s Front movement did, however, make a crucial contribution to the country’s political landscape, one which continues to have ramifications today; it tied together forever the plight of Sri Lanka’s disappeared with the fate of its journalists and press freedom – or the lack thereof.   

Exactly 20 years after de Zoysa was assassinated, another journalist’s disappearance prompted a woman to step into the global spotlight, much as Saravanamuttu did back in the 90s. This journalist’s name is Prageeth Eknaligoda, and he was last seen on January 24th, 2010. He telephoned his wife, Sandhya, around 10 p.m. to inform her that he was on his way home from the offices of Lanka eNews (LEN), where he was a renowned columnist and cartoonist. He never arrived.   

From local police stations all the way to the United Nations in Geneva, Sandhya has searched for answers as to his whereabouts. It is only in the past two years that some information regarding his abduction and detention by army intelligence personnel has been revealed.   

Both Saravanamuttu and Sandhya have received international recognition for their tireless campaigning.

Tamil Women in the North
Sandhya has also been one of the few women, and one of the lone voices, connecting the issue of press freedom with the movement of families of the disappeared led by Tamil women in Sri Lanka’s northern province, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged a 28-year-long guerilla war.   

Since January 2017, hundreds of Tamil civilians have observed continuous, 24-hour roadside protests in five key locations throughout the former war zone – Kilinochchi, Mullaithivu, Trincomalee, Vavuniya and Maruthankerny (Jaffna District) – demanding answers for their disappeared loved ones.   

Like the Mother’s Front in the 1990s, this movement too has been several years in the making. When the civil war ended in 2009, some 300,000 Tamil civilians were rounded up and detained in open-air camps, while hundreds of others – particularly men who surrendered to the armed forces – were taken into Government custody under suspicion of being members or supporters of the LTTE.   

But while the camps have closed and a large number of people reunited with their families, an estimated 20,000 people are still unaccounted for.   

In 2016, Parliament passed a bill to establish an Office of Missing Persons (OMP) tasked with investigating what Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera called “one of the largest caseloads of missing persons in the world.”   

But these cosmetic measures have failed to yield concrete results.   

In an interview with IPS, Ruki Fernando, a Colombo-based activist who has been visiting the protests in the northern province, noted that the decisions of Tamil families to spend day after day in the burning sun by the side of polluted, dusty highways and roads is indicative of their lack of faith in Government mechanisms like the OMP and the judiciary to bring them relief. He also called attention to the dismal levels of support or solidarity they have received from Sri Lanka’s broader civil society, including from English and Sinhala-language media or women’s groups in the capital.   

“It’s not fair that these families – particularly elderly Tamil women who are leading the protests – should have to carry this burden alone. They have already suffered heavily during the war –they starved in bunkers, didn’t have medication for injuries and have lost family members. All these factors have made them physically weak and emotionally vulnerable, yet now they are also shouldering the burden of keeping these protests going,” said Fernando. 

“In my memory, such a strong movement led by women, occurring simultaneously in five locations across the North and East, or any region, is unprecedented,” Fernando said adding  “And yet it has not become a priority for the rest of the country.”   

He called Sandhya’s participation in the protests as a Sinhala Buddhist ally an ‘exception’ to the rule of general indifference, which he chalked up to a combination of political and ideological issues.   

“Some people believe these protests are too radical, too politicized, that there should be more cooperation with, and less criticism of, the Government,” he explained. But as Fernando himself noted in an article for ‘Groundviews’-one of Sri Lanka’s leading citizen journalism websites- Tamil families have met repeatedly with elected officials, including President Maithripala Sirisena, to no avail.   

Exactly 20 years after de Zoysa was assassinated, another journalist’s disappearance prompted a woman to step into the global spotlight, much as Saravanamuttu did back in the 90s. 

No closure
Fernando is not the only one to draw attention to the disadvantaged position Tamil families’ are in with regard to both deaths and disappearances.   

Another person to make this connection was Lal Wickrematunge, the brother of journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge, former editor-in-chief of ‘The Sunday Leader’ who was murdered in broad daylight in 2010, and whose killers still haven’t been brought to justice.   

Lal pointed to the ongoing investigation by the Criminal Investigation Department into military intelligence officers’ involvement in the kidnapping and torture of former Deputy Editor of ‘The Nation’ newspaper, Keith Noyahr – and the arrest earlier this month of Major General Amal Karunasekera in connection with multiple attacks on journalists, including Noyahr, and Lasantha– as a possible avenue of closure for the families.   

According to a recent report in ‘Sunday Observer’, “The assault on former Rivira Editor Upali Tennakoon and the abduction of journalist and activist Poddala Jayantha are also linked to the same shadowy military intelligence networks.    

Suresh Kumar and Ranjith Kumar were both employees of the Jaffna-based Tamil-language daily ‘Uthayan’, whose employees and offices have been attacked multiple times, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.   

For Fernando, the task of keeping the torch lit for Sri Lanka’s dead and disappeared cannot be laid at the feet of their family members alone – it is a responsibility that the entire country must share.   

“What we need first and foremost are independent institutions capable of meting out truth and justice and winning the confidence of the families. And secondly, there is a need for stronger support for the families of victims from the civil society – activists and professionals like lawyers, journalists and women’s groups.”said Fernando. 

(Kanya D’Almeida* is a Sri Lankan writer, journalist and editor. )   
*Kanya D’Almeida was formerly the Race and Justice Reporter for Rewire.News, and has also reported for IPS from the UN, Washington DC, and her native Sri Lanka. She is currently completing an MFA in fiction writing at Columbia University, New York.   

 


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