By M.R. Narayan Swamy
IANS
New Delhi : A respected Sri Lankan academic who disappeared from Colombo six months ago and was believed to have been seized by a pro-government Tamil group has probably been killed, his distraught family said Monday.
After hoping against hope all these months that S. Raveendranath, who headed the Eastern University of Sri Lanka when he went missing Dec 15 last year, was alive a key family member now said that they feared the worst.
Amid media reports that the breakaway Karuna group of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had murdered him, Raveendranath's doctor son-in-law M. Malaravan told IANS over telephone: "Now I don't even have one percent hope of seeing him alive."
"I don't know what to do," said a despairing Malaravan, an eye surgeon in a Colombo hospital. "My mother in law has collapsed, she is crying non-stop. Our family is in a bad shape. Nobody in the government is telling us anything.
"This is so sad. All these months we kept on hoping that he would be released one day. We wanted him in our midst.
"I am literally begging the authorities to at least confirm if this news about his death is true. Even unofficially no one in the government is speaking."
The 36-year-old surgeon, who is married to one of Raveendranath's two daughters, said Tamil sources were telling him that the worst was true. Asked if he had any hope of seeing his father-in-law alive, Malaravan replied in the negative.
But there is no trace of Raveendranath's body. Several people abducted in Sri Lanka in recent times have disappeared. In some cases, bodies have turned up – with gunshot wounds.
Even by the standards of a strife-torn country where human rights abuses and disappearances have become the norm, Raveendranath's case attracted attention in academic circles worldwide because of his standing and international links.
Raveendranath was attending an international meeting in Colombo when he disappeared from a supposedly high security area of the Sri Lankan capital. No one ever claimed responsibility for the crime.
The abductors, widely believed to be from the Karuna faction, apparently wanted Raveendranath, who was from the island's north, out of the Eastern University near the eastern town of Batticaloa, in a zone they consider as their own.
The academic's problems came in the open when armed men kidnapped the dean of the arts faculty of the university in 2005 demanding Raveendranath's exit.
He sent his resignation as vice chancellor to the University Grants Commission, and soon the dean was freed. According to the family, the UGC told him to work in Colombo. He complied and thus remained the vice chancellor.
After two mysterious telephonic threats, Raveendranath asked UGC to relieve him. The UGC refused. And he disappeared Dec 15, becoming the most high profile of Tamils who have gone missing in Sri Lanka in recent times.
The worried family issued public appeals urging the kidnappers to treat him kindly, pointing out that he was a diabetic and suffered from hypertension, both of which needed regular doses of medicines.
The abduction was widely condemned. Messages of solidarity poured in from Western academic circles including the US, Britain, France, Denmark, France, Sweden, Canada and Japan.
Malaravan knocked on every single door in Colombo seeking justice, meeting even President Mahinda Rajapakse. But his father-in-law remained missing. "Now it seems it is all over," he said. "I have taken leave to take care of the family."