Tamil leaders in the North, according to media reports had
requested the United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner Prince ZeidRa’ad Al
Hussein who was currently on a four-day official visit to Sri Lanka to help
them find more than 4,000 of their loved ones missing during the war between
the armed forces and the LTTE. In spite of any person agreeing with their plea,
the number of persons they had mentioned would raise many questions in the
minds of those who are concerned about the deaths and the disappearances during
the war.
The Presidential Commission on Missing Persons had recorded
statements from relatives of more than 19,000 persons said to have been
missing. Commission’s Chairman Maxwell Paranagama had said that out of them
around 16,000 were said to have gone missing from the war ravaged Northern and
Eastern Provinces. Despite the UN Human Rights Chief having called on the
government to abolish the commission, anybody would be stunned to see the
disparity between the number of missing persons in the Tamil leaders’ plea to
Prince Hussein and the number of complaints received by the Commission.
Numbers pertaining to the war have always been used to suit
the agendas and ideologies of various people. In January 2013 former Defence
Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa had told the media that no person had disappeared
during the war and a six-member army court of inquiry appointed by the then
army commander in the same year confirmed his point. But under the same former
government, the then president Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed the commission on
missing persons which had interviewed relatives of more than 19,000 persons
said to have disappeared. Same confusion could be seen in the number of persons
who died in the war. Various UN bodies including the then resident
representative had put the number of people killed during the last phase of the
war at around 7,000. However, the experts panel, commonly known in Sri Lanka as
the Darusman committee appointed by UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon in 2010 to
advise him on Sri Lanka had estimated the number at nearly 40,000.
Interestingly, the government and the Sinhalese people were
sad to hear of that whopping number while many Tamils here and abroad were
jubilant and they were so keen to use it in their writings. TNA, the main Tamil coalition in its
manifesto for the Northern Provincial Council election in 2013 had put the
number of people who died during the last stage of the war as 70,000 and the
Tamil Nadu leaders who were not satisfied with the death of 70,000 Tamils
during the Eelam war claim that the number exceeded 150,000. Reminding the
famous statement by the former Soviet leader Joseph Stalin” the death of one
man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic”, the number of people
killed and missing during the armed conflict has become just statistics that can
be twisted according to the agendas of various people and organizations. The
Darusman committee’s estimation of civilian deaths during the last phase of the
war is something that should be questioned. On what grounds had they increased
to such levels? The former Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona’s argument that
there should be 40,000 graves if the Darusman committee was correct is a strong
valid point, considering the fact that the last stage of the war was fought
within the small littoral of Puthumatalan.
On or around May 17, 2009, two or three days before the end
of the war in a voice message to the international community calling for
intervention, which had been in circulation in many websites those days, Sea
Tiger leader Soosai had said that there were about 25,000 injured people
entrapped with them. Nowhere in his speech had he said about such a large
number of deaths. The findings of the
census carried out in 2011 in the North which has never been challenged even by
the Tamil leaders put the number of deaths at 7,000 and were tallied with the
UN estimate before the Darusman report. These numbers involve human lives.
People must handle them with care and sensitivity.
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