Gotabaya deploys PTA against protesting families of missing persons

[TamilNet, Thursday, 09 January 2020, 22:53 GMT]
The coordinator of the continuous protest in Vavuniyaa Jeyavanitha Kasippillai is again facing harassment from the ‘Terrorist’ Investigation Division of the SL Police which is compelling her to appear for an investigation under the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The cabinet of Gotabaya Rajapaksa has recently refused to withdraw the PTA. The latest harassment comes as the attempts by Douglas Devananda, an ex-paramilitary collaborator of Rajapaksa regime, miserably failed to end the continuous protests in the North and East. The families of Tamils subjected to enforced disappearances at the hands of the occupying Sinhala military have spent more than 1,055 days in continuous protests in the North and East.

The SL TID has instructed Mrs Jeyavanitha to appear for investigations along with her husband on 13 January.

The instruction of TID comes as another activist, K Rajkumar, alleged that the members of the Mr Devananda’s EPDP had assaulted him in Vavuniyaa. The families were quick to stage a protest in front of the EPDP office against the alleged attack.

During the previous regime, the continuing protest was exposing the forces that were deceiving the Eezham Tamils with the pep talk of ‘transitional justice’. The war ended in genocidal annihilation of one party. The international powers that backed the SL State or remained silent during the genocidal onslaught failed to deliver a political solution to the Tamil national question. There was no meaningful transition to the underlying conflict.

The backers of UN Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 and 34/1 were aiming at structural changes in the South that had no impact on ending the genocidal paradigm let loose on the nation of Eezham Tamils.

Despite some relaxation of harassment and arrests, the structural genocide on the ground in the North and East escalated further into demographic and heritage genocide during the ‘Yahapalanaya’ regime of Maithiripala Sirisena and Ranil Wickramasinghe.

The continuing protest was a slap in the face not only for the external establishments that deployed the incompatible paradigm but also for former SL President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (CBK), who led the coercing mechanism, which was known as the Office for ‘National Unity and Reconciliation’ (ONUR).

CBK stepped down as the chairperson of the ONUR on 20 November 2019.

The cabinet of Gotabaya Rajapaksa has also turned down the proposed Counter-Terrorism Act (CTA) which was supposed to replace the PTA. The CTA was equally worse as far as the Eezham Tamils and the Tamil-speaking Muslims were concerned.

The SL State has been deploying PTA selectively against Tamils in the past, and the notorious terror legislation is also targeting Tamil-speaking Muslims in the island after the Easter attacks in Colombo and Batticaloa in 2019.

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