The Policing of Grief: a glimpse of what unfolded in Jaffna

By Anangu Pegan

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The telephone calls came from the District Secretariat. Be ready at eight in the morning on 25 August, the families of the enforced disappeared in Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi were told, and wait at the pickup points. “Information will be shared at the meeting.” The locations are not named here, for the security of the families.

Consider what that does to a woman who has been waiting since May 2009, or since 1990. A government office telephones her by name, using the contact details it holds because she filed a complaint about her forcibly disappeared family member, and tells her there will be information. She was at that roadside long before eight.

The buses did not come until ten. They stood for two hours with the sun almost directly overhead, in Mullaitivu, one of the hottest districts in the country. When the transport arrived, their names were read aloud from a list, they were boarded, and they were driven to Jaffna. There was no information about anybody’s child. There were speeches.

On that same morning, while families in Kilinochchi stood at their pickup point, the Minister of Justice was himself in Kilinochchi. At Kanagambikaikulam, on the Iranamadu Road, he handed a family whose two daughters disappeared in 2009 documents approving a livelihood assistance allowance, and said around 200 complaints from the Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu districts remained under investigation. He then travelled to Jaffna, as did they.

Two events at the Kachcheri

What the buses were carrying them to was the Office on Missing Persons’ national commemoration of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, held in the auditorium of the Jaffna District Secretariat at two o’clock. On the platform were the Minister of Justice and National Integration, the Minister of Fisheries, the Governor of the Northern Province, government parliamentarians and the Chairman of the OMP.

None of it was improvised. Eight days earlier a preparatory meeting on the Jaffna programme was held at the Governor’s Secretariat under the Governor’s chairmanship, attended by his Secretary, an Additional Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, the OMP’s Executive Director, a member of its executive board, its regional coordinator and an investigating officer. The event was planned as one for people drawn from across the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Bringing families in from other districts was not a late convenience. It was the design.

Outside the gate, a second event was taking place. The Association of the Relatives of the Enforced Disappeared in the North and East had gathered to say what they have said on the roads of the North for years: that they want the truth about relatives handed over to the Sri Lankan military, and that no domestic body has given it to them. When they tried to open their banner, police stopped them and tried to snatch it away. The gate was closed, the public kept out, and several of the women were pulled from the site, manhandled and humiliated. The severity of the force was evident, and the images circulated widely.

Inside, at that same hour, the Minister was telling the hall that a family’s right to know what happened to its loved one is not a political demand but a fundamental human right. Reporting from the scene records that he watched the protest on Facebook. He did not walk the fifty metres to the gate.

What was said in public, and what was said on the telephone

In public the OMP described the day accurately, announcing it in advance as its national commemoration. On the telephone to Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi it became something else: a meeting at which information about their forcibly disappeared relatives would be shared.

Had the families been told plainly what it was, they could have decided for themselves whether to go, and many would have refused. That is the point. A hall with empty seats on the International Day would have been a photograph the state could not use. This is not a communications failure. The office that made those calls holds their contact details for one reason only. It used the register of the disappeared as a call sheet. Who asked that office to make those calls?

Thirty-one

What the families were told, when they got there, was that thirty-one complaints had been resolved and that the details could not be shared because the matters were sensitive.

They have asked the obvious question in reply: are those thirty-one enforced disappearances, or ordinary missing-person cases? The distinction is not academic. Sri Lanka’s missing-persons caseload includes people who vanished in circumstances involving no state agency at all. Establishing what happened to thirty-one of those is a welfare achievement and a real kindness to thirty-one families. Establishing what happened to thirty-one people forcibly disappeared by the state is a criminal matter, with perpetrators, units and command responsibility attached to it.
Confidentiality towards the individual family is legitimate. Confidentiality about the classification of the cases is not. The OMP can say how many of the thirty-one are registered as enforced disappearances without identifying a single person, date or place. That it has not done so is a choice, and the families have drawn their own conclusion from it.

Set that figure beside the rest of what was presented in Jaffna: 16,966 complaints identified as suitable for investigation, around 11,000 of them stalled for want of funding, twenty-five investigative teams, and more than 9,000 investigations reported complete. Against all of that: 2,719 Certificates of Absence, 409 death certificates, 5,427 people referred for reparations, and final information on thirty-one, of unstated category.
The state has become efficient at issuing documents about the disappeared. It has established the fate of thirty-one of them. The families have not misunderstood the mechanism. They have understood it precisely.

The spectacles

Alongside those bussed in, there were others in the hall whose connection to the disappeared is unclear. A free eye-testing and spectacle-distribution event, sponsored by the Lions Club, ran alongside the commemoration, and glasses were given out to some of those present.

The question is not who paid for the glasses. It is whether people were brought to a commemoration of the disappeared on the understanding that glasses would be given out, and then counted in the room as families. That question has not been answered, and the answer determines whether 25 August was a commemoration or a photograph.

“Do not play with innocent people”

As journalists reported on the confrontation at the gate, the Minister of Fisheries turned on them and told the media not to play with innocent people.

Consider what that phrase does. It recasts women who have maintained continuous roadside protest in Kilinochchi, Mullaitivu, Vavuniya, Mannar, Ampara, Batticaloa, Trincomalee and Jaffna, who have buried their own husbands, children and parents while waiting, who have testified before commission after commission and can recite their own case numbers from memory, as innocents being manipulated by reporters. It takes from them the one thing they have never lacked, which is agency.

So the humiliation of 25 August was fourfold. They were brought under a false description. Their banner was taken. Their own will was attributed to somebody else. And they were stripped of their dignity fifty metres from where two Ministers were giving speeches.

What we are asking for

Those of us who work with families of the forcibly disappeared and families of extrajudicial killings across the North, the East and the plantation districts ask for four things.

An account of how that room was filled. The District Secretariats of Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi should state on the record who authorised the telephone calls, what families were told would be shared with them, and which list their names were read from. If people were additionally drawn in through a medical camp and then counted as participating families, the OMP owes the public an account of who was invited and on what basis.

Classification of the thirty-one. The OMP should state how many are registered as enforced disappearances. This discloses no personal information and can be answered in one sentence. Until it is answered, the figure should not be cited by the government, by donors or by diplomatic missions as evidence of progress on enforced disappearance.

An end to the policing of grief. The right to peaceful assembly does not lapse because a minister is indoors. Confiscating a banner outside a government building during the International Week of the Disappeared is not crowd control.

Truth before relief, and never instead of it. The Governor said at that very event that livelihood assistance should never be used to end the struggle for justice. He is right, and on the same afternoon, outside his own building, the principle was inverted. No reparations package or spectacles can substitute for criminal investigation.

What they came for

Many of these disappearances date from 2009, when families walked their own sons and daughters up to the army at Vattuvagal and Omanthai and handed them over, having been told they would be safe. Others go back to the 1980s and 1990s. Some of those mothers have died waiting. The ones who are left are mostly in their sixties and seventies, and they are the women who stood on a roadside from eight in the morning on 25 August and were pulled off a pavement in Jaffna that afternoon.

They did not come for spectacles, for a Certificate of Absence, or for a seat at a ceremony. They came because a government office told them there would be news of their loved ones.

They have said what it would take to stop them coming, and it is not a welfare package or a line of police at a closed gate. Even if Yaman, the god of death, calls them, they say, they will go, and they will go to bring their children back.

(This account is based on interviews with families in Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi who received the calls and travelled to Jaffna.)

© JDS