Rights groups say they have a dossier of evidence against Gotabaya Rajapaksa – and a renewed appetite to bring him to account
Tamil women holding a protest in Jaffna soon after the civil war to remember family members who disappeared. Most are still waiting for answersTamil women holding a protest in Jaffna soon after the civil war to remember family members who disappeared. Most are still waiting for answersSat 30 Jul 2022 03.00 BSTt was a warm April day in 2019 and Gotabaya Rajapaksa was enjoying the afternoon with his family in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles.
“We are excited, this is a moment of opportunity,” said Yasmin Sooka, a human rights lawyer with the ITJP. “We’ve spent years collating an extensive dossier on Gotabaya and a pattern of international violations going back to 1989. Now he no longer has immunity, we are confident we have a credible case he has to answer.”
Citizens were enticed to safe no-fire zones in the Tamil-controlled areas in the north, only to be bombarded by deadly shelling from government forces, with dozens of hospitals and humanitarian facilities targeted. Thousands who surrendered were taken in and never seen again. In those final phases of the war, estimates of the dead range from 40,000-100,000.
Alongside hundreds of other Tamil mothers, Aanandarajah has spent years trying to find answers about her son, including testifying before police and commissions. Yet their calls for justice have consistently been ignored and she has faced constant harassment, surveillance and abuse from the authorities and military. Many of the mothers of the disappeared are now dying before they get answers.
Nushin Sarkarati, a lawyer with the Center for Justice and Accountability in the US, who filed the case on behalf of Wickrematunge’s daughter but had to withdraw it after Rajapaksa became president, said this felt like “a new moment of opportunity”, one they intended to seize. Nonetheless, the pathway to Rajapaksa facing trial is riddled with uncertainty.