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Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif will visit China at Premier Li Keqiang's invitation on Nov. 1, China's foreign ministry said on Wednesday. (Reuters)

Arumuga Lakshmi, tormented by questions about the fate of her two children, missing for years, marched through a town in northern Sri Lanka with a group of women, many holding up photographs, black flags and burning torches.

During a brutal 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and a militant group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Lakshmi's daughter Ranjinithervy went missing in 2004, followed three years later by her son Sivakumar.

"I just want to see my son's face," said Lakshmi, as she wiped away tears, adding that she did not know if the two, ​aged 16 and 20 when they disappeared, were dead or alive.

Thousands of people, mostly Tamils in Sri Lanka's north and east, went missing during the civil war in what were known as "enforced disappearances".

Few, if any, have been accounted for, and government officials have offered varying details of what happened to them, with many facts still unknown, despite investigative efforts.

The instances of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka rank among the world's highest, with human rights group Amnesty International estimating them to number between 60,000 and 100,000 since the late 1980s.

But the government's Office on Missing Persons (OMP), set up in 2017, said it had ​received just 14,965 civilian reports ​of disappearances from 1981 onwards.

Years after the war ended in 2009, Tamil families like Lakshmi's, and the hundreds of women who marched with her in the former LTTE stronghold of Kilinochchi in August, still seek their missing relatives - and answers.

Pressure is growing for the government to act.

In a report on Oct. 4, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights said the Office, and other steps taken by the government, had fallen short of the "tangible results expected by victims and other stakeholders".

Sri Lanka says it remains committed to pursuing tangible progress on human rights through domestic institutions.

'JUST CAN'T BEAR THE PAIN'

Government employee Valantina Daniel said her 66-year-old injured mother disappeared during the war's final ​phase.

On May 17, 2009, a day before the government declared victory, Daniel handed her ​mother to authorities, believing that she would be taken to hospital, but has had no word of her since.

"I developed this sense of hatred and so I tried to kill myself," said Daniel, 51. "I've tried many times. I just can't bear the pain of this separation."

Daniel, whose younger brother also disappeared in 1999, while an older one was killed in a shelling attack that decade, wrote to the authorities about her mother’s case, which they acknowledged in 2011.

Mahesh Katundala, chairman of the Office on Missing Persons, defended the institution against criticism that it was not doing enough.

He rebutted claims that those who surrendered went missing, saying there was no evidence, and added that the majority of those who disappeared had been abducted by the LTTE or factions opposed to it.

The Office had uncovered about 50 cases of people reported missing who were living abroad, he said.

Denying claims of a genocide of Tamil civilians during the war’s final offensive in Mullivaikkal, he said the army had instead rescued 60,000 civilians.

Among its functions, the Office issues certificates of death or of absence only when they are requested, Katundala said, while compensation amounts to 200,000 rupees ($550).

However the U.N. rights agency, among others, has faulted its efforts.

"It has not been able to trace a single disappeared person or clarify the fate of the disappeared in meaningful ways, and its current purpose is to expedite the closure of files," the body said in the October report.

An OMP spokesperson said the fuel shortages crippling the Indian Ocean island during its worst economic crisis in more than seven decades make it impossible to meet a target of 5,000 interviews by year-end.

For Daniel, the crisis pales besides the hardships of 2009, when she went from village to village with no food and just the clothes she wore, for fear of a shelling attack.

"Finding our relatives will never, ever happen," Daniel said, accusing the government of inaction. "Even now I'm living with so much pain." (Reuters)

Japan and Lithuania have decided to upgrade bilateral ties and start up security dialogue, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Wednesday, as the Baltic country faces diplomatic row with China over Taiwan.

Lithuania has come under sustained Chinese pressure to reverse a decision last year to allow Taiwan to open a de facto embassy in the Capital Vilnius under its own name.

"Japan and Lithuania are important partners that share basic values such as freedom, human rights and the rule of law," Kishida told a joint news conference in Tokyo with his Lithuanian counterpart Ingrida Simonyte.

"I'm glad we can upgrade our ties to strategic partnership at the time of Prime Minister Simonyte's Japan visit ... In valuing the fact that Lithuania is conducting its diplomacy in a resolute matter, we also decided to start up security dialogue."

