ALWAYS THE PROJECT for Chitral was to change minds. This, too, seemed to distinguish him among the Sri Lankans I met. I have called it several things—the edifice within, the structure of consciousness—and others had names for it: the mentality, and so on. A few recognized it as the site of authentic change. And fewer considered first the minds of ordinary people, those “below.” Change the minds of those below, and they will change the minds of others like them. And then the minds of those above will be forced to change, and Sri Lanka can become something other than what it has become. This was Chitral’s thinking, the revolution he was looking for.
In Panadura there was a steady stream of visitors: ex-detainees who had been tortured, the wives and husbands and siblings of victims—victims alive, victims dead—and then children. A child would be traumatized by what had happened to the father. There were cases in which the police forced the wife and children of a detainee to watch as the husband and father was beaten. There were other cases involving the child directly: A teacher or a principal had abused the child in school, or there had been abuse while in police custody.
Man, woman, child, it was invariably the same: Someone “above” had abused someone “below.”
Often after a case of abuse, the police would then say, “Don’t complain and we won’t press the charge against you.” Or the lawyer assigned took the fee but failed to represent the client: Instead he effectively represented the police and the court to the client. Or the defendant’s lawyer receives threatening telephone calls. Or the victim is offered bribes and threatened with more torture if he does not accept them. Or the judge openly discourages the lawyer from pursuing the case. Or the judge reviews photographic evidence of torture and rules, “minor injuries,” and a doctor supports the ruling. Or the judge rules, “You were caught stealing. You deserved torture.” Or the lawyer, judge, and a doctor conspire to force the defendant to plead guilty.
Shanthi had said once, “There are factual cases of all this.”
The cases involving children were the worst, the saddest, the most tragic. Lives were damaged or destroyed even before they had been lived. Lives without promise lay ahead, at least when they first arrived at Janasansadaya or the other organizations I visited, and Janasansadaya and the other places were not in the business of working miracles. Sometimes you could see the scars: a child could no longer hear, or the eyes were damaged, or there were permanent welts on an arm or a leg. But it was the marks inside the children that were the most painful to see: the flat affect, the inability to focus, the helpless clinging to the mother, the deadness within.
Chitral, with Shanthi’s help and the help of others in the office, kept good statistics.
“How many cases are you getting now?” I once asked.
It was a hot day in September. We were sitting, as usual, on the opposite sides of his messy desk. The babble of the schoolchildren next door seemed to suffuse the office, though no one ever bothered to mention it.
“So far this year, for the first nine months, we’ve received two hundred and forty-seven complaints. Of these, a hundred and forty-one involved the misuse of police power.”
These were curious numbers. A small office in a suburb of Colombo, an organization few had ever heard of, and there are almost two hundred and fifty new complaints on the books. It was a tiny number if you considered it the measure of a national problem, but it was plainly more a matter of an iceberg’s tip.
I considered Thangavelu’s figures, the official figures: For the first half of the year, the police had recorded fourteen cases involving the police and fundamental rights: two dismissed, twelve pending. Chitral alone had ten times as many cases involving the police in a slightly longer period. Nobody knows the true extent of the problem. Police abuse in Sri Lanka, a problem everyone knows about, remains unmapped territory.
Chitral said, “Ninety percent of people with experience of the police are assaulted: This is known. I doubt ten percent complain. We have nearly a hundred and fifty cases this year and we’ve hardly begun.”
I would eventually meet some of these cases. But first I was to travel in the south, to Galle and the towns around it. Shanthi and I would go together, this time in a hired car.
Before we left, Chitral showed me a video of a man in a hospital bed. It was twelve minutes long and had been shot a couple of months earlier at a teaching hospital near Galle. There was the patient, and a physician, a forensic specialist, reviewing the patient’s condition and reciting the symptoms for the video. There were many: Lesions on his leg caused by a steel rod; bruises on his torso caused by a wooden pole; handcuff marks. The ankles were swollen and discolored. This indicated damage beneath the skin tissue, the physician explained conscientiously into the camera. And there were extensive internal injuries.
