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Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons (OMP) claims it has managed to locate 16 forcibly disappeared individuals who were reported missing since 2000, out of approximately 6,000 inquiries they have investigated, but refused to divulge any further information.
Tamil protestors in Mannar earlier this year.
Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons (OMP) claims it has managed to locate 16 forcibly disappeared individuals who were reported missing since 2000, out of approximately 6,000 inquiries they have investigated, but refused to divulge any further information.
In an interview with the The Sunday Morning, OMP Chairman Mahesh Katulanda stated that although these individuals had been found alive, they had chosen not to disclose their identities or locations.
“Under the OMP Act, we are prohibited from revealing their identities without their consent,” he said.
He went on to state that out of the 14,998 complaints of missing or disappeared persons lodged with the OMP, 6,000 cases had been processed over the past two years. Katulanda did not clarify what the OMP meant by investigated.
Tamils have strongly objected to the death certificates and money provided by the OMP without any clear investigative and accountability process. Instead they have demanded that if death certificates are being provided, then their deaths should be investigated and perpetrators held accountable.
According to Katulanda, the OMP, established in 2018, had only completed around 67 inquiries until 2022. He claimed however that progress had been made in the past two years, with approximately 6,000 cases investigated. The outcome of the thousands of cases he claims were investigated however were also not divulged.
The OMP has been routinely criticised by international human rights experts and Tamil family members of the disappeared. In 2022, the UN High Commissioner highlighted that the OMP "has not been able to trace a single disappeared person or clarify the fate of the disappeared in meaningful ways".
Eelam Tamils in the homeland and the diaspora have rejected the OMP citing that it has failed to find their loved ones calling the institution merely an eyewash.
Leeladevi Anandanadarajah, the secretary of the Tamil families of the disappeared association told the Tamil Guardian that in 2019, they gave evidence and information relating to five enforced disappearance cases to the OMP. The families told them that if the OMP can investigate and solve one of these cases within three months, then they would trust the OMP but the OMP has failed to do so.
Several years on and the families have only received an acknowledgement of the evidence they submitted. “There is no further example needed to prove that the OMP is an inactive mechanism,” Leeladevi added.
Many family members of the disappeared still keep hope that their loved ones are alive and will return.
