In 2024, Harini Amarasuriya – then an opposition parliamentarian – lauded the Tamil mothers of the disappeared.
“The women in this country, particularly those affected by the civil war, have repeatedly expressed what they want,” she said.
“Numerous commissions have sought the views of women victims regarding the reconciliation process, compensation, and grievance mechanisms they want. It is time for the government to take action on these issues. Women have been demanding these changes for years. They are seeking the truth about what happened to their family members. This must be taken seriously.”
Yet today, as Sri Lanka’s prime minister, she endorses the very mechanisms those women have spent years denouncing. By backing the Office on Missing Persons (OMP) and other failed domestic mechanisms, Amarasuriya has exposed a stark hypocrisy: preaching empathy and justice while trampling the demands of the activists that she herself reiterated.
Tamil women demand international justice, not token commissions
For over eight years and counting Tamil families across the North-East have waged roadside protests demanding to know the fate of their loved ones. These demonstrations, led largely by Tamil women, are the longest-running continuous protests the island has ever seen – eclipsing even the much lauded ‘Aragalaya’ protest of 2022.
Their message has been unwavering: they reject Sri Lanka’s domestic “truth-seeking” bodies as sham exercises, and instead demand international accountability through the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The OMP, in particular, has utterly lost the trust of Tamil families. Formed in 2017 amid much fanfare, it has yet to find a single forcibly disappeared Tamil, identify a single perpetrator, or deliver any answers. Even the United Nations has acknowledged this abysmal record. In 2022, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that the OMP “has not been able to trace a single disappeared person or clarify the fate of the disappeared in meaningful ways”. Instead of uncovering truth, the OMP’s approach appeared aimed at administrative closure – “reducing the case load and closing files” rather than ensuring justice and redress, as UN Commissioner Michelle Bachelet observed. In short, it has been a spectacular failure. And Tamil families know it.
From the start, these families refused to be token participants in another empty commission. By March 2024, associations of the relatives of the disappeared reiterated that Tamils have “no faith” in domestic mechanisms “such as the OMP, which they see as but another means of evading accountability. They have seen too many Sri Lankan commissions come and go, placating international pressure but delivering nothing. Every Sri Lankan government – now including Amarasuriya’s – has used such bodies to deflect calls for real accountability. The families’ stance is clear: only an independent international mechanism can hope to deliver justice.
Their desperation is rooted in lived experience. Over 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Tamils, were forcibly disappeared during and after the brutal armed conflict. Sri Lanka remains one of the largest caseloads of enforced disappearances in the world. Mothers, fathers, wives, and children continue to clutch photos of their missing kin, protesting in blistering heat and pouring rain.
They have rejected government offers of death certificates and compensation – paltry attempts at “closure” – because accepting them would mean giving up hope of finding the truth. In mid-2024, the OMP tried to entice families with death certificates and Rs. 200,000 in compensation, only to be rebuffed at every turn.
Tamil mothers in Mannar held signs reading “Our children’s lives are worth more [than Rs. 200,000]”, decrying the offer as hush-money. In Mullaitivu, anguished parents asked, “If the death certificate is the answer to why our children are still missing, then who are the murderers?”.
Far from appeasing the protestors, these gestures only deepened their fury. As one mother lamented, “they have not [found our missing]; instead they are coming to give us compensation so they can force us to stay home". To these families, the OMP is not a solution but part of the problem – a cynical exercise to paper over atrocities without holding anyone accountable.
International observers have backed the families’ skepticism. The UN High Commissioner and multiple UN Human Rights Council resolutions have urged international involvement, citing Sri Lanka’s lack of political will and capacity to credibly investigate itself. Yet no such international process has been allowed. Successive governments in Colombo – including the current administration – flatly refuse to refer Sri Lanka to the ICC or to cooperate with a truly independent inquiry. This is the intransigent wall of impunity that Tamil families have been up against. And it is against this backdrop that Harini Amarasuriya’s recent stance appears not only woefully misguided, but cruel.