The victim’s name was Hevamarambage Premalal. He was thirty-two, married with three children. A relative had been murdered a year or so earlier, and there had been no investigation. In time it came to light in Wanduramba, Premalal’s village, that the police may have had a hand in the killing. It was then that Premalal stepped forward: He filed a complaint stating that the police had taken no action.
The police arrived at his home between 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. one night soon after Premalal had filed the complaint. The beating began before they had even reached the police station.
Later, when Premalal regained consciousness, he was already in the hospital—handcuffed to the bed, under remand, with no idea of the charges. I was to meet him in Galle, and I would meet the examining physician, too.
THE LANE OFF THE MAIN THOROUGHFARE near the center of Galle is crowded with shops and businesses—a place of small commercial enterprises—but it is also quiet. People in the street seem to know one another. Shanthi and I are strangers—not unwelcome, but noticed.
We park near a Buddhist temple. Next to it, struggling to be modern and affluent and Western and orderly and a little “global,” is a bright yellow building with oversized windows: the Sangharama English Night School. Inside, placed so they are visible through the large plate-glass windows, ersatz crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling, and on the walls are elaborate sconces, the kind one would expect to see in a formal dining room in a country house somewhere in England.
We are headed toward the next building over, a one-story structure, light blue with a corrugated roof, a little shabby but not worried about itself. It rather ruins things for the Sangharama English Night School, being modest and altogether local, but it is not worried about this, either. These are the offices of the Organisation for the Defense of Human Rights and also of something else, something called the Rural Women’s Front.
We had set out early from Colombo and driven south along the coast for much of the morning. And now we were in an office that seemed altogether makeshift despite its resonant name, almost too slight to have warranted a drive of such a distance. There were two or three rooms with benches, battered desks, a few chairs, and not much more. Almost certainly—I guessed this but did not ask—we had entered the only office of the Organisation for the Defense of Human Rights. But as soon as we began talking, none of this mattered. The work mattered. The people who walked in off the street, who had (usually) come in by bus from the countryside—they mattered. Their stories, accumulated in case files, mattered. This is the daily grind, the daily giving and taking, of human rights work—work that, far down the scale from councils in Geneva or New York, comes to two people talking: What happened, why did it happen, what shall we do?
Here I was to meet Premalal. Kanthi, the office manager, sat me in a plain wooden chair behind one of the old desks. I was immediately uncomfortable with this arrangement. I felt like a police officer, an interrogator, a Soviet bureaucrat, an authority figure of some kind. The desk was small, but it created a vast distance I despaired of crossing. I was sensitive to the matter of distance by this time. Premalal would come in, sit down opposite, and talk to me as if I were, indeed, somehow “in charge.” We would speak from “above” and “below,” not “across.”
Still, I left it as it was and said nothing to Kanthi. I was the visitor. I was the writer. I had to take my notes. Seating me at the desk was a gesture of consideration. No one else seemed to notice the “above” and “below” of it. This reminded me: The edifice within is difficult to dismantle, in part because it is unconscious. Almost nobody even thinks about it. Even when they understand it and determine to dismantle it they cannot see it in their own ways of doing things. I thought of Chitral and his stories of “mister” and “sir.” It is hard to break these habits, he had said.
When Premalal came in I recognized him from the video Chitral had shown me. He was thin. He had the same flat affect—a stunned, passively confused look—as I had already seen in others. His wife was with him. Both were good-looking, with fine features. They were poised, despite all they had been through and the legal maze they had entered. Somehow—I did not know how—Premalal seemed at home in public space.
I knew the outline of Premalal’s story, but we began by filling in the details.
He was a day laborer at a tea plantation and lived in the village called Wanduramba, about fifteen kilometers from Galle. He dug ditches and earned two hundred to two hundred and fifty rupees a day—about two to two and a half American dollars.
“Now I can’t work,” Premalal said. “My knees and the side of my left leg are still in pain. My parents help me, but of course it’s a strain.”
“Will you work again? Do you expect to?”
“I don’t think so. Even sitting in a chair is difficult. I’m hoping to do some kind of small business. I don’t really know. I’m still taking treatment.”
