Details emerge of Sri Lanka's post CHOGM crackdown on dissent

23 NOVEMBER 2013

BY FRANCES HARRISON

There are reports that the Sri Lankan security forces have been detaining and questioning Tamils who gave interviews to the British media covering the Commonwealth meeting in the island last week. In other cases family members of those who gave interviews or helped the media have been threatened and intimidated.

The victims do not want publicity for their individual cases for fear of further retaliation but the intimidation has involved threatening phone calls, security forces turning up at people’s homes, as well as visits to children’s schools, work places and detention for hours of questioning.

This is in addition to the report of harassment of a Tamil activist who took part in the protests by families of the disappeared that greeted British Prime Minister, David Cameron, on his visit to Jaffna. The Catholic priest running the Mannar Citizens Committee wrote to the Sri Lankan President on Friday complaining about the incident, saying threatening phone calls, extortion and intimidation had now become routine for those defending democracy and human rights.

On the day the Commonwealth meeting officially opened, there are now media reports that a Tamil man, Sivakumaran Baskaran, was abducted in a white van in northern Sri Lanka. Mr Baskaran was a former rebel who’d been through the government’s rehabilitation programme and had helped the Tamil National Alliance with their recent provincial election campaign. Nothing has been heard of him since.

On Friday an award-winning Tamil poet, with Norwegian citizenship, VIS Jayapalan, was arrested by police in northern Sri Lanka as he was visiting his mother’s grave. The visiting poet was initially said by police to have been “disrupting ethnic harmony” but then the suggestion was he might have been violating the terms of his tourist visa by addressing a public gathering.

Similar reports of harassment surfaced after the visit to Sri Lanka of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, in August this year. Ms. Pillay said that victims and their family members, activists, and journalists had faced reprisals and that this was an extremely serious matter that she would report to the UN Human Rights Council.

Image courtesy: Eranga Jayawardane / AP