As you may be aware the Asian Human Rights Commission together with many other organizations has been carrying out a campaign to get the Sri Lankan Government to bring to justice the perpetrators of mass disappearances from the 1988-92 period as well as the disappearances which are continuing at present.
Despite all attempts to date, including the recommendations made by the United Nations Working Group on Involuntary Disappearances and many cases in which State-appointed Commissions have named perpetrators and requested action be taken, virtually nothing has been done to prosecute offenders. In most cases, there is no authority to investigate and the Attorney General takes the position that he has no evidence to prosecute. Lack of evidence is usually due to lack of investigations, completing a circuit of impunity that protects perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
However, there are many individual cases on which the Sri Lankan government-appointed Commissions of Inquiry into Involuntary Disappearances have collected evidence and handed it over to the government, recommending prosecutions. The evidence in these cases has been documented and certified by the Commissions as being sufficient for prosecutions. This information has been suppressed. Instead of filing prosecution charges, the officers who were previously suspended from duty pending prosecutions have now been reinstated in their posts, and the names of the perpetrators have never been released.
The most recent tendency in this regard is to deny that systematic mass disappearances took place, in the style of those who deny the Holocaust. Lately, more people are demanding justice, but this spirit of denial is being spread by authorities and interested parties.
The situation is likely to become worse in the future as the United National Party, which was largely responsible for the mass disappearances, is once again back in power.
Recently, The Island, a newspaper in Sri Lanka, published an article in which the call for inquiries into mass disappearances was severely attacked. A report by AHRC on a detention camp called Wehera and the officer in charge, Mr. Janaka Perera, had been reproduced in The Christian Worker, a reputed local magazine. By way of a purported comment on The Christian Worker report, the article in The Island is an attempt to dismiss the allegations relating to disappearances. The writer of this article was a close associate of the police-military machine and was himself arrested on charges of causing disappearances. You will find his article at www.island.lk/2001/12/10/featur01.html
AHRCs original short report ‘Former detainee under General Perera speaks out’, which was the basis of the Christian Worker article is available at:
The AHRC has issued a reply so as to revive the discussion on accountability for disappearances as well as to counteract this attempt at denial. We are sending you a copy for your information (see REPLY TO DENIAL OF DISAPPEARANCES at the end of this email).
We ask you to write to the editor of The Island to urge him to expose the truth about the disappearances, rather than publishing denials of crimes against humanity. Finally, it is very important that you write to the newly elected Prime Minister, as well as the President to urge them to release the names of those mentioned by the Commissions of Inquiry as perpetrators of disappearances so that it will no longer be possible to allow these people to occupy high positions and enjoy complete impunity.
SAMPLE LETTER
The Editor
The Island
Upali Newspapers Ltd.
223 Bloemendhal Road
Colombo 13
Sri Lanka
Fax: +(94)-74-609198
E-mail: gamini@unl.upali.lk
Dear Editor
In the light of a recent article by Mr. C. A. Chandraprema attempting to deny the disappearances which have taken place in Sri Lanka, I urge your paper to take a proactive approach to the promotion of justice for all the persons in Sri Lanka, including those who have been victims of disappearances. The responsibility of the media in a country where impunity has become normal cannot be stressed too much. Of course you are aware that the duty of the press is not to cover up denials of justice but to expose such denials and to seek justice. Your paper owes this to the people of Sri Lanka who by several governments have been deprived of basic justice through displacement of the criminal investigation and prosecution functions in the country.
yours sincerely
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SAMPLE LETTER 2
Honorable Prime-Minister
Mr. Ranil Wicremesinghe
Cambridge Place
Colombo-7
Tel/Fax. 941-682905
Email; ranilwickremesinghe@www.com
Hon. Prime Minster
I draw your attention to the recommendations made by the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disapperarances (U.N. document reference E/CN.4/2000/64/Add.1). I understand that none of these recommendations have implemented. I urge you to take action on this matter and to end the tradition of impunity which has become entrenched in recent decades. Further, I request that you expediently release the names of the perpetrators of the disappearances as alleged by the four government-appointed Commissions of Inquiry into Involuntary Removal or Disappearance of Persons. The continued suppression of this information cannot be justified in any way. May I wish well for you and your country.
