Sri Lanka offers fresh probe into missing people
Sri Lanka’s president announced on Saturday new investigations into alleged secret detention centres as part of a drive to find tens of thousands of people still missing after the country’s decades-long war.
Maithripala Sirisena said he would establish a mechanism to search locations where there are reports that people may still be incarcerated after the war, which ended in May 2009.
“If there are allegations that people are still being held in some locations, the government will set up a mechanism to inspect them,” Sirisena told a rally in the former war zone of Sampur in the country’s northeast.
Multiple official committees have examined the issue of missing people, and recommended actions including reparations and criminal investigations into some high profile cases.
Authorities have so far been slow to act, but Sirisena promised he would now implement these recommendations.
The International Red Cross urged the government last year to disclose the fate of the more than 16,000 people still officially missing after the island’s ethnic war ended eight years ago.
Government forces crushed Tamil rebels fighting for a separate homeland for the ethnic minority, in a brutal offensive that ended 37 years of fighting. Some 40,000 people are thought to have been killed in the final few months of the conflict alone. Huge numbers of Tamils disappeared during the war including after being arrested by security services, while thousands more died in military bombardments.
Thousands of people also went missing during a crackdown by security forces and pro-government vigilante groups on Marxist rebels between 1987 and 1990.
The ICRC had said that it registered 16,000 people as missing since setting up a presence in Sri Lanka in 1989. The database also includes more than 5,100 security personnel listed as missing.
Sirisena, a member of the majority Sinhalese community, has taken steps to reconcile with the minority Tamil community since coming to power in January 2015, but international rights groups say the pace of delivery has been too slow.
(The News PK)
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Yahapalanaya Government came to power in January 2015. Still trying to find missing things. First, it was luxury cars, golden horses, money deposited in foreign banks. Still the finding Missing people going on with new promises now and then. Hope he will find missing people, publish their list and punish the culprits.
May I present the guide lines HE Sirisena:
1. Names of dead with proper ID
2. Where are the dead bodies (at least the skeletons – by 18th May 2009 entire military operation against LTTE was completed. How did SL military kill between 40,000 to 125,000 between 13th – 18th May and save 295,000 people too?
3. Where did the dead live – their addresses?
4. Who are the kith and kin of the dead?
5. Answers as to how Sri Lanka’s armed forces managed to dig graves to put ’40,000 to 125,000 dead’ while firing was taking place and if C4 had been given mobile footage of ‘crimes’ by SL troops why has no footage been taken of soldiers digging mass graves and putting the dead! To dig graves to put 125,000 or even 40,000 it takes more than a few hours! How many dead bodies can fit into a grave? A standard grave is 2 ½ feet wide and 8ft in length and 4ft deep. How many adult bodies can fit into such a grave?
6. Where are the mobile footage of soldiers digging graves, shoving dead bodies – if footage can be given to make documentaries surely there must be footage of graves being dug!
There are several catalogues of missing persons and the numbers vary between catalogues and it is time that Sirisena identify a catlog that is universally acceped and proceed therefrom. With computers is not a big deal and most likely they are already listed. To start with this list ought to be published and posted in the internet, something that ought to have been done years back.