From praise to betrayal: Amarasuriya and the OMP
When Amarasuriya spoke about these Tamil women last year, she seemingly understood their pain. She acknowledged that Tamil women war victims have “repeatedly expressed what they want” from any “reconciliation” process. In a 2020 interview, she noted how “women in the North of the country have not given up their fight asking questions about their loved ones who were disappeared”.
As an academic-activist, Amarasuriya built her reputation on advocating for human rights and social justice, often criticizing the Rajapaksa regime’s repression. It is precisely this history that makes her current reversal so jarring and reprehensible.
Now in power under the National People’s Power (NPP) banner, Prime Minister Amarasuriya has abandoned the reformist rhetoric that brought her party popular support. In parliament, faced with questions about the lack of progress for families of the disappeared, Amarasuriya paid lip service to their grievances, admitting that “the public has lost their trust in the Office for Reparations and the Office on Missing Persons”. Yet in the same breath, she doubled down on those very institutions.
The problem, she claimed, was merely that the OMP and others “were merely established in name and lacked adequate strength and were largely ineffective” in the past. That failure, she blithely assured, “is expected to be corrected.”
In other words, trust us – this time will be different.
But Tamil families have heard these promises of reform countless times before. Indeed, Amarasuriya’s talking points are indistinguishable from the technocratic excuses of her predecessors. Like many governments before, she insists that Sri Lanka will solve its own problems “legally and institutionally,” that it’s “not an easy task” but the state is “committed to ensuring justice”. The reality, however, is that her government, like those prior, fiercely resists international oversight and is simply refurbishing the facade of domestic accountability. Amarasuriya has become the latest government figure to continue backing failed domestic mechanisms. The NPP’s lofty pledges of accountability and equality have proved paper-thin, as its leaders settle into the old mould of Sri Lankan power politics.
This volte-face is emblematic of a wider pattern. The NPP campaigned as a progressive alternative, promising to break with Sinhala nationalist impunity and uphold rights for all. Amarasuriya herself stressed that people “need to know what happened” to their disappeared loved ones. Yet, now ensconced in office, the NPP is echoing the very complicity and hypocrisy it once decried From dragging its feet on repealing the draconian PTA to balking at genuine devolution, the party’s reformist image is rapidly crumbling.
What changed? Perhaps the levers of power in Colombo proved more persuasive than principles. Perhaps the NPP’s rhetoric was always easier in opposition than in government. Whatever the case, Amarasuriya’s stance sends a chilling message to Tamil families: that even a self-professed feminist and progressive will abandon them when politically expedient. It reinforces the cynical view that, in Sri Lanka, Tamil victimhood is a talking point, not a commitment.
A callous indifference
Amarasuriya’s endorsement of the OMP is not some abstract policy choice. Instead, it is a direct affront to the lived experience and suffering of Tamil families.
These families have endured harassment, surveillance, and heartbreak in their long quest for justice. Many of the activists Amarasuriya spoke of are elderly mothers, women who have lost everything except the hope of discovering their children’s fate. To now ask them to place their faith in an OMP that has “not revealed the fate of any forcibly disappeared people” in over six years is beyond insensitive. It is cruel. It effectively tells these mothers that their 8 year struggle on the streets was in vain, and that they must reconcile themselves to the very institutions they have rejected.
This is not a technocratic misstep by the prime minister; it is a moral failure. Amarasuriya is choosing the convenience of state-controlled narratives over the truth. In doing so, she actively disregards the pleas of families who have repeatedly said they do not want more empty domestic commissions. By pressing forward with the charade, Amarasuriya treats these families’ pain and patience with callous indifference.
As the Tamil families of the disappeared continue their struggle, they do so now with the painful realisation that a figure who had the potential to be an ally has firmly turned her back on them. The moral authority of their protest – the simple demand for truth and justice – far outweighs the hollow credibility of the OMP or the political calculations in Colombo.
In the end, this episode serves as a reminder to what Tamils have known all along. True reform will not come from Colombo, but from international pressure - which is why many of the Tamil families of the disappeared continue to appeal directly to global actors over Sri Lanka's political leaders.
The world must do its duty and listen to them.
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Theepan is a staff writer at the Tamil Guardian.