It was October of 2006 when Premalal and I met. The incident with the police had taken place the previous July. And life had been uncertain ever since. It had probably changed for good.
The man killed, the murder victim whose death had got Premalal involved with the courts and the police, turned out to be his brother-in-law, Sunil, his wife’s sibling. Premalal never found out why Sunil was killed. “I don’t know who killed him, either. I complained to the Criminal Investigations Department simply because the police weren’t doing anything to find out.”
When the police came for him that night in July, the night Premalal became a victim, he recognized them as he opened the door. One was in uniform and had a gun—Police Constable Lasantha. Another was a sergeant, Sgt. Samaranayake.
Premalal gave a long account of what happened that night and in the days that followed. I let him speak without interrupting, even when there were parts of his story I was not clear about. This is some of it:
“Outside the house, Sgt. Samaranayake punched me in the mouth. I asked, ‘Why are you taking me in?’ and they said, ‘To record your statement.’ Sgt. Samaranayake then hit me on the spine with a wooden pole.
“On the way to the police station I was taken first to sign various documents at a place where they keep patrol log books. Once we were at the station I was told to remove my shirt. They handcuffed me and fixed the handcuffs to the ceiling of a cell. Sgt. Samaranayake then took his pole and started hitting me again on the back. He hit me until the pole broke. With the bit remaining he hit me on the head. My skull fractured and I started to bleed.
“Sgt. Samaranayake collected the pieces of wood and took them into the next room. Through the doorway I saw him drinking arrack. Then he came back with a steel pole. By this time my sarong had fallen off. I was shouting, so he took the sarong and tied it round my mouth.
While he hit me with the steel pole, they all kept shouting at me, ‘Did you see Sunil’s murder? The same thing will happen to you.’
“After assaulting my back he started on my stomach, and then I lost consciousness. When I came to, my head was in the station’s latrine. I shouted for water. Lasantha brought water, I drank it, but I vomited immediately.
“In the morning a policeman named Nimal Ranjit came to my cell, and I told him I was in pain. He rushed out and told Sgt. Samaranayake and the others. They dragged me outside and bathed me. They gave me a big coconut”—a king coconut, a common drink in Sri Lanka, consumed straight from the shell. “Then they brought a stretcher and put me in a jeep to take me to a hospital nearby. I heard Sgt. Samaranayake say, ‘Don’t take the main road—it leads past another police station. Take a by-road.’ Nimal Ranjit said to me, ‘At the hospital, tell them some villagers assaulted you. We’ll give you five thousand rupees and get you some medicine, too.’
“But as I was being admitted I told the lady doctor”—this must have been the admitting physician—“that the police had assaulted me. Then they admitted me. When my family came, I told them the same thing.
After that, I’m not aware of what happened.”
Premalal stopped. I asked him, “Were you afraid? Afraid of telling the truth?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you tell the story, then?”
“It was the true story. The villagers didn’t hit me.”
“Were you aware then of police abuse?”
“Not really. I was making a living. I hadn’t really thought about it.”
FOR TEN DAYS THE DOCTORS could give no assurance that Premalal would survive. He lived on saline solution, oxygen, and blood transfusions. He went on dialysis while the doctors monitored his kidneys. Eventually there was a successful surgery.
Then the police came again.
“On July 21st, the O. I. C. from Wanduramba”—the officer in charge at the village station—“came to visit. He told me to withdraw from the case I planned to file against the police. He said, ‘It’s really money you want. Come see me.’ I was discharged on the 29th and told to return to the clinic every week.”
At this, Premalal’s wife produced a worn school notebook with neat lines written across its pages. It seemed to be a record of his weekly treatments. This, apparently, would be evidence. “We have filed a case before the Supreme Court,” Premalal said with evident pride.
When he first got out of the hospital, a lawyer approached him. “He told me he could arrange for the police to pay one to one and a half lakhs of rupees. I said no.”
One lakh: a hundred thousand rupees, about a thousand dollars.
“Then Chitral came to visit me, Chitral and a foreign lady. They took down details. They made a video.”
