Sri Lanka is a tropical island country lying just about 55 kilometers off the southern
tip of India.
This tiny nation has got a plethora of problems but its sports authority, in particular, has
a unique issue, which is that its players keep vanishing.
They are sent abroad to participate in international tournaments and training camps and from there,
they just disappear.
Some are found, some write back to their homes, while the whereabouts of the majority of them
are never found.
This problem is so widespread that the country's sports authority has found a term for it:
Decamping.
The number of incidents of Decamping has not been 5, 10, or 15, it's been estimated that
there are at least 44 cases where Sri Lankan athletes have abandoned their teams and vanished
during international events.
All of this brings great embarrassment to the country, and causes a huge loss of athletic
talent in Sri Lanka.
One such incident happened in Canada in 1993, where ONLY ONE of Sri Lanka's 11-member teams
returned home.
The rest of the 10 members disappeared.
In 2007, a member of Sri Lanka's triple jump team vanished from an Italian hotel.
He was sent to Italy for an athletic meet as part of a training program sponsored by
the International Olympic council but he never returned home.
During the 2014 Asian Games in South Korea, two athletes from Sri Lanka - a hockey player
and a beach volleyball player went missing.
Their whereabouts remained unknown and they were later blacklisted from international
sporting events.
Troubled by an alarming number of decamping incidents, the Sri Lankan sports authority,
in October 2021, took strict precautions.
They sent a manager with the wrestling team that was to participate in the world's wrestling
championship in Oslo, Norway.
The manager, a 45-years old guy named Donald Indrawasna, was given very special instructions
to keep a close eye on the athletes and to stop them from running away while abroad.
This time, the manager, Donald himself vanished.
A day before they were to head home from Oslo, Donald told his team that he was going to
the embassy to talk to officers about something.
He never arrived at the embassy, nor did he come back to the team.
His whereabouts remain unknown to this day.
But the biggest, most elaborate, and most audacious act of disappearance by Sri Lankan
athletes was pulled in 2004, when an entire handball team of 23 members including, players,
coach, and managers, disappeared in Germany without a trace.
The German organizers of the sporting events, puzzled and confused, looked around for answers
for weeks.
When they contacted the Sri Lankan Ministry of sports to report this act of disappearance,
they were told that Sri Lanka had not sent any handball team to Germany for any event
whatsoever.
In fact, the country did not even have a handball team, they had never played handball on the
national or international level, and they had no information on people who first claimed
to be Sri Lankan players and then went missing in Germany.
This biggest incident of decamping made international news and created a huge scandal.
An investigation answered some questions while the rest remain a mystery to this day.
This is how the events unfolded -
The Asia-German Sports Exchange Program - AGSEP - is a non-government organization that helps
conduct international sports exchanges between Sri Lanka and Germany.
The organization has been operating since 1986 with an aim to expose young talent in
Sri Lanka to European cultures through sports.
In 2003, the founder of the AGSEP, Dietmar Doering, was contacted by an officer of the
Sri Lanka sports ministry.
The officer urged Doering to organize an exhibition game of handball between the German & Sri
Lankan national teams.
Now, here's the thing, handball is a rather popular sport in Germany been played for more
than 100 years.
They've got their handball clubs, handball national team, and have won international
tournaments.
Sri Lanka, on the other hand, had never played handball.
They had no clubs, no players, no teams, and most of the countrymen had not even heard
of the game, let alone seen it.
Nevertheless, Dietmar Doering agreed to the request for an exhibition game since it was
going to introduce a new sport to the region.
Sri Lankan sports ministry appointed a new coach, who in turn, selected a group of 22
men to form the nation's first handball team.
None of these men had ever played the game but they had some experience of playing basketball.
With some practice, they thought they could learn the basics of handball well enough to
face the German team.
A few weeks later, the German national handball team arrived in Sri Lanka.
They played a game of handball with the newly made Sri Lankan handball team and hammered
them 36 to 2.
Sri Lankan players didn't stand a chance, it looked like they had no idea what they
were doing.
Despite this embarrassing performance, german officials still invited Sri Lankan players
to Germany to play there.
Valid visas were issued for the whole team of 23 men and in September 2004, the team
arrived in Wittislingen, a town in Southern Germany.
They went on sightseeing, met the mayor of the town, took photos, sang, danced, and had
dinner with their German counterparts.
They had the best time of their lives.
They did everything they could except for practicing for the game like they didn't care
about the game at all.
In the very first game, they were hammered again, this time they couldn't score a single
point.
German players didn’t laugh at their pathetic play, instead, they compared the Sri Lanka
team’s performance to the early days of German handball.
