17 Years On, Sri Lanka's Missing Haunts Families

Many women admit that while they keep clamouring to know the whereabouts of their disappeared family members, they are painfully aware that all of them may have been done to death.

IMAGE: Injured civilians are seen in this photograph released by a pro-LTTE group, showing them being evacuated from the 'No Fire Zone' near Mullivaikkal village in May 2009. Photograph: Reuters/Rediff Archives

Key Points Tamil families in Sri Lanka continue demanding answers about relatives forcibly disappeared during and after the civil war.

Hundreds marched in Jaffna on August 30, demanding answers about relatives handed over to the military.

Families expressed anger at President Anura Dissanayake for failing to deliver promised justice for enforced disappearances.

Human rights groups criticised the government for a gap between its reconciliation promises and actions on disappearances.

Many Tamil women continue struggling economically while searching for relatives whose fate remains unknown after years.

Pavala Nayaki was at home near Batticaloa town in eastern Sri Lanka when neighbours hurried to tell her that her farmer-husband had been taken away from his field by the feared Special Task Force (STF).

This happened just three months before the Tamil separatist conflict ended on a bloodbath in May 2009.

Batticaloa, like the rest of the island's east, was already under military control after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) broke up there five years earlier following a split by one of its top commanders, Karuna.

A traumatised Nayaki first ran towards the farm where her husband had gone earlier in the day to work, and then to the nearest STF camp.

She broke down when they flatly denied taking away her husband Amalaraj, who was then 40.

'I cried and cried outside the camp,' Nayaki said recalling the horror which unfolded 17 years ago. 'I told them, "Punish him if he has done any wrong. But please bring him before me. I want to see him. Please!" I pleaded with them.'

Nayaki never saw her husband again. He joined the ranks of thousands of Tamils who disappeared during the long years the LTTE fought for an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka.

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, Nayaki, now 53, was in Jaffna to be with hundreds of similarly placed women whose unending search for their missing husbands, sons or daughters, and siblings continues without any positive outcome.

Along with other distraught women and some men, she marched through Jaffna and then took part in a gathering which was also attended by diplomats, a UN official and an outspoken human rights campaigner.

The event was organised by the Association of Relatives of the Enforced Disappearances of the North and East, on the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, observed annually on August 30.

'Where are our disappeared relatives?' the marchers, some dressed in black and some carrying burning torches, chanted in unison in Tamil. 'Where are those we handed over to the military?'

The reference was to the innumerable LTTE fighters in different age groups who gave up themselves to the military in 2009. While Colombo rehabilitated an estimated 12,000, hundreds of others disappeared without trace.

The brutal vanishing act has been played for long years in Sri Lanka, not just in 2009. Many were arrested in Colombo and elsewhere in the country and melted away in a black hole.

IMAGE: This photograph released by the Sri Lankan military on May 18, 2009 shows the battle scene near where LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was located. Photograph: Reuters/Rediff Archives

Tamil Families Lose Faith In Dissanayake

The women who flocked to Jaffna from various parts of the island nation were bitter that President Anura Dissanayake, a Marxist, had proved no different from his predecessors by failing to secure them justice.

'We have no more faith in this government,' said Leeladevi Anandanataraja, a retired labour department officer whose son was snatched by the army from Vavuniya district soon after the war ended over his association with the LTTE.

'Seeing our sorrow, a true leader should have spoken to us. But he (Dissanayake) doesn't have time to meet us,' said the 73-year-old woman. 'I am still looking for my son.'

A similar event was held on Sunday at Kilinochchi, the former administrative capital of the LTTE, south of Jaffna.

During the 2024 election campaign, Dissanayake took the Tamil areas by storm by promising justice and saying he understood their suffering as members of his leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) too had been forcibly disappeared by the very same military.

Jeyavanitha Kasipillai, one of whose daughters was snatched from her by troops from a camp also in 2009, explained why Tamil women were now angry with the JVP, which heads a coalition government in Colombo.

'We voted for the JVP in full confidence that Dissanayake will be different. But he has forgotten us after taking our votes.'

Some accounts put the number of disappearances in Sri Lanka blamed on the state at 60,000 to 100,000 -- the second highest in the world after Iraq.

Ana Lorena Delgadillo Perez, a member of the UN Working Group on Enforced on Involuntary Disappearances, told the Jaffna gathering that many of the mothers who had sought justice had died without getting answers.

'In the future no victim should have to die without receiving an answer,' she said. 'The voices of these mothers must continue to be heard by the international community.'

Smriti Singh, Amnesty International's South Asia regional director, took a swipe at the Sri Lankan government.

'The government speaks about reconciliation. But there is a gap between the government's intentions and its actions.'

Tamil activists say that JVP leaders, having supported the military's no-holds-barred war against the LTTE, have no desire to do anything that will put guilty soldiers, many of whom are known, in the dock.

IMAGE: A Sri Lankan soldier near the town of Putumatalan located at the 'No Fire Zone' in northern Sri Lanka, May 2009. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters/Rediff Archives

War May Be Over, Conflict Continues

Every Tamil is painfully aware that both the overwhelming majority in the JVP and the military hail from the Sinhalese majority, underlining that while the war may be over, the ethnic conflict continues.

The mass disappearances -- which are also a problem in the Sinhalese-populated areas due to earlier JVP insurgencies -- have left scores of families in the Tamil region to be headed by women.

Since many of them are not educated, they struggle to make a living. In many cases, they are dependent on their children or the generosity of relatives or well-wishers.

'Life is very, very difficult for the women,' said a Jaffna-based academic who did not want to be named. 'The tragedy is the government is simply not bothered.'

Many women admit that while they keep clamouring to know the whereabouts of their disappeared family members, they are painfully aware that all of them may have been done to death.

Nayaki said there were at least 3,000 families in Batticaloa, the only Tamil-majority district in Sri Lanka's east, suffering like her. In the entire northeast, she put the number of such families at about 48,000.

"I still wear my thali (mangalsutra) because I believe my husband may be alive," she told me. "Death we can accept. Even if they say they killed him, I can somehow accept. But this uncertainty is a torture."

Does she -- and the others -- expect justice from Colombo?

"How can we ask for justice from those who are guilty? We continue to be on the streets because such injustice should not happen to our children and to the Tamil society ever again.

"We met in Jaffna on Sunday only to appeal to the international community. At least they should not give up on us."

Colombo-based human rights lawyer Bhavani Fonseka admits the government has done very little to fix responsibility for all the enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka.

"They (the JVP-led coalition) promised in its election manifesto so set up prosecutors (to pursue these cases). But even that has not happened."

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff