புதன், 30 மார்ச், 2016

SL Presidential ‘Commission’ continues to deceive families of enforced disappeared

SL Presidential ‘Commission’ continues to deceive families of enforced disappeared

[TamilNet, Monday, 28 March 2016, 23:29 GMT]
  The ‘Presidential Commission to Investigate Complaints regarding Missing Persons’ (PCICMP) has held 3-day long public sittings at Mullaiththeevu District Secretariat last week and proceeded to Mannaar on Monday with the second session of sittings. The mothers and wives of persons, who have been subjected to enforced disappearances during the genocidal war and its immediate aftermath, blamed the occupying Sri Lanka Navy as the major culprit behind many disappearances that have taken place in Mannaar. In the meantime, the PCICMP ‘Commission’, which lacks credibility among the population, was engaged in deceiving the families through prompting them to consider receiving ‘death’ certificates. “We were handled as beneficiaries and not as witnesses,” a mother in Mannaar told TamilNet adding that Maithiripala Sirisena's ‘Commission’ was trying to substitute justice with ‘supplies’.


PCICMP sitting in Mannaar
PCICMP sitting in Mannaar
The interviewers of the ‘Commission’ were asking the mothers and the wives of the missing persons whether they were interested in receiving assistance through poverty alleviation programme of Samurdhi.

Before the so-called consensus resolution was adopted at the UN Human Rights Council, which dashed the hopes of international investigations on Sri Lanka's crimes, the people were actively boycotting the sittings of the PCICMP.

Now, the organisations that were earlier involved in organising protests against the ‘Commission’, have been forced to confine themselves to a situation of briefing the victims on how to witness, circumventing the ‘interviews’ aimed at transforming them into mere beneficiaries. “This is how the so-called victim-centered approach of the OHCHR in Geneva has changed the situation on the ground,” a rights activist attached to Mannaar Citizens' Committee told TamilNet.

Jesu Mariyaseelan Jegajotheeswary, a mother of four, who lost her mother, two brothers, a brother-in-Law and a four-year-old child relative when the Sri Lanka Navy fired at their boat in 1990, also lost her two brothers after she moved into SL military controlled Vangkaalai. They were abducted by the SL Navy, she said. Although many of her family members had lost their lives, it was the thought of the missing ones, which was causing her a big trauma, Ms Jegajotheeswary said in her emotional address to media after attending the PCICMP ‘Commission’.

Likewise, A Tamil-speaking Muslim mother of five from Erukkalampiddi, Jeferina Abdul, said her husband was taken by SL Navy.

51-year-old woman Sebamalai Anthony from Pa'l'la-madu in Murngkan said her son, Nixon, who went missing since 2005, was alive in 2008 as an LTTE member when she last met him in Vanni. She was still searching for her son.

40-year-old Umavathy Dorine Iyrangany Peries, a mother of one, said she handed her husband, an LTTE member, over to SL military after they came into the SL military controlled area in Vadduvaakal in Mu'l'livaaykkaal.

Dorine's husband and 50 others who were taken away in a Ceylon Transport Board bus on 17 May 2009 are still missing. “We are still caught in shock as the SL authorities are still unable to trace of what had happened to all of them,” she said.

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