A foreign lady: This would have been a journalist from a Korean television station.
A video: The video Chitral and Shanthi had shown me.
“My pastor spoke with Chitral after this. Clifford made the connection with Janasansadaya. Then my pastor spoke with Chitral, just before we filed the case.”
The pastor: Premalal was a devout Christian. It was because of his faith, he had told me, that he refused to lie about the police.
Clifford: Clifford Perera, the forensic physician in the video.
“Sgt. Samaranayake and the O. I. C. came back after I filed the case.
Sgt. Samaranayake didn’t come directly—his relatives approached me. They offered me three lakhs to settle the case. I refused. Then they offered me five lakhs, but I refused again. Now both the O. I. C. and the sergeant have been interdicted.”
These were considerable sums for Premalal. Five lakhs, half a million rupees, would have been almost seven years wages at two hundred rupees a day—assuming, that is, he could work every day of every year. By this measure alone, Premalal’s commitment to what he was doing seemed remarkable.
There were other remarkable things about Premalal’s story. It was very local in character, for instance. Premalal knew most of the police officers, and they him. He had used their names all through his account—it was always “Sgt. Samaranayake,” I could not help noticing. So there was the familiarity of village life. But then Premalal had stepped into public space when he complained about the inaction of the police in Wanduramba. After that, no amount of familiarity would save him. Abuse, even abuse of a savage character, does not depend upon people being strangers to one another.
There was the paperwork. Here was Premalal, about to be beaten unconscious, and the police take the trouble to stop along the way to make sure he signs the proper documents. “Why are you taking me in?”
“To get a statement.” It is a kind of obsession in Sri Lanka, this matter of documents, procedures, and the legalities used to mask illegalities. It is fine to beat someone—“You deserved to be tortured”—but one must get the paperwork done first.
There was also the sadistic character of the torture. It was not about getting information or getting questions answered or preventing some imminent calamity. It was about inflicting pain, pain that would be forever remembered, pain inflicted to the maximum possible: until the wooden pole broke across Premalal’s back, until a scar within had been etched, a scar of fear, until Premalal lost consciousness. The drinking also betrayed the pathology of this kind of torture—its psychological complexity for the victimizer as well as the victim.
Premalal had decided to refuse a settlement before he had met Chitral or “the foreign lady,” before he had decided to file a case with Janasansadaya’s help—this I noticed, too. It seemed the most important point. Premalal had an idea of autonomy, an awareness of himself in the world that was not shaped by “the mentality.” He had made a decision to step out beyond the totalizing mechanisms of the system. Then he paid for his decision. Perhaps this was out of ignorance of how things worked, as he suggested. But in the end he made another, larger decision: He would pay the price. There was no stepping back from the advance he had made into the no-man’s land of public space.
I AM TO BUY LUNCH for those I am meeting: for Premalal and his wife and for some others waiting along the benches to see me. Kanthi seems to have promised this.
She is clear-skinned and has a bright smile. She dresses in a sari and wears gold jewelry. Kanthi is extremely organized—this I noticed as I conversed with Premalal.
Now she would like three hundred rupees to cover the lunches. Kanthi had not mentioned this earlier, but the silent communication between us is perfectly plain as I hand her a note of a thousand rupees: It is little to me, it is much to them.
Lunch would arrive in containers carried in plastic bags. As we waited, I asked Kanthi about her routine. Why Galle? I asked. Why did she have an office so far in the south, where things were supposed to be more orderly, where the tourists came and were not supposed to see this side of Sri Lanka?
“I don’t know why. It’s something I’ve noticed, too. There are loads of cases. I don’t know if the police are especially brutal here.”
“How many case are we talking about?”
“Every day there are new cases. I can’t really say how many we have. Sometimes there are three or four a day. Sometimes one, sometimes more.”
Three cases a day would mean the Organisation for the Defense of Human Rights, a large name in a small lane in a provincial city, painted on a bedsheet and tacked above the entrance of a modest house—this number matched the police records for the first half of the year, the fourteen cases recorded in Thangavelu’s files, in less than a week.
I said, “You’re talking about hundreds of cases a year, then. All to do with human rights.”
