When our white van stopped in the Muslim hamlet of Saintha Maruthu in Batticaloa district on the night of November 23, residents viewed us with fear. So my friend from the locality introduced me to them, “She is a journalist from Chennai.”
For the Tamils in Sri Lanka, a white van is terror on four wheels. “White vans have been used to abduct people, especially young Tamil men,” my friend told me. It was in such a van that Madura Guna Singam was abducted from Colombo last June. “My son was staying with my eldest daughter, Kalanayagi, in Colombo. I knocked on all doors. God knows what happened to my son,” said Madura’s mother, Velayutham Pushpavalli, 60, from Kilinochchi.
Madura’s sister Sivapatham, who stays in Vavuniya, said her brother had no links with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). “My brother was innocent. He was a van driver. They might have taken him thinking he was with the LTTE. Please give him back to us,” she said with folded hands.
Soon after the abduction, the family informed the police, but they did nothing. “We tried every avenue, the Red Cross and the human rights organisation. We met minister Douglas Devananda three times. We do not know who abducted my son and why,” said Pushpavalli. Though fragile and old, she has not given up. “I am sure he is alive and will come back,” she said.
Jayanthi Krishnan’s husband, Pushparaja Krishnakumar, 34, was abducted from Colombo in June. “Some people came to his shop in a white van and took him away,” said Jayanthi, who has a two-year-old son, Vekesh. “To run the family, I had to sell off the shop. If my husband does not return, I will have to go begging with my child,” she said.
Mukunda Sivagunaratnam, 33, was waiting to join his wife in Canada when he was arrested in June. His mother, Selvajothi, feels she led him to his fate. “He was living in London and came here to get himself registered so that he could join his wife in Canada. I suggested he join a computer course. He was abducted from the computer centre,” she said. Mukunda had called up his family saying that he was being taken by the police. Selvajothi and her daughter Darshini approached the police, who said they were unaware about the abduction. Said Darshini: “We are sure the army has done it because after the abduction, the special task force came to our house twice for inquiry.”
Unaware of Mukunda’s fate, the Canadian embassy recently sent a letter to him, asking him to appear for a medical test. “Mukunda would have been overjoyed to see the letter,” said Selvajothi. As proof of her son’s innocence, she has the ‘no objection’ certificate issued to him by the police for his travel abroad. “He had a clean record. He was a simple person. Why would anybody want to snatch him away from us?” she asked.
Idayarani knows that her son Robinson, abducted five months ago, is in Boosa detention camp in Galle, near Colombo. “There is no sign of his release. We are not allowed to see him. There is no inquiry. He just exists there,” she said. The family received a ransom call, but Idayarani cannot pay it.
Mano Ganesan, MP from Colombo and head of the Civil Monitoring Commission that tracks human rights issues of the Tamils, feels the abductions were carried out with the connivance of the army. “Anybody with a number on his mobile phone that the government thinks belongs to an LTTE cadre can be picked up, abducted or shot,” he said. Reports say there have been around 3,000 white van abductions in Sri Lanka since the ceasefire ended in 2005; 300 of them were in Colombo.
The Tamils live in constant fear of being abducted or shot. They suffer the ignominy of having to register themselves in their own places, and live as a displaced people in their own country. The government had made registration mandatory for Tamils who came to Colombo in the last five years. “They think every Tamil-speaking person is a terrorist. It shows they don’t trust us,” said Murugan, a hotel employee.
Despite the government’s statement that civilians are not affected by the war, 3,000 families are living in camps for Internally Displaced Persons in Batticaloa. Displaced during the ‘liberation’ of the east, they cannot return to their homes, which, as a woman said, “are in high security zones.” The life of IDPs on the war front in the Wanni region is even worse.
My attempts to get the permission to go to Jaffna failed. Later, a lawyer friend said it was easier for Sri Lankan passport holders to get permission. “In a family I know, the parents had UK passports and the daughter a Sri Lankan passport. The daughter went to Jaffna, but the parents’ request was rejected,” she said. “Your governments will make it a big issue if you are affected. We can be shot like dogs in Sri Lanka. No one bothers about Tamils.”
The peace in government-controlled areas is not without violence. Said S.L.M. Hanifa, a Tamil writer in Batticaloa: “We have suffered more during times of peace and ceasefire than during times of war.”
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