They wished all the best to the guest team for the remaining 9 matches.
At night, the Sri Lankan team joined the dinner hosted by the Germans and celebrated the evening.
Then they went back to their rooms, packed their bags, and waited until just before dawn.
At 5 am, all 23 members of the Sri Lanka Handball team slipped out of their rooms and moved
out in different directions.
The world would never see them again together.
All they left behind was their dirty laundry and a note, in which they thanked the German
team for their love and hospitality.
They expressed regret for they had no option other than leaving in dark in the middle of
the night.
They didn’t want to go back to Sri Lanka instead, they wanted to make a better life
and future there in Europe.
When the news came out, it made international headlines.
Fox News went as far as branding these players are terrorists who were smuggled into the
country as handball players.
German Sports Ministry cut all ties with Doering and his organization, and Doering, utterly
embarrassed, swore to never help any Sri Lankan athlete set foot in Europe.
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This incident may sound mysterious and may raise many questions, however, the reason
why Sri Lankan athletes keep abandoning their teams and disappearing while abroad is not
much of a mystery.
It has little to do with athletes themselves and more to do with the county and its past.
From 1983 to 2009, Sri Lanka was scarred by a long and brutal civil war arising out of
ethnic tensions between the majority Sinhalese and the Tamil minority in the north and east.
A series of unrests, which lasted for about 2 and a half decades, involved several incidences
of war crimes, massacres, sexual violence, and terrorism; it killed 80,000 and displaced
more than half a million people.
Innocent lives were destroyed beyond measures and the social and economic growth of the
country was stunted.
Following a brutal mass killing of Tamil Fighters in 2009, the civil war came to an official
end however tensions continued to boil.
Not too long after, Sri Lanka found itself in the middle of an unprecedented economic
crisis.
Corruption, economic mismanagement, and bad loans lead to a foreign currency deficit in
Sri Lanka preventing this import-reliant country from purchasing oil and staple food from other
nations.
Acute shortage of essential items caused inflation to soar beyond 40% this year, milk prices
rose three times, cooking gas two times, the country ran out of papers to conduct school
exams and several people died waiting in long lines to get fuel on the scorching hot day.
Widespread violent protests have been going on for weeks but there seems no relief in
sight.
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If you’re born in a country like Sri Lanka with an endless cycle of violence and misery,
there are only a few options left to you make a good living.
Either your name ends with RAJAPAKSA or SENANAYAK, and you have a decent chance of making it
to politics, where you can accumulate illicit wealth through corruption and deposit it in
offshore accounts in the UK.
OR you may happen to know the right person at the right position to help you get a good
job.
For the rest of the population, especially those facing violent persecution, leaving
Sri Lanka for another country may seem like the only option.
But there’s a problem, no country wants refugees, and legal immigration through jobs
and education costs a lot of money.
Hence, the poor and lesser-educated Sri Lankan resorted to illegal ways of sneaking into
Europe and Australia in tankers, fishing boats, and cargo ships.
Some would succeed while others would die horrible deaths after being stranded in the
ocean without food or water.
If caught by the Sri Lankan navy, they would face severe charges for illegal migration.
Some Sri Lankans would overstay their tourist visas and never return, but then, European
countries made it difficult to get tourist visas from Sri Lanka.
People would be required to show proof of a big bank balance, a high-paying job, ancestral
property, income tax returns, air tickets, and hotel booking, only to apply for a tourist
visa.
The process would cost a considerable sum of money, take over a month to process and
it would come with a high rejection rate.
Sri Lankan athletes, over time, realized that there was another way.
They can simply run away when they're sent to Europe for international tournaments and
training camps.
The government would take care of their visas, air tickets, and other expenses, while all
they had to do was to make it into a national team.
This is what they did and the cases of decamping soared.
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The case of the 2004 Handball team disappearance is a little different.
Dietmar Doering believes that the crime was planned from the very beginning.
The coach of the team was the mastermind, and he possibly had help from someone in the
sports ministry.
They assembled a team of 23 men who wanted to migrate to Europe, disguised them as athletes
of a new sport that was never played before in Sri Lanka, successfully convinced germans
to invite them over and when they were in Germany, they disappeared.
The Sri Lankan sports ministry refused to recognize these men after the act of disappearance
probably because they wanted to avoid embarrassment OR because they were complicit in this crime.
Almost two decades have passed since the incident took place in 2004 and more than half of the
disappearing team has returned home.
Some were deported, some returned to look after their families while others couldn’t
find jobs in European countries.
Sri Lanka now has a legit handball team.
—————————————
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