SL military brings back paramilitary violence to control peaceful protests as NGO tricks fail

[TamilNet, Friday, 13 April 2018, 23:18 GMT]
An unidentified operative with alleged paramilitary background violently threatened the mothers of enforced disappeared Tamils in Mullaiththeevu on Thursday when the protesters were marking 400 days of continuous protest. The agent, armed with a knife, entered the hut of the protest around 7:00 p.m., cut the main placard, destroyed a chair and smashed the simmering stock pots. He was pointing the sword-like knife at the protesters and demanding them to “end the protest once and for all”. 47-year-old Eeswary Mariyasuresh, the chairperson of the protesters told TamilNet that the forces who want to stop their protest have resorted to deploy violence and target those who come forward to give leadership to the protesters. She survived a targeted assault on her also in August 2017. There is a pattern of SL military intelligence taking over the containment process from Colombo-centric NGOs.



Mrs Mariayasuresh, also known as Alai, said she had joined the protest demanding the SL government to hand back his husband and son who were handed over to the SL military at the final days of genocidal onslaught on Vanni in 2009. Her husband and son were not armed combatants, she said.



“We are mothers and wives of people who were handed over to SL military and whose whereabouts are not known. We are only demanding the SL Government to return our husbands and our family members as we think they are still alive,” Mrs Maraiyasuresh who is searching for two of her family members told TamilNet.

“I survived a similar attack on 14 August 2017 when I was taking night food to those participating in the protest. I believe the two incidents are related to each other.”

She said the attacker's identity was not known and that she was not at the site of the protest when the assault took place. However, the people who witnessed the assault said they had seen the person before.

The paramilitary operative who showed up on Thursday night, according to the protesters, is a person fluent in Tamil with strong connections to SL military. He resides among the Sinhala colonists in Mukaththuvaaram at the southernmost village of Mullaiththeevu district, they said.

The intelligence of occupying Sinhala military has long experience in deploying paramilitary agents, armed gangs and so-called ‘grease devils’ to contain mobilisation of people.

The attacker also warned the people at the hut that more attacks would come. However, the people quickly mobilised, cornered him and finally turned him over to the traffic policemen.

But, on Friday when journalists in Mullaiththeevu contacted the police to know the whereabouts of the attacker, the Sinhala police responded that they did not know about the incident.

The conduct of the SL Police has strengthened the allegations of the protesters that the attacker is a paramilitary operative instructed to act against them by the intelligence wing of the occupying military.

The attack has also come after Mangala Samaraweera, the SL Minister of Finance and Media, demanding the protesters to end their struggle and leave the fate of enforced disappeared at the hands of the so-called Office of Missing Persons (OMP), which the protesters strongly object as an eyewash.

Earlier, certain Colombo-based NGOs were attempting to contain the struggle by seeking to bring the district chairpersons of the protesting mothers and wives into their fold. But, the trick didn't work out, according to a section of rights activists in Vanni.

The NGO personalities from Colombo, pre-occupied with their budgets and financing, have been serving the interests of the foreign diplomatic missions in Colombo, who promote the so-called transitional justice circumventing political solution to the Tamil national question and subverting justice for seven-decades of protracted genocide against Eezham Tamils in the island.

The Colombo-based so-called rights defenders have been attempting to cause divisions among the self-mobilised protesters in the North and East of the Tamil homeland as recently exposed by the district head of families of enforced disappeared victims in Batticaloa.

The political machinations agent Mangala Samaraweera wishing an end of the protest and the SL military wanting to end the protests seem to have resorted to military tactics as the Colombo-based NGO tricks have failed to contain the demonstrators, the Tamil rights defenders in Vanni said.

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