The government, strongly tied to the military, is blocking inquiries into wartime atrocities, undermining efforts to learn the fates of thousands of missing people.
The families of the missing hold small roadside sit-ins or canvass the scarred villages of Sri Lanka’s ravaged north, hugging photos of the tens of thousands who disappeared during the country’s brutal civil war. In each place, the parents and grandparents ask the authorities a simple question: Where are our children?
The protests have continued virtually uninterrupted for more than four years, allowed by a government open to an accounting of the human toll of the war. Now, the already desperate protests seem hopeless. Sri Lanka has a new government that has turned even remembering into an act of resistance.
Since Gotabaya Rajapaksa took charge as president in late 2019, the authorities have raided news outlets, harassed and investigated journalists and activists, and dragged human rights lawyers and writers to jail and held them for months without charges, rights watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say.
Investigators looking into wartime abuses have been jailed, forced to flee the country or put under travel bans, in a clear message that the government sees accountability for past crimes as an affront.
That’s no coincidence. Sri Lanka’s new government is led by the same people who brought the three-decade war to a brutal end in 2009, then squelched discussion of it for half a decade after. During the final, brutal phase of the civil war, Mr. Rajapaksa, a former army officer, served as the defense minister.
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