‘Inadmissible evidence’ — the truth about Sri Lanka
1971 — Insurrection in the south
An insurrection of dissatisfied young Sinhalese, mostly rural and predominantly male, erupts in the South. At the time Neville Jayaweera was the Government Agent (the highest ranking public servant in the region) in Vavuniya, a mostly Tamil area in the North with some Sinhalese villages. The police in Vavuniya came under sustained attack by the JVP, who were repulsed. The army then came to “mop up”. The government had offered an amnesty to those who gave themselves up and Jayaweera was instrumental in brokering a deal for a young married man who was in the periphery of the JVP (he had attended a couple of their classes). The young man was handed over to the Sandhurst-educated captain in charge and was never seen again. He had been “shot trying to escape”, and under emergency regulations in force at the time his body was burnt and disposed of without a coronial enquiry. This very same captain was responsible for the killing of around 30 unarmed males in a neighbouring village and torturing others — torture that involved drilling holes into their palms to extract a confession (one of the victims was only 10 years old). Neville assiduously reported all this to his superiors, but no action was taken and when he pushed for a response he was met with a wall of hostility and silence from the military. He resigned from a promising career partly from disgust but also because of the pressure of powerful political thugs like Felix Dias Bandaranayke. (See The Vavuniya Diaries: Recollecting the first JVP uprising 1971, by Neville Jayaweera, Ravaya Publishers, 2017.) How many more reports and individual testimonies were buried? Eyewitness reports of government atrocities were coming out at the time from newspapers like Le Monde, The Guardian and international human rights organisations like Amnesty International and local human rights activists and organisations. There is credible evidence that what Jayaweera reported happened to hundreds of villages across the south, yet nobody from the security forces was brought to justice. In response the government passed the Criminal Justice Commission Bill (CJC). This bill allowed the government to set up special courts dispensing with common law safeguards that ensured a fair trial. All these extra-judicial innovations were passed a year after the insurrection had been crushed. The main features of the bill were these: there was no right of appeal, except when the death penalty was pronounced; the CJC was given enormous discretion to decide on the procedure best suited to uncover the truth; and a special law was passed stating that any confession given to the police would be classified as valid evidence. The methods by which the evidence was obtained were not subject to scrutiny; they were brutal, to put it mildly, and sometimes verged on the psychotic. (Criminal Justice Commissions Act, No 14 of 1972.) Presiding over the cases were five judges from the Supreme Court and leading the prosecution was the Solicitor General. None of them when looking at the transcripts of the trial were unduly concerned with the trampling of the principle of habeas corpus or the legitimacy of the use of torture to obtain confessions. (Habeas corpus is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether the detention is lawful.) The JVP, according to the government of the day, were responsible for: 41 civilian deaths, the killing of 63 members of the armed forces and the wounding of 305 members of the armed forces. (The Government of Sri Lanka Criminal Justice Commission.) The estimates of how many young Sinhalese people were killed by the security forces ranged from a few hundred to over a thousand — 1500, 5000 or (more probably) 10,000; Jayaweera estimates 20,000. Yet this is a period that many middle-class Sri Lankans are nostalgic about.1977 — UNP landslide election
The United National Party or UNP (satirically called the Uncle and Nephew Party) was elected in a “landslide” (it in fact got only 51% of the vote). Many Tamils voted for the UNP, especially in the South, but how was their optimism rewarded? By a riot which also targeted Plantation Tamil workers. Countless hundreds lost their lives and many thousands were forced to flee. We have an eyewitness account from the Medical Superintendent at the time for Anuradhapura hospital, Dr K.N.K. Wijayawardana. It makes disturbing reading. He reports bodies being stacked up almost roof level at the mortuary, while the “fact finding mission (two cabinet ministers) confined their investigation to sitting in the police station” and left soon after by helicopter. Dr Wijayawardana and his staff, which consisted of both Tamil and Sinhalese medical staff, did their collective duty in the face of police inaction and political indifference. He reported what he had seen and yet no action was taken (see The Sri Lankan Guardian, “Anti Tamil riots of August 1977” and Michelle De Krester’s novel The Life to Come.) How did the guardians of the law act? They set up a Commission and then nullified its findings by the Indemnity Act of 1982, which gave anybody from Ministers down to security personnel immunity for their actions during the disturbances.Late 1970s to early 1980s
