A street vendor carries fruit through monsoon rain in Colombo as the Sri Lankan capital prepares to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Source: AFP
THE voice on the other end of the line was clear and menacing.
"Are you going to remove Lalith from Jaffna, or do you want us to eliminate him?"
When Lalith's father, Arumugam Veeraraja, received the call from an unknown number one afternoon in November 2011, he started shaking. He told the caller: "Please. I'm just a working man. Please don't take my son."
His plea was in vain. Two weeks later, his 28-year-old son, a Tamil human rights activist who had been investigating abductions by Sri Lanka's security services, vanished.
Armed men bundled him and a colleague into an unmarked white van in Jaffna, the Tamil capital of northern Sri Lanka. It was broad daylight and there were witnesses, but Lalith Kumar Weeraju has not been seen since.
"He was my only son," said Mr Veeraraja, 54, his voice cracking with emotion as he sat at the family home on a rubber plantation in Srinivas last week. "Sometimes when I think about him I shiver. I don't know how to cope."
Mr Veeraraja, who survived an abduction attempt last November after pressing for information about his son's fate, is not alone.
Next month, Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is to greet Prince Charles and dozens of world leaders for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, an event he hopes will bolster his regime's credibility.
However, four years after the end of a civil war that left up to 100,000 people dead, activists say the nation's human rights record remains atrocious and such abductions continue with disturbing regularity. After Iraq, Sri Lanka has the highest number of disappearances in the world, with fewer than half of the 12,000 on record solved.
White vans have become such a potent symbol for abductions in Sri Lanka that they have even spawned their own verb. Being "white vanned" is to be "disappeared" by shadowy groups linked to the security services.
Dimuthu Attygalle, 46, understands Sri Lanka's dark underbelly better than most. Walking home in Colombo in April last year, she felt a hand grab her mouth and pull her backwards.
"There were six or seven of them, armed with T56 rifles," said Ms Attygalle, a member of a leftist political party who is now in hiding. "They bound my eyes and beat me. They molested me sexually and used filthy language."
She was handcuffed and blindfolded for four days and interrogated by security agents, but was relatively lucky. A colleague who was abducted simultaneously was a dual Sri Lankan-Australian citizen. She believes that pressure from Australian diplomats helped to secure their release.
Although the pace of abductions has slowed since the war ended in 2009, Ruki Fernando, a human rights activist, estimates that about two "white van" abductions take place every month. Some believe the number may be higher, as many cases go unreported because the victims' families are too frightened to speak out. Another activist believes there are at least three abduction squads operating in Colombo, with several more in the north of the country, the heartland of the Tamil insurgency that gripped Sri Lanka for 26 years.
The government denies it is behind the disappearances.
The families say few cases are followed up by the police and the fate of the victims is unknown.
Abdul Hameed Noor Najiba, 62, fought desperately with the men who abducted her two sons outside their home in May 2010. "When I went to see the police, they laughed at me," she said. "When I saw the police Inspector-General, he said: 'Don't bother searching for them, just pray for their souls.' "
No comments:
Post a Comment