Columns

As expected, the eagerly hyped parliamentary debate on the ‘Batalanda’ Commission of Inquiry report on April 10th 2025 turned out to be ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing’ with little focus on Sri Lanka’s systemic impunity.

Transparent pre-election ploy

A media engineered controversy over a twenty seven year old Commission of Inquiry Report (1998) on the Batalanda torture chamber led to a debate in the House dominated by the ‘Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’ – JVP led National People’s Power (NPP). This was over former President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s airy (and incorrect) dismissal of a ‘non-existent Report’ during an Al Jazeera interview on 6th March 2025.

Put mildly, the debate was an obvious political ploy ahead of the local government elections. ‘Batalanda’ was one of many other ‘torture camps’ maintained by the then United National Party (UNP) Government as it fought the JVP’s failed second insurrection in Sri Lanka’s South in the nineteen eighties. It would be hard to determine who committed the worst atrocities with public servants, media personalities, academics and students killed by JVP party cadre while the State perfected its brutal counter-terror tactics in return.

Essentially, this was the ‘Southern’ mirror image of what occurred in the North and the East during a savage war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the State ending with the military defeat of the LTTE in 2009. In one respect, the controversy underscored the fact that no particular ethnicity in Sri Lanka has an exclusive claim to victimhood. This has been a truth ignored in international campaigns for ‘justice’ focused exclusively on ‘victims of the North.’

‘Awakening’ to ‘Batalanda’ now

That the focus has now expanded is due to the expanding targets of international actors persisting in efforts to prosecute the Sri Lankan State on a shifting geo-political canvas. The hypocrisy in this is manifest given war crimes and genocide committed by the State of Israel in the Gaza Strip aided and abetted by Western allies, including the United States and Great Britain.

That apart, where ‘Batalanda’ is concerned, several absurdities have become apparent. As previously remarked in these column spaces, no journalist, activist or lawyer working on state impunity worth his or her salt, here or overseas, can plead ignorance of ‘Batalanda’ or its Commission Report that has been in the public domain since 2000. But in a profound irony, many seem to have conveniently awakened only now, like new born babies blinking in the harsh (political) light.

To reiterate, this is a fact-finding Commission Report shot through with numerous legal fault-lines as contrasted with other far more deliberate Commissions of Inquiry reports which I will return to later. The key determinant, (in regard to ‘Batalanda’ or any other atrocity), is the standard of criminal prosecutions in terms of the country’s penal laws. Assessments of random ‘international actors’ acting on ‘selected agendas’ as the case may be, are beside the point.

 The NPP’s governance deficit

But more to the point, if the NPP was honest in dismantling state impunity structures, a parliamentary debate is surely redundant. Instead, three immediate steps will prove its good faith. First, the Government must repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the cornerstone of state impunity in Sri Lanka and urgently review current drafts of a replacement Counter-Terror Act (CTA) for constitutional conformity.

To the contrary though, the NPP bleats in confused public pronouncements that it has appointed a ‘committee.’ Arrests and detentions continue under the PTA, from a youth pasting anti-war posters on Gaza to a para-military leader linked to a particularly heinous enforced disappearance of an Eastern academic. Now this paramilitary leader is being questioned on the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks by jihadists. Is this the damp squib ‘action’ that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake promised Roman Catholics before this Easter Sunday?

Secondly, criminal investigation files of a special prosecutorial unit established in the Department of the Attorney General on ‘missing persons’ and the records of the ‘Disappearances Investigation Unit (DIU) of the Police Department should be re-examined. Both these units examined the reports of three fact-finding Zonal Commissions geographically covering the country and the All-Island Commission (1994-1998) investigating enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions.

Priorities for an independent state prosecutor

The Reports highlighted 16,800 cases of atrocities with 1, 681 cases indicating substantial evidence of criminal culpability by state officers/politicians. These findings were far more rigorously executed from a legal standpoint than the Batalanda Commission Report, which was meant to be used for political purposes by former President Chandrika Kumaratunga. The ‘Disappearances Commissions’ pointed to political ‘architects’ of atrocity crimes, emphasizing command responsibility at the highest executive level.

Both Zonal Commissions sitting in the North and East and the North Western, North-Central and Uva Provinces submitted lists of names of ‘implicated’ state agents and politicians. The Southern, Sabaragamuwa and Western Zonal Commission was more circumspect, forwarding confidential documents to then President Kumaratunga.Copies of these lists and documents were scrutinised by this columnist years later when analysing the Reports.

Its findings would have been conducive to good criminal prosecutions if the political will had been present. Regardless, only a few convictions ensued. The Commissions recommended an independent prosecutor, remarking that the Department of the Attorney General is coloured by its affinity to the political arm. Decades later, an independent Criminal Prosecutor has been promised by the Government. Examining these files must be his/her priority.

Unmet promises impacting on EU GSP Plus

Yet more than six months into the term of the NPP Government, bedrock campaign promises on the repeal of the PTA, the repeal of the Online Safety Act (OSA) and an Independent Criminal Prosecutor, remain unfulfilled. In fact, a dysfunctional leaf has been borrowed out of Mr Wickremesinghe’s political playbook on appointing ‘committees’ till the ‘fuss dies down.’ Were these campaign pledges made without thought on how they would be implemented?

The upcoming review of the European Union’s GSP Plus status is all the more important now in view of demented tariff swings of trade policy by United States President Donald Trump. The NPP’s governance deficit moreover poses troubling question marks regarding the commitment of its leadership to independent constitutional and statutory oversight commissions. And how will non-adherence (PTA, the OSA etc) to international human rights conventions impact on the GSP Plus review?

In this gravely critical backdrop, President Dissanayake’s boast of having ‘tackled political corruption’ by party members is not enough. And his Government scoring political brownie points by a parliamentary debate on ‘Batalanda’ is patently hollow. Some JVP parliamentarians wept for their fallen comrades while being blissfully silent on the hundreds of innocents arbitrarily killed by the party. Others threatened fire and brimstone on the head of the (politically irrelevant) United National Party and its leader, former President Ranil Wickremesinghe.

The absurdity of ‘system change’

From the depleted Opposition, fierce accusations of perpetuating ‘terror’ to be necessarily met by state ‘counter-terror’ rained down on the JVP’s head. Disingenuously, the pain of ‘Batalanda victims’ accompanied by the drum beat of an orchestrated media campaign was used to ‘justify’ a patently political parliamentary debate. That was perhaps inevitable but nonetheless, constituted the greatest harm.

Will the Government go beyond an ‘off with Wickremesinghe’s head’ call? What if individuals implicated in those atrocities now firmly wave the NPP political banner? And what pray, of the acute responsibility of the Rajapaksa clan in the killing fields of the Vanni, the disappearances of critics and journalists post-war and the kidnappings of children for ransom? What of its culpability in turning the country into an economic ghost land?

To be sure, Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa must be quietly chuckling in some corner of his Wijerama house, which this Government has yet not managed to evict him from, on the peculiar turn that Sri Lanka’s  embittered struggles for ‘justice’ have taken.