Ms. Jayanthi Dandeniya, the coordinator of Families of the Disappeared based at Raddoluwa, Seduwa, has announced the launching of a signature campaign by the victims of past disappearances to demand authentic investigations into the present spate of disappearances and to have them stopped.
“Our experience regarding the disappearances in the late eighties clearly demonstrates that fact finding commissions into abductions and disappearances are useless and that without serious criminal investigations within the framework of the law nothing positive will come out of such commissions,” said Ms. Dandeniya who lost her fianc? and two of her brothers in the disappearances which took place in the late 1980s that claimed the lives of about 30,000 people. “We tried hard to get justice. We went before those fact finding commissions. Despite of all that no justice of any sort happened,” she said.
Ms. Dandeniya spoke about the annual event of the gathering of the families of the disappeared at a monument which exhibits the pictures of about five hundred disappeared persons and said, “this year we had this commemoration on the 27th October as usual. When we discussed with the parents and others who had lost their loved ones in those days and told them that about 686 disappearances have taken place in recent months in Sri Lanka these family members were shocked and could not believe it. When we told them about the white vans which come without number plates and take people from their families that reminded them of what happened to their own children and how they were taken away. And then they said, ‘we thought it would never happen again.'”
She explained that many parents of past disappearances agree that not enough was done to get justice for those cases and that it is because of that that these disappearances are recurring now.
She emphatically states, “You cannot get justice from fact finding commissions. You must have thorough criminal investigations through persons competent in conducting such investigations and who will have the independence to conduct them.”
Ms. Dandeniya further said, “This is just not fair. The victims and the families of past disappearances were cheated. Cheated by fact finding commissions; the government did not provide proper investigations and then the Attorney General’s Department says we cannot prosecute because there is no evidence. This is what happened to the case of my fianc? who was a young trade unionist. We worked hard and for a long time to get the case investigated and prosecuted. We even gave the names of some persons whom we thought were behind the disappearance. We had strong reason to believe that on the instructions of a manager in a company one senior police officer at the time got my fianc? killed. But there was no result, no justice.”
Ms. Dandeniya urges everybody to take a more active part to avoid the same type of mistakes being made this time, saying, “We did not get justice but at least this time let these people who are facing the same problem get justice.”