Thank you
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SEND LETTERS TO
Her Excellency President Chandrika B. Kumaratunga
Presidential Residence
Colombo 03
SRI LANKA
Fax: +941 333 703
SALUTATION: Your Excellency
Honorable Prime-Minister
Mr. Ranil Wicremesinghe
Cambridge Place
Colombo-7
Tel/Fax. 941-682905
Email; ranilwickremesinghe@www.com
The Editor
The Island
Upali Newspapers Ltd.
223 Bloemendhal Road
Colombo 13
Sri Lanka
Fax: +(94)-74-609198
E-mail: gamini@unl.upali.lk
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REPLY TO DENIAL OF DISAPPEARANCES
The Casual Approach to Killings
A Reply to C. A. Chandraprema
[This reply is also available on our website at:
http://www.ahrchk.net/statement/update/viewnews.cgi?newsid1008238786,71917, ]
This is a reply to an article published in The Island on Dec. 10, 2001, entitled The Christian Worker and the Disappeared by C. A. Chandraprema. It was purported to be a comment on the reproduction of a short report about the Wehara detention camp in Kurunegala published by the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) on June 28, 2001, and reproduced in a past issue of The Christian Worker. AHRC is glad that the report is still being passionately discussed.
It should be noted that Mr. Chandraprema attended a meeting organised by AHRC on disappearances on Feb. 21, 1998, in Sri Lanka and heartily participated in it, opposing at the time any discussion on disappearances, and that afterwards he wrote several articles attacking this meeting (a summary of the proceedings of this AHRC meeting is available on the Internet at www.disapperarances.org). Yet Mr. Chandraprema wrote in his comment on Dec. 10, 2001, in The Island that this is the first time in my life that I have heard of an organisation called the Asian Human Rights Commission. If one descends to the type of journalism that this gentleman has engaged in and uses his own words, we should call him a joker or a moron or an ass or a fraud or a hoax. However, to do so would be abuse the right of publication. It suffices for us to say that what he has written, even about himself, is not true. To quote from his article itself is sufficient to reveal Mr. Chandrapremas own style: The highly respected Buddhist scholar Hajme Nakamura in analysing the South Asian mind pointed out that South Asians have a tendency to be profuse and fluid with facts and numbers. This is one reason why India has no accurate historical records problem.
Mr. Chandrapremas attempt in his article is to reduce massive disappearances which occurred and are internationally known to be mere myths. This is the same tendency one finds in those who seek to deny the reality of the Holocaust. It is all a mythit never happenedis the argument of this type of denial. As for his reference to South Asia, the lack of a historical record is due to the levels of repression that have prevailed in the region. For example, where are the records of the genocide of Buddhists in India? The repression was so complete that Buddhism was completely wiped out of the land of its birth. It has been revived only recently, in comparatively small numbers, by the movement of Untouchables. This tradition of repression and the denial of it in South Asia was a creation of the Brahmins, and it has left its mark deeply in Sri Lanka too. This is why we are not surprised by Mr. Chandrapremas article. A denial of grave violations of human rights, including massacres, is the basic trait of South Asian culture. Just recall what happened in the inquiries of the Bindunuwewa massacre more than a year ago. One can only guess what might happen as well to the massacre of 10 Muslims on Dec. 5, 2001, Sri Lankas recent violent election day. The pattern of denial is as follows: there is a murder; no proper inquiries are held; no prosecution takes place; and later the incident itself is denied because it was not proved in a court of law. The main difference in the approach of Mr. Chandraprema and AHRC is that he wants to deny the existence of disappearances on the basis that there were no prosecutions or convictions while we maintain that investigations and prosecutions have deliberately been denied.
Another aspect of the same South Asian tradition is the casualness towards killings. This is what permeates Mr. Chandrapremas thinking as expressed in the meeting mentioned above, in this particular article and in what he says in other writings about the people he most admires, who in normal parlance are called mass murders. He writes: This is not some tribal society. Every birth is registered. The Grama Sevaka system covers all villages. Every family and individual is registered for purposes of giving food stamps, janasaviya or samurdhi. If somebody was abducted from a village, such facts are easily verified. The Grama Sevaka of the village will know all about it. Why is it that well over a decade after these incidents took place none of these so-called human rights organisations have been able to come up with any accurate figures of the actual number who disappeared?
