IN PURSUIT OF AN ELUSIVE TRUTH FOR OVER A DECADE

AS THE NEW SRI LANKAN PRESIDENT COMMENCES HIS FIRST STATE VISIT TO INDIA, TNIE ECHOES THE EXPECTATIONS OF THE MARGINALISED LANKAN TAMILS IN RESOLVING LONG-PENDING ISSUES

(NPP) coalition, in the 1970s and 1980s. While the majority of disappearances have been attributed to the Sri Lankan state, outfits like the LTTE have also been accused of such crimes.

There is no official estimate of how many people have disappeared in Sri Lanka; reports by human rights organisations like Amnesty International place the number at between 60,000 and 100,000 between the 1970s and 2009. The Office on Missing Persons (OMP), an agency formed in 2017, received around 15,000 complaints, a majority of which were from Tamil families.

While such disappearances have largely stopped since 2009, the largest case of en masse disappearances likely occurred when the war ended on May 18, 2009.

Ranjanidevi, who was in her third trimester of pregnancy with her second child, vividly remembers that fateful day when her husband Manickam Sasikumar and her brothers Murugan Selvakumar and Murugesan Rajapulendran, all low-rung cadres of the LTTE, voluntarily surrendered to the Sri Lankan army along with hundreds of others at Mullivaikkal, the final theatre of war. "We all lived in a bunker to escape the army's shelling. I had not eaten for a week when we heard we were being allowed safe passage to the army-controlled area," she recalls.