“About a hundred and fifty. These are new cases. The old ones have to come back ten to fifteen times because there are new details in their cases. New arrests. People are tortured again after the case begins. New charges are fabricated.”
“Again, why so many?” I was still puzzled.
“The south, somehow, is more prone to violence,” Kanthi replied. Then she said, “Me, I’m not a victim. But I intervened in the Malkanthi case, the case I’ll introduce you to this afternoon, and I had threats afterward. I once attended the Human Rights Commission in Matara regarding another case, and the police there began insulting me and the work we do. Afterward, they came to ask us to withdraw the case. I got a little scared on that occasion. I ’phoned Chitral immediately.”
“That was the only time you were afraid, Kanthi?”
“We have links with people—people like Chitral. We can gather two hundred people whenever we want. No problem.”
K. P. MALKANTHI IS FORTY-TWO, a poor woman, obviously poor, with bad teeth and a worn sari. She looks as if she is perennially exhausted: She looks, perhaps, sixty or so. But she is able to smile.
“Let’s all speak,” I say, trying to make Mrs. Malkanthi comfortable. At this she smiles. And she would smile, now and again, as we talked.
P. W. Pushpakumara, Malkanthi’s son, is sixteen. He wears a T-shirt with “William Sport” written across the chest, the sort of thing a teenager would wear the world over. But P. W., as I will call him, seems to have had all his smiles knocked out of him. He has flat affect. He is missing an eye—the consequence not of abuse but of an illness. He is wary. And he clings almost desperately to his mother.
“This is corporal punishment in school,” Shanthi, who has been helping to translate, tells me. It is a bit like an announcement, an introduction. She had wanted me especially to hear about this case. “We’ve come to conclude the schools are as bad or worse than the police stations.”
I remember something Chitral had said when he was recounting his last years as a teacher—again, the “mister” to “mister” exchanges becoming “mister” to “sir” exchanges. A piece of the psychology I was trying to understand suddenly fell into place. Schools, police stations, hospitals, government offices: It made no difference. There would be stories like the one I was about to hear involving any institution within which authority was projected. And the stories had multiplied in the course of Sri Lanka’s “politicization,” which put people in positions of authority that everyone, including the person himself or herself, knew were not deserved. This was Chitral’s point in telling me this: Power had become uncertain of itself—insecure. As a consequence, now it was more arbitrary, more unpredictable, and more violent in its defense of itself.
P. W. told his story in a low, almost inaudible voice, looking up only occasionally from the corner of the desk upon which he seemed to have fixed his gaze. His mother helped him when he had trouble going on. To some smaller extent we all did. But it seemed important to Mrs. Malkanthi that her son tell his story himself as best he could. In the end, P. W. was not very good at connecting facts—he seemed to have neither the habit nor the training—and he left most of them to his mother.
He said, “On 3rd March 2005, because I teased another student, a teacher summoned me and hit me on my ear. I suffer epileptic fits.”
The mother said, “He’s on medication, and we had this under control for the past five years. But when he was assaulted the fits came back. On the same day as the incident he had a fit and urinated in his clothes.”
P. W. resumed his story.
“After the teacher hit me the principal called me in and suspended me for a week. When he hit me my hearing was damaged. Later on the principal told me to come with my father.”
Then Mrs. Malkanthi again: “I sent the two of them. The principal forced his father to sign certain documents. I had to take action against that later on. I didn’t know what the papers said, so I brought them to this office.”
The mother has taken over now. P. W. remains quiet, looking at her as she speaks, and occasionally, just briefly, when he thinks I will not notice, he looks at me.
Mrs. Malkanthi said, “After my son was assaulted I explained to the Hikkaduwa police. They had called only me—not the school authorities. I felt they were not taking proper action. So I came to see this lady.
This lady sent me to Panadura.”
Hikkabuwa: the family’s village, a coastal town a few kilometers north of Galle.
This lady: Kanthi.
Mrs. Malkanthi continued, “I can’t remember the documents, but I suspected they were something bad. So I visited the regional director of education. He chased me from his office. I went to see the principal. She chased me, too. She wanted only his father. The principal also refused to let the boy back in school. As a result, he has lost a year and a half of his education.”
