Colombo's commissions have failed to do any good to victimized persons: HR activist

[TamilNet, Sunday, 14 November 2010, 06:13 GMT]
“Various commissions and committees appointed by alternating Sri Lanka governments have stopped with issuing reports and their reports have been slighted by all the governments,” the President of the Association for the Protection of Disappeared persons arrested by Sri Lanka Army in Jaffna peninsula, N. Vijayakumar said Saturday witnessing before the Lessons Learnt & Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) session in Nelliyadi in Vadamaraadchi. LLRC is authorized to record statements related only to the past ten years but this period should be extended to cover the last thirty years, he said. The president of LLRC in response said that LLRC had already made this request in its interim report submitted to the SL government.

Vijayakumar said that his brother, a Sarvodaya employee, had disappeared after arrest by SLA soldiers, and his father had died unable to bear his disappearance and that his four sisters remain unmarried. He added this was the general state of most of the families in Jaffna peninsula.

He added that there are many women in Jaffna peninsula whose husbands had disappeared. They don't know whether they are widows or not.

Between 1996 and 1998, 700 young men and women had disappeared after arrest in Jaffna peninsula and though his association had appealed to the then President Chandrika Bandaranayake Kumaratunga in person nothing was done to find what happened to the persons disappeared, Vijaykumar told LLRC.

He cited the HRC Commission led by Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy and the Commission led by Manouri Muttetuwegama as examples of Commissions which had failed to bring any good to the victimized persons.

The Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who had projected himself as a human rights activist in his early days of political career in South, should take action to disclose the full particulars of the persons disappeared after their 'arrest', Vijayakumar said.

He told LLRC that thousands of young men and women had disappeared after 2006 adding that though people have lost faith in the commissions appointed by SL government his association hoped that LLRC would give us positive results.

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