Civil war missing are dead, says Gotabaya

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has acknowledged for the first time that more than 23,500 people missing for a decade since the end of the country’s protracted Tamil war are dead.

Rajapaksa, who played a key role in the campaign that crushed the Tamil separatist rebels, told a UN envoy that steps would be taken to provide death certificates for those reported missing.

“President Rajapaksa outlined his plans to address the issue of missing persons,” said a statement on the president’s meeting with UN resident coordinator Hanaa Singer. “He explained that these missing persons are dead.”

Some 5,000 security forces are among the 23,500 people never accounted for.

The statement said most of the missing civilians had been conscripted by the LTTE, which was crushed in a major offensive that ended in May 2009. “The families of the missing attest to it. However, they do not know what has become of them and so claim them to be missing,” the president said. Under law, families cannot access property deeds, bank accounts or inheritances left by missing relatives unless they can prove they are dead.

The last government set up an Office on Missing Persons in 2018 to investigate those never traced after the 37-year Tamil separatist war, as well as during a Marxist uprising. Rights groups claim at least 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed in the final stages of the separatist war.