The military, led by a relative of the then President (Brigadier Weeratunga), was sent to stamp out a low-level insurgency of Tamil youth, consisting of bank robberies, harassment and the killing of a police officers and a popular Mayor of Jaffna. The army promiscuously targeted the whole Tamil community. They arrested, shot and tortured anybody who was critical of the government: young student activists, teachers, academics artists, priests, social workers (bearing in mind that the majority of population had elected a party that supported separation). It came as no surprise that the violence escalated, and it was during this period that the repository of Tamil culture, the Jaffna Library, was burnt by the police. The draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) was enacted. What do you get by eliminating, jailing or silencing civil society activists? Young men with guns. Prisoners were subjected to cigarette burnings; chilli and red ants were placed on ‘sensitive parts’ of their bodies; they were hung upside down by their feet; pins were driven into their toes and fingers; and that old standby being beaten repeatedly. The techniques of torture are similar to ones currently being related by Tamil refugees. Yet none of this is deemed admissible or spoken off. (See Nancy Murray, ‘The War Against the Tamils,’ in Race and Class, Vol XXVI, Summer 1984, No. 1, Institute of Race Relations) Down south, trade unionists, the media, sections of the judiciary and political parties were also subject to harassment and abuse, with individuals occasionally made to “disappear”. The above was reported in detail by University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), Amnesty International, the Council for Communal Harmony through Media, the International Commission of Jurists, the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality and others.1983 — Black July and the week-long pogrom against Tamil civilians
The level of efficiency was new, though not the barbarity. The catalyst was the ambush of a patrol of Sinhalese troops by the LTTE (Tamil Tigers), resulting in 13 deaths. The army retaliated by killing around sixty civilians (never mentioned or investigated by the authorities), and the dead bodies of the Sinhalese soldiers were publically displayed in Colombo, resulting in rioting. The next day, with the guardians of the law being strangely absent, mobs of armed men, ferried frequently by government lorries and sometimes accompanied by monks resplendent in saffron and equipped with voting lists, went systematically to the households and shops of Tamils in Colombo (many of whom had voted for the government in power), stealing their possessions, money and jewellery and then burning their houses and many cases also incinerating or beating to death the inhabitants of the household. How many died and how many fled this holocaust we do not know. The government claims around 300; other estimates range from 1000 to 2000 or 3000. Two thousand seems the most credible figure. Around 150,000 fled from the South to the North and Tamil Nadu. While this was going on, between 300 and 400 armed Sinhala prisoners massacred 37 Tamil political prisoners who were being held under the PTA in Welikade prison (situated in Colombo). Two days later this horror was repeated, with another 18 Tamil prisoners being butchered. What was the government’s reaction? Before the massacre, President Jayewardene, in an interview in the Daily Telegraph, had this to say:1986-1989 — The second JVP insurrection
When a peace deal was brokered by the Indian government, stipulating that Indian peacekeeping forces would be placed in the North, the JVP saw this as a means to whip up anti-Tamil and anti-Indian feelings and gain political power. They initiated a number of hartals (strikes) in the South; they were also responsible for the assassination of countless individuals of other political tendencies, trade unionists, student leaders, security personnel and human rights activists. The government, led by Premadasa, made a deal with the LTTE and armed them against the Indian peacekeeping forces. Premadasa now felt free to turn his attention to the JVP and unleased the full might of the security forces on them. The security forces showed no mercy. They killed human rights activists, left-wing figures, ordinary citizens and JVP politburo members, cadres and sympathisers, in large numbers and with impunity. Suspects, once captured, were usually tortured in the most brutal manner and then killed. The authorities recorded these extra-judicial executions as KIA (killed in action). Bodies were dumped in rivers or buried in the jungle; sometimes the charred remains of a body burnt in a tyre were found. Some of the bodies were left hacked, often decapitated or with their faces mutilated. Professor Romesh Gunaratna in The Long Revolution alleges that this was done to prevent identification. This may be true, but it also reflects a certain sadism and shows how far the state and the guardians of law and order had descended into barbarity. The executions seem eerily similar to the credible allegations made against the Sri Lankan army in the last phrase of the civil war — an inadmissible connection… Around 40,000 to 60,000 were killed. One of the planners and leaders of this operation was the then Brigadier Janaka Perera; he retired as a major-general and became High Commissioner to Australia in the 1990s. Another notable personage involved was Sarath Fonseka — inadmissible evidence.2009
The Rajapaksa clan, riding high on the coattails of victory in the civil war, nobbles the media and political opponents and offers no reconciliation to the Tamils. People are made to disappear; many others are arbitrarily arrested in the ubiquitous ‘white vans’. In 2015 the Rajapaksa government is kicked out of office by an electorate who yearn for change. Our report deals with the paralysis of the current government’s reform program. More importantly, we point out that the structures of power, manifested in parliament, the legal system and the security forces, have not been reformed or questioned and have carried on their activities with impunity. This should be admissible evidence. The challenge for us is how we make the inadmissible admissible. As our report bluntly puts it:Sri Lanka ALL by fredfuentes on Scribd