> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Tamil Mothers Are Still Grieving. Is Anura Listening? - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/the-tamil-mothers-are-still-grieving-is-anura-listening/ - Published: 2026-08-26T03:36:26.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-26T03:48:11.000Z - Author: M.R. Narayan Swamy - Tags: JM Exclusive, August 2026 **By M.R. Narayan Swamy** Jeyavanitha Kasipillai was crouched in the crowded camp for war-hit civilians at Omanthai when some Sri Lankan soldiers showed up and rudely snatched away her eldest daughter, Jeromi. Jeyavanitha still remembers screaming her head off as she desperately tried to ward off the armed intruders to save and retain the 16-year-old girl, who too was shouting and wailing. One of the heartless soldiers told the distraught mother in half Sinhala, half Tamil: “We believe your daughter was with the Tigers. We need to question her. We will send her back after that.” The soldiers were intimidating. They were the law. This was in the immediate aftermath of the long war that militarily routed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), forcing tens of thousands of battered Tamil civilians to make it to the camp at Omanthai in the northern district of Vavuniya. When the tragedy unfolded, no one – just no one –came to her help. It was an unequal contest between a frightened Tamil woman and a power-drunk Sri Lankan state. Among those who witnessed the horror were her husband and her four other terrified and younger children – three boys and a girl. Speaking from Vavuniya, Jeyavanitha, now 56, insists that her daughter had nothing to do with the LTTE and that she had just given her OL school exam when the war crashed to an end. “She always lived with me.” Then, a bizarre – and frightening – thing happened. Years later, a group photograph of President Maithripala Sirisena was splashed in newspapers. Jeyavanitha could not believe her eyes when she saw her own Jeromi in the frame. Partly thrilled and partly anxious, the mother rushed to Colombo with some friends and confronted the president. His office promised to investigate. An officer told her: “Your daughter will be back with you in two days.” Nothing, however, happened. Jeromi never returned. (The girl in the frame turned out to be someone else.) Today, Jeyavanitha, unlike most Tamil women who too lost their spouses or siblings or children during the war against the Tigers, still lives in the hope that somehow, some day Jeromi will reunite with her. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/08/170518bcsrilanka-main2-editorial.srilanka_main2.jpg) Jeyavanitha On the day she spoke to Jaffna Monitor, she said: “Sir, today is the 3,468th day since I lost my daughter. I have cried and cried. My husband passed away in grief five months ago.” Heartbroken mothers like Jeyavanitha will gather in Jaffna on August 30 to discuss their collective suffering and to appeal to the international community for justice which eludes them despite years of shouting and screaming on the streets. Human rights groups believe the number of forcibly disappeared people across ethnicities in Sri Lanka is a staggering 60,000 to 100,000 – the second highest globally after Iraq. While Tamil militant groups, including the LTTE, have also been blamed for many disappearances, the principal perpetrator in Sri Lanka has been the Sinhalese-dominated state. Most of these crimes took place between 1983 and 2009, the years in which the Tamil insurgency began in earnest and ultimately ended in a bloodbath. The meeting will coincide with the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. One of the key organisers of the event is Jenita, 47, whose husband, Sivanandan, vanished without a trace after being abducted by men linked to the security forces from Vavuniya in 2008. Her husband, then 30, owned and drove a bus. After the abduction, Jenita received a note purportedly written by him along with a ransom demand for Rs 50 lakhs – if she wanted to see him again alive. For good measure, she was informed that her husband was linked to the Tigers – a charge she refutes. Jenita was certain that the signature on the note sent to her was Sivanandan’s. But the note had not been written by him. When he was taken away, their first son was aged 8 and the younger was just two-and-a-half years old. Raising Rs 50 lakhs was beyond Jenita’s wildest dreams. With not many to assist her, she somehow collected Rs 5 ½ lakhs and had the money delivered to the criminals. But Sivanandan was not freed. There was no further word from the kidnappers. The money was gone too. “Even today I live in sorrow,” Jenita told Jaffna Monitor, her voice cracking. “The people who took away my husband cheated me. No one wants