On The Road To Retrogression
By Rajan Hoole –July 11, 2015
Dr. Rajan Hoole
The foregoing contributed significantly to the change of public mood in the South. On 11th January 1996 President Chandrika Kumaratunga addressed a letter to the Army Commander G.H. de Silva with an attached schedule of names of army personnel identified by commissions of inquiry as being responsible for disappearances of persons. These personnel, she said, should be sent on compulsory leave and disciplinary action initiated. She wanted him to report the action taken within a month. This was about the last occasion on which President Kumaratunga took her election pledge on human rights seriously.
When the editor Rohana Kumara was murdered in September 1999, eleven of this country’s leading editors in a statement pointed to the State as the culprit, and the ridiculously ineffective police investigation did nothing to contradict them. But then most of these editors directly or indirectly supported UNP’s Ranil Wickremesinghe for president at the election held shortly afterwards, and some of them had worked openly to subvert any punitive action against security personnel implicated in grave violations, including arbitrary reprisal killings. Are they not rather late in condemning something that they had licensed several years ago? How consistent are they even today?
That there was such a letter was first reported in the Island on 28 Feb.96. Among the 200 personnel to be sent on compulsory leave were 4 brigadiers, including Janaka Perera and P.A. Karunatilleke. On 11 Mar.96 Shamindra Ferdinando writing in the Island as part of the campaign against the move said that it will not go ahead. An unnamed army officer was quoted saying, “Who wants to join the army when one is punished for destroying the enemy?” Here was the Press trying to bury mass murder, even the murder of women and children (68 children in the Sathurukondan massacre), under the general nomenclature of ‘enemy’.
That the move had indeed been undermined was confirmed when on 15th April 1996, Janaka Perera and Karunatilleke were promoted to the rank of major general. It was in the divisions of these two generals that disappearances commenced in Jaffna less than 3 months later, after a woman suicide bomber killed Brigadier Hamangoda. The total disappeared ran into several hundreds. The Army was once more beyond the law.Read More