Shanthi, who had continued to interpret for me, interrupted. “This is a complicated story,” she said to me quietly.
I had begun to notice this about the narratives I was hearing: Those telling the story often did not seem to distinguish between useful detail and detail without meaning. Their stories came out in a kind of unchecked flood, without discrimination. The same was also true of chronology: Things got mixed up. When had Mrs. Malkanthi come to see the human rights people—before or after going to the regional director and the principal? When had she begun worrying about the documents and taken action?
I let the confusion go. Victims and the relations of victims seem to have an impaired sense of time: This happened, then that happened, but before this, something else happened, and before something else, something else again. Sometimes, when the order of things seemed obvious, or when it did not seem especially important, I would say nothing. On other occasions I let the story be told and then went back to ask about the order events had occurred. In some cases, a completely different story would then emerge.
I did not conclude that the victims, or whomever was talking, was simply a bad storyteller, or was too simple to get the narrative straight. It always seemed to me another piece of evidence reflecting the degree of trauma, the degree to which they had been consumed by fear. Those talking seemed to re-enter the time of their suffering, and to recount it meant letting it tumble out—all at once, as it were. A person perfectly capable of conversing in the present lost all capacity to differentiate among events or make order of them once the moment of trauma was re-engaged.
This was Mrs. Malkanthi, to some small extent, though she was not the most extreme case of the problem I had seen.
She said, “I urged the regional educational director to insure my son goes back. Eventually he accompanied the boy and told him to give the principal betel leaves. But the principal threw them away. ‘Give the betel leaves again,’ the educational director said. But the principal threw them away again. As result, my son went back to school only one day.
“Later I explained to the educational director, and he said my son had been suspended because he wrote a letter to a girl. It was then we went to the Supreme Court with a fundamental rights case.
“Exactly a year later one of my younger sons, a seven-year-old, was assaulted by his teacher and suspended for five months for failing to meditate properly. Then we went to the Supreme Court with both cases. Eventually both boys were found new schools. But the court did not see fit to take action against the assaulting.”
“These cases are now closed?”
“There’s now a human rights inquiry going on,” Mrs. Malkanthi said.
Shanthi, who seemed to know Mrs. Malkanthi well, said at this point,
“This woman is fearless and insists on confronting officials. She’s unafraid of authority. That’s why the principal asked only for the father. He doesn’t think too far. He’ll do anything people say.”
I turned to P. W., who had remained silent through all of this. “This happened a lot in the old school, it seems. Do you know why?”
P. W. smiled faintly for the first and last time. “I told tales against a classmate.”
“What about your hearing?” I pointed to his right ear, the one that had been damaged.
“I had treatment in a hospital.”
Apart from the human rights inquiry, Mrs. Malkanthi had become part of something else Chitral was doing through Janasansadaya. He had organized street demonstrations in Colombo and Galle—small affairs in very public locations—so that ordinary people would see them. It was another tactic for dispelling the fear of authority and for multiplying awareness, and the mother had taken part.
“This is something new in Sri Lanka,” I said.
Mrs. Malkanthi laughed.
“I distributed leaflets. I sold some booklets. I held up banners.”
She seemed to consider these acts altogether a great wonder.
“All this makes you feel better.”
“It does, yes.”
Do you think Sri Lanka is changing?” I aimed the question somewhere between Mrs. Malkanthi and her son.
“Change has to do with these sorts of problems,” P. W. said quietly.
Shanthi asked, I sensed for my benefit, “‘These sorts of problems?’ Are they getting better or worse?”
Mrs. Malkanthi answered immediately, and with a certain rigorous confidence.
“Worse.”
IN A BOOK CALLED The Decent Society, Avishai Margalit asks what one is. What is a decent society, the Israeli scholar, who teaches philosophy in Jerusalem, wonders at the beginning of his 1996 work.
The decent society is one that does not humiliate, Margalit asserts.
Then he elaborates:
The decent society is one whose institutions do not humiliate people. I distinguish between a decent society and a civilized one. A civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one in which the institutions do not humiliate people.
