(31) COLOMBO – Where is Mohideen?
His wife Fatima wonders this every day as she wakes at 5 a.m. to say her morning prayers and get her two sons ready for school.
Since November, Fatima, who lives in a corrugated tin-roof home in one of the Sri Lankan capital's Tamil neighbourhoods, has been praying to Allah for her husband's safe return.
At 5:30 a.m. on Nov. 11, four men wielding guns and flashing badges barged into Fatima's home, demanding Mohideen accompany them to the police station for two hours to be questioned.
Mohideen, who makes a modest living as a jellyfish seller, hasn't been seen since.
"When they took him, he was crying and asked me to protect him," said Fatima, who spoke on condition her last name not be published because she is afraid of reprisals.
Fatima's anguish underscores the plight of many families in this war-torn country off India's south coast. Even as Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa promises victory over the Tamil Tigers is imminent – the terrorist group is making a final stand in Sri Lanka's northeastern jungles – families like Fatima's continue to be tormented by mysterious kidnappings.
"It's happening across the country and people are terribly afraid," said Jehan Perera, a director with the National Peace Council, a research and advocacy group. "The biggest fear is not knowing who is doing the kidnapping. Is it the government or the LTTE (as the Tigers are known here) or some faction or breakaway group of the LTTE? It's worse when you have no idea."
Wearing a pale yellow and tan sari with her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a bun, Fatima says she has done everything possible to ensure Mohideen is released.
When local TV reporters appeared at the family's home days after he went missing, she turned them away, believing the publicity would hurt his chances of survival. She has repeatedly gone to local police, who say they don't know where Mohideen is and deny taking him into custody. She's also filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka.
She plans to move in with her sister, Raheema, who also lives in Colombo. That way Fatima can rent her house, pay bills and buy food.
Kidnappings have long been a Sri Lankan scourge and were a particular danger in the late 1980s when the government of the day was battling an aggressive Marxist political party that both challenged its authority and tried to scuttle peace negotiations with the LTTE.
Between 1988 and 1990, an estimated 20,000 to 60,000 people here were murdered by government-sponsored paramilitary death squads, European parliamentarians charged at the time.
Young men suspected of being revolutionaries were forcibly taken from their homes, tossed into jeeps with no licence plates and driven away to be beaten, interrogated and murdered. Sometimes, their bodies were tossed into a river near Colombo and commuters at the Ja-Ela Bridge, just north of the city, would slow down to watch the corpses float out to the ocean.
"It was a different time, a different government," Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona said. "Sometimes the people who were kidnapped would have their head cut off and it would be left on the (traffic) roundabout. It was brutal."
In recent years, kidnappings have continued and both the government and the Tigers have been accused of being responsible. Both typically deny involvement and blame the other. Both sides have also been accused of kidnapping children and forcing them to become military conscripts, an allegation the government has angrily denied.
Fatima sat on a couch in front of a grandfather clock, her front door wedged open with a broken cricket bat. She said she's desperate for her husband's return. "He can be rude and cranky, but we love him," she said. "We need him here."
Fatima already has sent her two girls, Faraht Amin, 23, and Hamat, 18, to live with her husband's family in India. Her two sons, Mohammed Atif, 14, and Mohammed Shazan, 6, remain in Colombo because they're too young to move abroad.
"We're a good Muslim family," Fatima said. "We have nothing to do with the LTTE. My husband sells jellyfish to exporters. That's all. We just want to make a living."
It's hard to say how many families have been victimized by kidnappings. A spokesperson for the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka declined to comment and did not respond to emails. A civil liberties group here that tracks kidnappings declined to provide statistics or be interviewed. The group's executive director wouldn't return a phone call. "She won't talk; she's too afraid right now," a friend explained.
Kohona said disappearance figures are usually inflated.
"Last year the American ambassador gave me a list of 355 cases of disappearances," Kohona said, chuckling. "About 5 per cent of the cases were duplicates. They hadn't even checked the names. They just got the big headlines. I think this is a big racket. The husband goes away from the family for a while and they apply with an embassy for asylum, saying they are afraid for their lives. It happens, I'm sure of it."
In the town of Dambulla, a four-hour drive north, shopkeeper P.L. Srigulatha sat at a rickety metal table in her grocery store.
She said a local man disappeared just two weeks ago. Another man, a Tamil shopkeeper, went missing in November. "We just don't know what happened to them," she said.
Asked for more details, she demurred. "I don't want to talk about it. No one wants to talk about it."
