A Comment On The Proposed Office Of Missing Persons

By Basil Fernando –May 30, 2016

Basil Fernando

It seems no progress can be made in Sri Lanka on the attitude to murder. Murder is now regarded as normal and therefore not something to worry much about. And, this is exactly what should worry everyone. But hardly anyone seems to worry about it.

We see the same thing in the proposed Office of Missing Persons (OMP). The simple fact about a missing person in Sri Lanka is that he or she is dead. Very rarely, does a missing person re-appear. As in the case of the dead, missing persons normally never appear again. At least that is case in Sri Lanka, what ever the case may be elsewhere off the Island.

When a person is dead, he or she, of course, goes missing. There is no paradox involved in this. However, it is quite a different case if we were to be told to assume that the dead person is merely a missing person. This means that we are expected to assume that the dead man or woman is not dead at all but only missing.

Why should the dead be assumed to be merely missing? The answer would be that there is no proof of death, as the dead body has not been found. The argument is that in the absence of a corpse, there is no proof of death. So this whole exercise is about proof.

If the corpse is available then we know person is dead. If the person is, in fact, dead but his body cannot be found, we are expected assume that the person is missing. However, what is really missing is not the person, but the corpse.

If an office were to be established to look for missing dead bodies, the task of the office would be different than of an office looking for missing persons.

The situation would differ even more, if one knows or has reasonable grounds to suspect that the person is not only dead, but, in fact, killed, and the corpse has been disposed of. Obviously in such a situation, there is no need to be looking for the missing body, as the body itself has been disposed, in order to hide the fact of a murder.

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