China, which claims democratically ruled Taiwan as its own territory, has downgraded diplomatic relations with Lithuania and pressured multinational companies to sever ties with it.

Taiwan's government strongly objects to China's sovereignty claims and says only the island's 23 million people can decide its future.

"Recent geopolitical challenges from North Korea's reckless and dangerous missile launches and Chinese economic coercion and to the brutal, large-scale war that Russia has started in Europe show a need for like-minded nations to cooperate closer together," Simonyte said.

"This partnership serves the mutual interest of our nations and it is aimed at making the world a better and safer place for democracy and all the freedom-loving people," she said. (Reuters)

The three most glaring omissions from China's new Communist Party leadership share one common trait: all rose through its Youth League and were considered members of a once-powerful faction whose influence Xi Jinping has now effectively crushed.

Premier Li Keqiang and Vice Premier Wang Yang, both 67 and young enough to be re-appointed to the elite seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, were left off even the wider Central Committee, as Xi installed loyalists in top party posts during the recent twice-a-decade leadership reshuffle.

Fellow vice premier and one-time high-flyer Hu Chunhua, who, at 59, had been seen by some party watchers as a candidate for premier and once even a possible future president, did not make it to the 24-man Politburo.

The omissions show Xi has succeeded in a years-long effort to eradicate the faction, analysts said.

"On Hu Chunhua, I think this has been Xi Jinping's main tactic of shutting down the youth league faction," said Victor Shih, an expert on elite politics in China and a professor at the University of California, San Diego.

"He has stifled the careers of quite a few cadres in that faction."

In a dramatic incident widely viewed as symbolic of the faction's demise, Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, who is 79 and a Youth League veteran, was unexpectedly escorted from the stage at Saturday's closing ceremony of the party congress.

Exactly what happened remains unclear, but state news agency Xinhua said in two English posts on Twitter that it was related to Hu's health. The social network is blocked in China.

"They are completely defeated," said Cheng Li, a specialist on the transformation of political leaders in China, referring to the sidelining of the Youth League faction.

"It means Xi can do many things he wants to, and opposing forces have got weaker," added Li, who is with the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"It can be read as, he didn't want the Western-style balance of power and wanted to show more of the centralisation of his power."

As Xi kicks off his third leadership term with more power than any leader since Mao Zedong, he faces a mountain of problems, from a dismal economy to his own COVID-19 policy that has backed China into a corner, and souring ties with the West.

TRAINING GROUND

The "faction" refers to officials in leadership roles in the Youth League, which recruits and trains some of China's brightest, mainly high school and university students, traditionally acting as a feeder organisation for the party.

The Youth League's budget has been cut from nearly 700 million yuan ($96 million) in 2012, the year Xi assumed power, to about 260 million yuan in 2021, official data shows.

Membership has dropped to about 74 million over the same period from around 90 million.

China's Communist Party has about 97 million members.

"As a party-led organization, the CYL has lost its clout as the place for grooming leaders," said Dali Yang, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.

"But it has already been working hard to adapt to the changing political circumstances," he said, adding that the Youth League had built a social media presence, appealing to nationalistic pride, and engaged in civic functions.

The Youth League has been active in attacking foreign brands accused of misbehaviour in China, such as false advertising.

Last year, Western journalists said they received death threats after its branch in the central province of Henan asked social media followers to report the whereabouts of a BBC reporter covering major floods there.

The Youth League did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Its political image lost some sheen in 2012, when Ling Jihua, a top aide to Hu Jintao, tried to cover up the circumstances around the death of his son, killed while driving a Ferrari that crashed in Beijing.

Ling was later charged with corruption and jailed for life.

XI'S 'ZHIJIANG NEW ARMY'

Factions, cliques and power bases have existed, with varying levels of influence, since the party's founding a century ago.

They famously included the so-called "Shanghai Gang" of former leader Jiang Zemin, who is now 96.

Xi's faction, the so-called "Zhijiang New Army", was forged during his years as party chief of the eastern province of Zhejiang between 2002 and 2007.

John Delury, a professor of Chinese studies at Seoul's Yonsei University, said the new leadership reflects Xi's predominance.

"But history would remind us that no political system on earth has eradicated the existence of internal disagreement, rivalry, and power struggles," he said.

"It can take time, but after one particular faction is eliminated, another faction eventually emerges." (Reuters)