It is interesting, if not very time-consuming, to consider Margalit’s thought in relation to Sri Lanka. By his definition, Sri Lanka is neither decent nor civilized. One may at least wonder whether it is possible for a Sri Lankan, any Sri Lankan, to get through a single day without suffering some form of humiliation. For the vast majority of ordinary Sri Lankans, for those “below,” the Premalal’s and Mrs. Malkanthi’s and the millions like them, daily humiliations are more or less ceaseless.
Humiliation is the very substance of their lives. And when they refuse to be humiliated, their humiliation can become acute, violent, and sometimes fatal.
But Margalit formed his definitions at least partly in response to the fate of Palestinians. Clifford Perera is a doctor and a Sri Lankan. He had his own definition, and it had to do with the society around him, the society he had been born into, the society in which he tried to practice his profession with nothing more than ordinary integrity.
“Every civilized society has a proper medical-legal system, Clifford said.
“One of its main functions is to investigate death.”
Clifford had a quick mind, and, coming early in our conversation, the thought eluded me. Death reports as a measure of civility: What could he mean?
“Unless we have such a system, a society can go into a vertical situation,” he explained.
“‘A vertical situation?’”
“You’re losing law and order, the smooth functioning of society. We’ve had this. Nobody knows how your next-door neighbor died. Nobody wants to inquire. Nobody wants to investigate.”
A vertical situation, then: a downward spiral.
LATE IN THE AFTERNOON, after we had finished meeting people at Kanthi’s office, Shanthi and I drove to Karapitiya. The road wound through many neighborhoods of Galle, then through fields and small settlements. It narrowed, the grasses on either side grew tall, and for a few moments we got lost. Then we came to Karapitiya, and the hospital district. As the only teaching hospital in the southern part of the island—one of six nationwide—it was a large complex. The street opposite the main wards was dense with vendors: fruit vendors, sellers of juice and water and candies and small gifts. These were for the families of patients, and they seemed to do a brisk business.
Clifford’s office was in a separate building on the hospital grounds. You could say it was tiny or you could say it was vast, depending upon what Clifford decided to show you. The room where we sat was not much more than a cubicle, with a desk and a couple of chairs. Down a hall beside it, there was room after room filled with laboratory equipment, examining tables, and shelves containing human remains: parts of skeletons, attached bones, skulls, bits of clothing, shoes, odd belongings.
Clifford was a J. M. O., in Sri Lankan legal parlance—a judicial medical officer. This meant his expertise was forensics, the specialty that had brought him to Premalal’s hospital room. There is a clinical aspect to this work, and also an aspect that had to do with pathology. “The living and the dead,” Clifford said with a mordant smile.
He was young, energetic, often witty—none of these a quality ordinarily associated with so somber a specialization. He was also acutely insightful. Clifford had come into his position at an important moment. He had earned his medical degree in 1994, not long after the wave of murders and disappearances that had followed the second insurrection. The experience seems to have marked him. He became a J. M. O. three years later, and in his years since he had acquired a deep understanding of Sri Lanka and, we might say, the pathology that surpasses all others—that is, the national pathology.
Clifford leapt from subject to subject in our conversation. Sometimes I did not know why we had left off talking about one thing and begun talking about another. He made unlikely connections—invisible connections. Only later, looking at my notes, would I understand that he had been giving me as full a picture as he could of a single, complex phenomenon.
À propos of nothing he said, “I was in Melbourne at the time of the tsunami. I called my office. They said, ‘Don’t come. There’s no work for us.’ This was the position of the government: ‘Just clean up, bury the bodies.’ Only when foreign pressure came to identify the foreigners did they realize that what they did was wrong. Now they’ve agreed they made a mistake. But they don’t learn. It’s my belief that if we had another tsunami tomorrow the same thing would happen. Forensics are not important.”
When I met Clifford, it was shortly after the murders of seventeen local employees of Action Contre la Faim, the French group that provides food aid, in the northeast of the island. Clifford was involved in the investigation and was leaving shortly to arrange for the bodies to be exhumed and shipped to Colombo.
