“The Missing Are Considered Dead”: Reflections on a Declaration
The early months of 2022 saw mass protests erupt against Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa government against the backdrop of the country’s worst economic crisis. Protests eventually led to the ousting of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, as protesters stormed and occupied the Presidential palace in Colombo and the official residences of the President and Prime Minister. While seated comfortably in California, I watched these events unfold in the place I call home. I was struck by the global attention garnered by the #GotaGoGama protest sites in Colombo, especially considering that long-standing continuous protests in the country’s north-east have received much less recognition. On 12 August 2022, Tamil families of the forcibly disappeared in Sri Lanka marked 2,000 days, or five years, of continuous protest demanding knowledge about their loved ones who were disappeared by the government. In the face of ongoing denial and state repression from a government responsible for the genocides of Tamils in 1983 and 2009, Tamil families of the disappeared have consistently called on international entities to support their demands. The international community, however, mobilized much more quickly and substantively to the #GotaGoGama protests than to the ongoing protests by Tamil communities. Many have highlighted the divergence in demands– with the predominantly Tamil protesters in the north-east calling attention, as they always have, to the government’s war crimes and Sinhala-Buddhist supremacy, while protesters in Colombo focus largely on the economic crisis– as well as in the brutality of police and military response they each receive. As the world’s attention– and mine– was captured by news of the mass protests in Colombo, I began to wonder about the visibility of one protest drowning out another. I thought about the erasure of a five-year-long protest on behalf of the disappeared.
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