Sri Lanka war widows demand answers on missing

Tamil women in eastern Sri Lanka are continuing a years-long protest demanding answers about relatives who vanished during the country's 1983-2009 civil war.

In Batticaloa, Saradhadevi Thadcanamoorty recited 124 handwritten names of husbands, fathers and brothers who disappeared, then joined three other women for what the item describes as their 1,604th consecutive day of protest.

The war between Sri Lankan government forces and Tamil separatist rebels killed more than 100,000 people, including many civilians, according to UN estimates. The United Nations has cited figures of up to 100,000 disappearances.

Thadcanamoorty said her husband was found shot dead in 1992 and that witnesses blamed a soldier. She said her son disappeared in 2000 and that she believes Tamil rebels abducted him to force him into their ranks. Other women described husbands taken by armed or masked men and years of unanswered appeals.

In 2018, Sri Lanka created the Office on Missing Persons to determine the fate of those who disappeared. The office says it has 22,000 cases and has traced 24 people in the past three years.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's election in 2024 raised hopes among some families after he promised to investigate political assassinations, disappearances and assaults and to create an independent national prosecutor's office. Human Rights Watch said in September that some progress had been made, but that the government had failed to address what it called the urgent need to end impunity.

Tamil opposition MP Rasamanikham R. Shanakiyan said there had been "zero movement" on enforced disappearances or missing persons. Mirak Raheem, a member of the Office on Missing Persons, said progress was too slow for families who had waited decades and that witnesses and documents were becoming harder to find.