“Gota, go home,” mothers in Jaffna protest against the architect of white-van abductions

[TamilNet, Monday, 28 October 2019, 23:02 GMT]
The kith and kin of Eezham Tamils subjected to enforced disappearances at the hands of the occupying Sinhala military during the regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa staged a protest in Jaffna on Monday, when his sibling, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa contesting the forthcoming SL Presidential elections came to woo the Tamil voters in the North on Monday. The mothers gathered in front of Col Kiddu Park at Nalloor staging their symbolic protest against the former SL Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. The world community must call for international criminal investigations against the crimes committed by Mr Gotabhaya, the mothers said. They were also denouncing internal and hybrid forms of the inquiry approved by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as futile.



In the meantime, a tweet from SL Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera was a raising a logical question: “Just two months ago, @GotabayaR stalled yet another court case, citing security concerns about travelling to the North. Now he is attending political meetings in Jaffna. Why so scared of the courts, media questions and debates?”



Mr Samaraweera is backing SL Presidential candidate Sajith Premadasa. Neither did his government book the former SL Defence Secretary for his past war crimes.

Gotabhaya Rajapaksa was the SL defence secretary, the person with command responsibility on behalf of SL President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was the formal commander of the armed forces of genocidal Sri Lanka during the times of the final onslaught on the de-facto state of Tamil Eelam.

‘White-vanning’ was a particular abduction ‘technique’ of terror that the SL State unleashed against the Eezham Tamils since 1990.

Gotabhaya Rajapaksa ‘perfected’ it further into an enterprise, systematically outsourcing the dirty work to paramilitary groups to destabilise the Ceasefire Agreement with the LTTE and to terrorise the Tamil population.



Gotabhaya is also responsible for the slaying of those who carried white-flags as requested by the Norwegian Envoy for the Peace Process and UN officials during the final hours of the war.



Chronology: