Photo courtesy of LEN
For 25 long years the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme, better known as the Batalanda Commission report, has languished untouched in the Department of Archives. There is only one full original; all the copies were destroyed according to the law.
In 2030, the full report can be made public. It contains a list of several hundred perpetrators who include military leaders, politicians, businessmen and others. Many of these people have gone on to hold prominent positions in the military and in public life. While some names are mentioned in the text of the report, the annexes with the complete list of names have been suppressed until 2030 by former president Chandrika Kumaratunga, who commissioned the report in 1995. It was handed over to her in 1998 and published in 2000. It has 167 pages but the whole report, with annexes and testimony, runs to 6,780 pages over 28 volumes.
However, in his capacity as president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake can order the full report to be made public immediately. But given the fact that his party, the JVP, also committed many atrocities during that time that it still has not acknowledged or apologised for, it is uncertain how far the president is willing to go to uncover these skeletons.
In addition to the Batalanda Commission, President Kumaratunga appointed three zonal commissions in 1994 to look into complaints of involuntary removals and disappearances that occurred after January 1, 1988, as well as an the All Island Commission.
In three years the Zonal Commissions received and analysed 27,526 complaints, out of which some 16,800 cases were deemed to be enforced disappearances. The commissions found “credible material indicative of those responsible” in 1,681 cases and compiled lists of names of several hundred alleged perpetrators mostly from the army, navy and air force and police but also politicians, home guards and grama niladharis.
Although it was recommended, judicial action against security officials and politicians was halted due to lack of political will and the need to ensure that the government could fight the LTTE in the north and east. By now many of the witnesses to those incidents have died but their sworn statements remain in the reports as proof of what they knew, saw and experienced.
The Batalanda Commission report was resurrected after former president Ranil Wickremesinghe’s disastrous Al Jazeera interview where he even denied its existence only to have a copy waved in front of him by former BBC Sri Lanka correspondent Frances Harrison. He then claimed it was not relevant because it had not been tabled in parliament. The report has now been tabled and parliament began discussing it on April 10 with the next debate to be scheduled once parliament meets again on May 8.
During the first day of the debate Minister Bimal Ratnayake promised to prosecute those responsible for the horrific acts of torture and murder detailed in the report. He said that legal action would be taken against those deemed responsible including Wickremesinghe.
The report says that Wickremesinghe must have been aware of torture and illegal detention perpetrated by the police in the Batalanda housing complex in Biyagama, which was his electorate, where he had a bungalow with staff and sometimes stayed overnight. The commission found Wickremesinghe and Nalin Delgoda, the officer in charge of the Kelaniya Division, “responsible for the maintenance of places of unlawful detention and torture chambers.”
But Batalanda was not the only torture site run by the military in the late 1980s. Painstaking research and detailed reports by the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) have documented 200 sites across the country used for the torture of Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims by the army, police, navy and paramilitary groups. Sites used for torture included the law faculty complex of the University of Colombo, the basement of Lake House newspapers, schools, colleges and training institutes as well as factories, farms, cinemas, stadiums and a golf course.
The ITJP report cited former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa as having played a part in the violence in the Matale district where at least 700 people were subjected to enforced disappearances by security forces under his command. It named former Army Commander Shavendra Silva, former Army Chief of Staff Jagath Dias and former Deputy Chief of Army Staff Sumedha Perera as Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s company commanders.
The fact remains that if military officers and politicians involved in those inhuman acts had been held accountable at that time, the repetition of torture, enforced disappearances, rape and murder may not have happened to the extent that it did during the 26 year civil war.
“The same police and army officers – and also politicians – who were implicated in the appalling crimes of the late 1980s in the South often went on to hold positions of command during the civil war. They were never held accountable for violations against Sinhalese, and then repeated them against Tamils. One case in point is Shavendra Silva. Another is Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former secretary of defence and later president. There are many others, including Janaka Perera, who was involved in crushing the JVP uprising and went to be an army commander in Jaffna at a time when over 700 people there had disappeared.
“The disappearance commissions in the South came up with lists of hundreds of officials against whom to file criminal charges. There were even some cases filed in magistrate and high courts in the South. The relevant court documents appear to have disappeared in the intervening years, but several so-called “heroes” of the civil war were accused of multiple disappearances of Sinhalese civilians in the South when they were young officers,” wrote Frances Harrison in Himal magazine.
M.C.M. Iqbal was secretary of the Batalanda Commission as well as a zonal commission and the All Island Commission of Inquiry into the Disappearances of Persons. He was also a member of a Committee appointed by Dr. Radhika Coomaraswamy, the then Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka. In an interview posted on the Sri Lanka Campaign’s X, Iqbal recounts several instances of brutal violence narrated by witnesses who had appeared before the various commissions.
Females suspected to be JVPers underwent sexual torture. In one instance a girl had been asked to report to an army camp each week and when she did she was abused on every occasion. She had told this to her mother. Giving evidence, the mother told the commission that her daughter had not returned after her last visit and was not seen again.
In Moneragala a wife recounted how her husband, a day labourer, had climbed a post to tie a JVP flag for which he was being paid. The army shot him dead while he was up on the post although he had no connections with the group. His wife, who had no means to support herself, gave evidence before the commission.
At St. Sylvester’s college in Kandy, there were about 1,000 young people being detained and tortured. A lorry load of cane had been delivered to beat them with. Every day a few young men were put into a truck and taken away, stating that they were being transferred to another detention centre. A witness narrated that they were handcuffed. The truck had police with guns and it was followed by another vehicle with police personnel carrying petrol cans. In dark places along the road, the boys were pushed out of the truck one by one. The police officers in the vehicle that followed the truck would pour petrol on those who had been pushed out and set fire to them. The witness had escaped being killed because at one point they had run out of petrol.
Hali Ela Motors in Badulla was another torture chamber where people were hung upside down and beaten with hose pipes to the point of death. Then they were forced to breathe in burnt chillie smoke. Residents in the area were afraid to walk past the building years later because they supposedly heard screams of the ghosts of those who had been tortured and killed.
Despite having commissioned the reports, President Kumaratunga decided to shelve them and not pursue the recommendations in the reports. She was supposedly persuaded to do so by her uncle, the Defence Minister Anuruddha Ratwatte, who was also implicated in the reports, being an influential politician in the Kandy District. Also, many of the top military leaders fighting the LTTE were the very people responsible for the human rights violations against the JVP.
Iqbal spoke to Groundviews about his experiences with the commissions and why it is necessary to take action now to put an end to the culture of impunity that prevails among those in the security services.
How useful are these reports today?
There have been several commissions that have been dealing with this issue of impunity. Chandrika Kumaratunga appointed three commissions on disappearances of persons. The mandate clearly stated the commission has to confirm whether the person in the complaint had actually disappeared. If so under what circumstances and who is alleged to be responsible and what is the evidence available to confirm that the person is responsible. I was secretary to two of the zonal commissions of the three appointed by Chandrika. These commissions were called zonal commissions because they were given jurisdiction only for particular zones to locate a disappearance that occurred in those regions. Once these three had finished their task, they received such an overwhelming number of complaints that they took about two years but could not complete inquiries into all the complaints they had received. Then the commissions were asked to stop their inquiries and provide a report based on the complaints they had completed their inquiries. To dispose of the remaining complaints, Chandrika appointed another commission to inquire into them. It was that commission which came to be known ss the All Island Commission as they were authorised to inquire into the remaining complaints irrespective of the zone from in which the incident had occurred. In the course of the inquiries of these commissions they came across evidence of 8 to 10 different torture chambers like the Batalanda one. Evidence was provided on those torture chambers, which included the names of those who were running them and what was happening inside them. All that is part of the evidence given by some of those persons who had been taken to custody, to be caused to disappear but had managed to escape or disappeared and escaped and came before the commission and gave evidence. It is through them that we came to know that certain persons who had been detained there had disappeared. That information is part of the records of the commissions. Once we finished enquiring, we gave a report to the president. The Commission of Enquiry Act permits the president to make available to the public whatever she thinks should be known to the public and keep away what she thinks should not be made known to it. Everybody thinks that the reports were published in full. They are wrong. The reports were not published in full. The evidence given by the witnesses and the recommendations, along with the list of perpetrators, were not published. On a directive from the secretary to the president the records of the commissions were handed to the government archives with a condition that access to those records by the public should be denied for at least 30 years as recommended by the president. Only the archives has the full reports of the commissions. Extra copies that were lying with us were destroyed. The chairpersons of the commissions retained their copies of those documents.
Were there other Batalandas?
Many people think Batalanda was an exceptional case. It is not exceptional. If you read the evidence given by those people in respect of the torture chambers mentioned, you will be shocked to see they were more horrifying than what we hear about what happened in Batalanda. And just like in Batalanda politicians were involved. In every torture chamber that we came across during our investigations, there were politicians behind them. Some of them were in parliament. The evidence made available to the commissions were categorised and listed as politicians involved in causing disappearances, military officers, police officers and civilians responsible for causing disappearances. Those were people who politicians had personal grudges against or who were their political opponents. The president during the 1980s was Ranasinghe Premadasa. He authorised the ministers to provide a list of those in their electorates whom they suspected had links with the JVP. All ministers provided lists of persons whom they suspected to have links with the JVP to the security personnel, the police and the military, who went from house to house with those lists, abducted people and did what they wanted to do with them. These suspects were mainly people belonging to the SLFP, children of SLFP leaders and SLFP youth. According to the evidence given by the parents who came before the commission, some of them were school students. They were taken into custody and had disappeared. To prevent other youth from joining the JVP, they cut and beheaded some of those taken, burnt their bodies and left them at road junctions for the other people to see, to prevent any more youth joining the JVP.
The JVP also committed many atrocities during that period and have to face up to their crimes. Would the government be willing to take this on?
There is no list of JVPers in the reports of the commissions as no names of such persons were provided to the commissions. However, there were references to JVP members doing such atrocities in some places. But none of the witnesses had named any of them.
If the security forces had been held to account at that time, do you think that some of the atrocities committed during the civil war could have been prevented?
I very much think so. Impunity would have been stemmed then itself if Chandrika had taken action based on the list of perpetrators provided by the commissioners in their reports. She didn’t take action or she didn’t want to do so because her uncle Anuruddha Ratwatte, the Defence Minister at that time, may have persuaded her not to as they were conducting the war against the LTTE. If they had started dealing with the military officers and the police, they would have not got their support for the war. Probably because of that Chandrika was hesitant to take action. There was a headline in the papers that Chandrika had issued orders to the Defence Minister, the army commander and the IGP to take immediate action against those perpetrators mentioned by the commissions in their reports. A few days later there was another news item where the president said there is no such order.
Did you leave Sri Lanka because you were being threatened?
After I retired from public service, I was made one of the advisors to the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons who had been invited to oversee the investigations into serious human rights violations by a Presidential Commission of Inquiry in 2006. The UN appointed me as one of their advisors because they didn’t have any local personnel on their staff. I had to answer many questions for which they wanted answers. The eminent persons group went for discussions with the president. After one of those meetings, they came and told me that I must leave the country immediately. They were afraid that I might get into difficulties because I was one of their advisors. I had no plans to leave the country. But they insisted that I should leave. They must have felt that I may be harmed if I remained in the country. So it is they who took me out of the country for my own safety. Many would have wanted my services if I had continued to live in Sri Lanka. After leaving I have written a number of articles on matters related to these commissions. They were published on Groundviews.
When you heard those stories, what did it make you feel?
All the commissioners were so shocked. We never expected such atrocities to have been committed by our security forces. In one instance people who were kept in custody were taken out and taken to a spot where they had been asked to dig a big pit. That was in the Kurunegala District. While they were digging, they were shot inside the pit itself. One of them who did not die on that occasion gave evidence before the commission. There are many such instances like this narrated to the commissions during their inquiries.