First of all, Mr. Chandraprema has a poor understanding of tribal society. Tribal people are very civilised people; they do not kill casually. They have their unwritten laws and very humane traditions. No tribal people would have done what has been done in Sri Lanka: killing, torture, exhibiting bodies on roads, raping girls and killing them. Tribal people did not produce informers who carried lists of people to be killed. For a full list of such atrocities, there are the reports of four state commissions (i.e., Commissions of Inquiry into Involuntary Removal or the Disappearance of Persons, which inquired into all of these matters); and for any worthwhile journalist who wants to recall the details of this grisly period, all that is needed is to look into his or her own notes of this time. (It is quite possible that some may have destroyed their diaries regarding this period.) It is, indeed, a blind, deaf and dumb person who would deny that these things happened, which are known even to little children. If one is to go by Mr. Chandrapremas own publicly known record, he cannot pretend to be so ignorant about these matters. We do not want at this time to go into well-published materials about Mr. Chandraprema own involvements at the relevant time. All that we wish to do is to point out is that he is not the impartial observer that he pretends to be. As for records, the following quotes from the state commissions tell the whole story:
A feature that struck us most forcefully in our inquiries was the utmost care that had been taken, not only by individual perpetrators, but also by the system itself to present these occurrences from being reflected in the official records of the country. Starting with the refusal of the local police to record complaints, which was a general feature in all three provinces, through the blatant use of vehicles without number plates, right up to the refusal to allow the bereaved to take possessions of corpses identified by them, let alone obtaining death certificates in respect of them, there is clear evidence of a systematic attempt to keep these deaths/disappearances from being recorded in the official annals. A nation which takes pride in the fact of having a recorded history of thousands of years should not leave a dark patch of unrecorded events in the recent past (Introduction to the Final Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Involuntary Removal or Disappearance of Persons in the Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa Provinces published in September 1997). (The head of this commission, Ms. Manouri Muttettuwegama, was one of the participants at the Feb. 21, 1998, meeting that Mr. Chandraprema attended. Had he taken the trouble to read the report of a fellow participant, he would have found hundreds of times more damning information than what is in the AHRC report. This full report is also available on the Internet at www.disappearances.org/reports/srilanka/lkrpt.html.).
Furthermore, the following is a comment of one of the participants, Mr. Javid Yusuf, at the Feb. 21, 1998, meeting: I remember some years back I interviewed many of these cases to present it before a United Nations organisation. When I interviewed the parents, wives, brothers and sisters, most of them were a desperate and helpless type of villagers. Even if they have a legal establishment, they will not be able to have access to the police or armed forces. Yusuf further stated: I remember soon after the government came into power [that] ministers were going about digging graves without any expertise, which is necessary for this job, as otherwise all evidence will be lost. Suddenly it stopped as the army and the police might have brought pressure.
Mr. Chandraprema seems to think JVP killings justify killings by state agencies. AHRCs position is that all killings, be they by the JVP, state agencies, Black Cats, PRA and all other groups, were crimes. We do not agree with the view that one crime cancels the other. Instead, our position is that, unless all of these killings are investigated and brought to justice in some manner, it is not possible to re-establish the rule of law in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankas juridical framework collapsed, and the continuing effect is well reflected in everything, including the violence in the last election on Dec. 5. In South Africa, leaders did not say white peoples violence justifies black peoples violence. The way that was found to deal with decades of violence was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. If the issue was swept under the carpet, the law would have lost all credibility. Many argue that what was done in South Africa was not enough. For the purpose of this discussion, however, suffice it to say that there was some attempt to deal with historic accountability. If there is no accountability, how can anyone talk of historical records?