to listen to our plight. We will never get justice in this land.” Like most women in her category, Jenita has lost all hope that any government in Colombo will treat Tamils with a sense of equality and justice. At one point, she called on Sirisena, who was then president. “But speaking to him was like blowing a conch in the ears of a deaf person.” She added: “On August 30 we will tell the world that the Sri Lankan government cannot be trusted. That is why we are approaching the international community. We want a change. We have no trust in Colombo.” Tamils across the board feel that while the military could have fought the LTTE, it was sheer evil to have suspected almost everyone in the Tamil community, without realising that ordinary Tamils were the biggest victims of the war – from all sides. A Colombo-based lawyer who did not want to be named said: “Tamils were treated like insects. Anyone could be made to disappear. No one was punished, no one was prosecuted. And they say Sri Lanka is a democracy. I have a question: In what way was the government different from the LTTE?” The punishing campaign against Tamil civilians – all of them classified as suspects – reached its peak when the war ended, and thousands surrendered to the military. While an estimated 12,000 LTTE fighters and sympathisers who gave themselves up are alive today, hundreds of others vanished after surrendering. Take the case of Leeladevi Anandanataraja, who was an officer in the Sri Lankan labour department when she and three other lady colleagues were arrested illegally during an official visit to Colombo in 1993. The reason? They were Tamils; what were they doing in Colombo? One police officer brusquely asked Leeladevi if any of her five children were in the LTTE. “Not so far,” I told them. “But after this brazen injustice to me, maybe one of them will join the Tigers.” That is exactly what happened. Shocked by her mother’s ordeal and insult, her eldest son, Anuraj, who had been studying to be an engineer, joined the LTTE. Called Mayuran in the Tiger ranks, he held a key position in the LTTE communication wing until 2009 when he flung his uniform and weapon and mingled with the mass of civilians fleeing the battlefield. He managed to reach Omanthai — once a no man’s land between Sri Lanka and the de facto Tamil Eelam — with a Tamil family. There, an informer told the military who Anuraj was. He was promptly taken away by the military – and has never been seen again. “I have been looking for him ever since,” a distraught Leeladevi, 73, said over telephone from the northern town of Kilinochchi where she lives with her husband, four years her senior. “For many years I prayed and hoped that he must be in detention somewhere,” she said. “But I admit I have more or less lost all hope of seeing him in flesh and blood.” It is the same unfortunate conclusion that large numbers of distressed women have reached in Sri Lanka’s north and east, the former war theatre. And almost everyone is now blaming President Anura Dissanayake, who heads a coalition government led by his Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). The women say that during his 2024 election campaign in Tamil areas, Dissanayake repeatedly promised them justice, saying he understood their suffering because JVP members, too, had been forcibly disappeared by the military over the years. So, large numbers of Tamils believed that he will do something others had not done until then – and voted for him. Now, the women say, he has simply turned his face away. “We have no more faith in this government,” says Leeladevi. “Seeing our sorrow, a true leader should have spoken to us. He doesn’t have time to meet us.” She added: “We realise that no government in this country will help the Tamils.” Jeyavanitha echoes her. “We voted for the JVP in full confidence that this man (Dissanayake) will be different. But he has forgotten us after taking our votes.” Many Tamil women have refused to accept the death certificates and financial compensation the government is offering. They say they either want their missing family members back or justice – not money. Human rights lawyer Bhavan Fonseka admits that there has been very little movement by the government in terms of fixing accountability over the mass of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka. “People want to know what happened (to their loved ones),” she said from Colombo. “They promised in their election manifesto to set up prosecutors. But you don’t see even that promise being fulfilled. “Chemmani is another issue,” Fonseka said, referring to the discovery of more than 500 sets of human remains buried in Jaffna. “There doesn’t seem to be a clear path. The government has to act... Some cases are dragging on for too long.”