[TamilNet, Monday, 23 July 2012, 01:58 GMT]
Tamils Against Genocide (TAG), a non-profit litigation and advocacy
group based in the U.S., has pieced together an operational blueprint of
Sri Lanka's White Van abductions, and the complicity of State
Institutions. The blueprint is based on affidavits from surviving
abductees, a video deposition from an ex-member of Liberation Tigers who
was spared execution at the last moment, information revealed from
recent capture of white van abductors in the South, and other
circumstantial evidence including open death threats issued by Sri
Lanka's Defense Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapakse. TAG concludes that the
white van phenomenon is not a random occurrence of isolated events, but a
systemic well-organized criminal enterprise carried out by
independently operating cells consisting of criminal gangs and military
personnel and activated by directives from high level State officials.
"In
their dormant or active status, the persistent and ubiquitous threat of
white van networks is the sine qua non of Sri Lanka’s de facto
institutionalized culture of impunity. The sustained operability of
white van networks, and the culture of impunity they create and within
which they operate, are necessary to undermine, if not suspend, the
fundamental liberties of free speech, free association, and due process
that typically animate active citizenship and meaningful democratic
participation," TAG says in the report.
White-van command hierarchy
White-Van and followup phases
State institutions collude to
provide the criminal network wide latitude in the abductions, which is
followed by up to four additional phases the victim passes through, if
the victim escapes murder, according to the report:
- Abduction: Criminal gangs, or military personnel in civil
uniform abduct targeted Tamils; abductions get converted to 'arrests' if
there is public outcry;
- Detention: Black sites run in Army camps, or in police custody,
torture/interrogation carried out under ER without Court intervention;
- Incarceration: Court, especially Puthukkoadai Court located
near, and under the influence the White Van command hierarchy, orders
incarceration routinely with coerced confessions. The prison authorities
provide fluidity to move detainees around within the detention complex;
- Release: Detainees fortunate to obtain release are under continuous surveillance; and
- Post Release: Many who are released are re-arrested or re-abducted, and some escape to seek asylum in other countries.
The report provides detailed maps of the detention complexes used in the
white van networks, one centered in Colombo, and the other in the South
of Colombo.
The
video deposition referenced in the report and attached with this story,
TAG said, provides corroborating evidence to the white van operations
from an demobilized ex-combatant who escaped from the jaws of death from
the criminal gang operating under the direction of the command
hierarchy. Vadivel Muhunthan, was first targetted for assassination in
Jaffna, and later was abducted in Colombo (marked 4 in the Colombo map,
GPS: 6°56'33.87" N, 79°51'46.48" E) near Kotahena Government Tamil
school in 2009, incarcerated, tortured, released, re-abducted and
tortured, and incarcerated again. He escaped from the jaws of death to a
European country where he has been granted asylum, according to the
deposition.
The report spotlights the basis of the Rajapakse
administration's totalitarian, yet tenuous grip on the militarized
republic as being reducible to two factors: Sinhala-Buddhist
majoritarianism and state-sponsored white van networks. The report
points out that while Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarianism has been a
persistent feature abetting post-colonial Sri Lanka’s progressive
evisceration of basic Tamil liberties, white van networks emerged during
the armed conflict as national security legislation expanded, and
continue to operate post-war.
TAG-UK's Jan Jananayagam told
TamilNet, "It is well known that Sri Lanka has long relied on arbitrary
arrest, detention without charge, torture and disappearance to suppress
dissent. We have now established how the ‘white van’ abduction sequence
is an indispensable part of the state machinery used to implement the
first stage of ‘disappearances'.
"The machinery of state
sponsored disappearances was previously used to instill an atmosphere of
fear among the Tamil population and thus control them. It is now also
used by the Rajapakses to consolidate regime survival, suppress peaceful
dissent and democratic opposition," Ms.Jananayagam added.
Gotabhaya
Rajapakse is a dual U.S. and Sri Lankan citizen. While, the U.S. has
articulated that upholding human-rights across the world is a priority
in U.S.'s foreign policy, Tamil political observers said that it remains
to be seen to what level of culpability Sri Lanka's violations of
fundamental rights can rise before U.S.'s threshold for tolerance is
breached and U.S. confronts its own citizen's criminality in issuing
death threats openly and his alleged complicity in war-crimes.
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