Mr. Chandraprema tries to distort AHRCs statement that these killings were not part of a war against a foreign enemy or civil war. Under international law, the people who are arrested are entitled to protection. Mr. Chandraprema himself was arrested recently, but he is still alive because he was treated in a different manner than those who were arrested during the time that these disappearances took place. All that AHRC argues is that there was no reason to deny the protection available to people after their arrest. At no time has the Sri Lankan government taken the position that the disappearances are, in fact, combat killings. According to the findings of reports of the four state-appointed commissions, most killings happened after the arrests. We quote: Killings on the spot, termed extrajudicial killings, constitute the ultimate in involuntary removal. Disappearance following an abduction is in our finding only a euphemism for a killing, a reality that the absence of recovery of the body should not be allowed to obscure (p. 33 of the Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa report mentioned above). What AHRC has stated is that there was no basis at all for such killings and that the legal provisions existing in the country were sufficient to deal with them. If that was done, much of the confusion that Mr. Chandraprema has tried to create about numbers would have been answered through examining the official records.
Mr. Chandraprema asks AHRC how we know who is innocent or guilty out of those who were killed. The answer is that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. It is the duty of the State to declare by proper process who is guilty. If Mr. Chandrapremas test is applied, anyone can be killed, and it would be the duty of people to prove that innocent people were killed. If we apply this test to Mr. Chandrapremas arrest, we would presume him to be guilty if he disappeared. We are glad he is alive and has a chance to say he is not guilty. Those who were made to disappear did not have that chance. It is also relevant that, according to the report of the commissions referred to above, 15 percent of those who disappeared were people below 19 years of age.
AHRCs call for inquiries and prosecutions is not original. Four commissions have made the same demand and U.N. agencies very many times. We quote from the recommendations to the Sri Lankan government on Dec. 21, 1999, by the U.N. Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances: a) The government should establish an independent body with the task of investigating all cases of disappearance which occurred since 1995 and identifying the perpetrators; (b) the government should speed up its efforts to bring the perpetrators of enforced disappearances, whether committed under the former or the present government, to justice. The attorney-general or another independent authority should be empowered to investigate and indict suspected perpetrators of enforced disappearances irrespective of the outcome of investigations by the police; (c) the act of enforced disappearance should be made an independent offence under the criminal law of Sri Lanka punishable by appropriate penalties as stipulated in Article 4 of the United Nations Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance; (d) the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the emergency regulations currently in force should be abolished or otherwise brought into line with internationally accepted standards of personal liberty, due process of law and humane treatment of prisoners; (e) any person deprived of liberty should be held only in an officially recognised place of detention as stipulated in Article 10(1) of the declaration. All unofficial places of detention, in particular those established by paramilitary organisations fighting alongside the security forces, such as PLOTE and TELO, should immediately be dissolved; (f) the government should set up a central register of detainees as provided for in Article 10(3) of the declaration. Since the Human Rights Commission needs to be informed immediately of every arrest and detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the Emergency Regulations, such a central computerised register of detainees might be established at its headquarters. Such a solution would, however, require a substantial increase in the powers and resources of the commission; (g) all families of disappeared persons should receive the same amount of compensation. The differentiation between public civil servants and others seems discriminatory and should, therefore, be abolished. Compensation should not be made dependent on the confirmation as proven by a commission of inquiry. In addition to these compensations, the families of disappeared persons should be supported, according to their needs, by other means, such as low interest loan schemes or scholarships for the children; (h) the procedure for issuing death certificates in cases of disappearances should be applied in an equal and non-discriminatory manner to all families; (i) the prohibition of enforced disappearance should be included as a fundamental right in the Constitution of Sri Lanka to which the remedy of a direct human rights complaint to the Supreme Court under Article 13 of the Constitution is applied irrespective of the fact whether the disappeared person is presumed to be alive or dead; (j) the government should instruct the special unit in REPPIA to respond to the cases submitted by the Working Group on a case-by-case basis in order to enable the Working Group to solve the cases which were reportedly clarified (U.N. document reference E/CN.4/2000/64/Add.1).
None of these demands were fulfilled by the state party, Sri Lanka. Thus, Sri Lanka has failed in its treaty obligations. Until these obligations are fulfilled, there is the need for everyone to ask for compliance with these obligations. AHRC has acted on the basis of this obligation and will continue to do so.
Asian Human Rights Commission
Hong Kong
December 11, 2001
