COLOMBO, 6 March 2007 — Like the relatives of hundreds of Sri Lankans who have “disappeared” or been abducted amid renewed civil war, 27-year-old Dushyanthi Malaravan dreams of the day her missing father will come home.
Professor S. Raveendranath was serving as vice chancellor of the island’s Eastern University in the restive eastern district of Batticaloa when he disappeared from a science fair in a heavily guarded district of the capital Colombo in mid-December.
“Every day he came home for lunch. That day he didn’t arrive. By late afternoon, I knew something had happened because he had been getting threats (demanding he resign),” Malaravan said, her mother weeping beside her.
“We don’t want to point at anyone, because we are afraid for his safety as well as for ours,” the housewife said in the apartment where her father lived before his disappearance.
Colleagues and rights officials say 56-year-old Raveendranath, a Tamil from the northern Jaffna Peninsula, had been receiving threats from a breakaway rebel faction called the Karuna group, which split from the Tigers in 2004.
A United Nations envoy says elements of the military have been helping Karuna members to abduct children as fighters. Nordic truce monitors see troop involvement in Karuna attacks, and analysts say the government is fostering the former rebels.
Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission says nearly 100 abductions and disappearances have been reported to them so far this year in Colombo, Batticaloa and the besieged Jaffna Peninsula, which is guarded by more than 40,000 troops.
That in turn comes on top of 1,000 cases reported during 2006 as the island’s two-decade civil war resumed, 56 abductions of which were blamed on the Tigers, 71 on their former comrades the Karuna group and 184 of which were listed as unknown.
Other groups say the numbers are really far higher and do not include those taken inside rebel territory.
The Tamil Tigers have long been accused of abductions, particularly of hundreds of children to fight in their push for an independent state in Sri Lanka’s north and east. UNICEF still lists 1,710 outstanding cases of Tiger underage recruitment and 169 cases of underage recruitment by the Karuna group.
The Tigers argue children lie about their age to join up. Released abductees Reuters has spoken to in the east say they were taken against their will.
Some see an eerie parallel between abductions in well guarded government-controlled areas and a rash of disappearances when the then government crushed an uprising by hard-line Marxists in the late 1980s — and see state involvement.
“The present set of disappearances is creating a sense of terror, fear in all the island,” said Basil Fernando, executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asian Human Rights Commission.
“There’s a link between the faction from the east with the government. So there is some sort of an agreement not to interfere in this at a political level,” he added.
Rights groups say relatives and witnesses in the east have sighted infamous white vans with no number plates whisking abductees unhindered through army checkpoints — a terrifying echo of white vans used in abductions in the late 1980s.
They doubt the Tigers could be behind abductions in Colombo, because security has been tightened after a spree of rebel attacks, spot checks are routine, roadblocks widespread and hundreds of troops and police are on the streets.