“When transferring bodies you use body bags. We don’t have body bags in the state medical stores. So we have to plead with the international organizations. We had a notice in the Sunday newspapers—perhaps you saw it. In this heat, with these delays, we put every body into at least three body bags. I need fifty before I go, and I don’t have a single one. It’s a seven– or eight–hour journey to Colombo and we have no refrigeration trucks. We’ve requested them. Nothing.”
A narrative of carelessness was emerging—a narrative of another kind of abuse: the abuse of the past, the abuse of the record. I began to see the connection between medical reports and civility.
Clifford spoke in staccato phrases, one after another. They seemed to reflect the rhythm of a very fast mind. When we turned to torture victims, people such as Premalal, he started talking about the forms he had to fill out for each case. Again, I was not sure why.
He said, “We’re expected to document our findings—the severity of the injuries, the weapons used, the timing. We have a standard form—a medico-legal form, it’s called. These forms are at least twenty-five years old. They were designed by a J. M. O. who retired sixteen years ago. If you have a traffic accident, the form is good enough. But if you have a torture victim, it isn’t. Sometimes there are more than a hundred injuries in these cases. The space provided to describe these injuries is two lines. Sometimes we don’t see these cases until a week or a month after the incident. This is crucial information for the lawyers. But there is no place on the form to specify the timing—when something happened.”
“But it’s only a form.”
“This is the final version of events that is accepted by the courts. That means it’s not only a form. It’s a big problem.”
Are you saying it’s a purposeful problem?”
Clifford hesitated, glancing at the ceiling. Then, his eyes leveling at me again: “The form is used to limit allegations of torture. Sometimes. To limit the available medical evidence. Sometimes. So we’ve adopted a different method. We call it ‘free-style.’ We go to our computer, we write our findings in full, sign it, and submit it. But the courts are the final deciders. It could be that it is not enough—it is not accepted. Sometimes.”
Clifford decided then to take me on a tour of his laboratories. They were down long, factory-like corridors behind heavy sliding doors, like the doors in warehouses. The lighting was terrible—single bulbs hanging here and there, giving off a faint, yellowish glow, and occasionally some weak fluorescent tubes. The dim light illuminated ancient, decrepit equipment covered with decades of chemical stains.
It was in the dank and dark of the labs that I began to realize what Clifford was trying to show me in his stories of body bags, hasty burials, and bureaucratic forms. We were not talking simply about an inefficient system, or a disorganized society, or this or that problem having to do with the misuse of standard procedures or the absence of identifications and autopsies. Clifford was showing me the practical consequences of a psychology. He was showing me what it actually meant on the ground, day in and day out, when a society had no habit of caring for most of its own people, no habit of looking at itself, no habit of making sure it understood its own workings, and certainly no habit of recording and remembering the fate of most individuals. This was the connection he made between civility and the management of an individual death.
A careless society, which means an indecent society, an uncivil society: Clifford sat at the peculiar point where this was revealed in matters of torture and death.
AT ONE POINT, CLIFFORD RECALLED the tradition that had begun in the 1870s, when doctors and lawyers had been drawn from the same social strata and shared a common notion of their responsibilities. The system as it is today can be understood, at least partly, as a corruption of this bygone, paternalistic ethos.
Clifford said, “You alter the injuries recorded in the documentation—they don’t match what is there in front of you. You can misinterpret.
You can classify in a different manner. You can give your own reasons—your own surmise. Based on these observations you can come up with your conclusions: timing, circumstances, weapons.
“These things happen. It’s a problem, but not everywhere. It’s mostly in district or base hospitals—the lowest on the chain. You see influence from lawyers or government attorneys against the litigant. They’ll do it in a very friendly manner. It’s known only to you.”
You: the doctor working with lawyers and the courts, the doctor who earns part of his living from these sorts of cases and needs the connections to keep the cases coming.
At his peculiar intersection in Sri Lankan life, Clifford seemed to see things few others ever glimpsed. He seemed to understand Sri Lanka as an organism—a network, to borrow Shanthi’s word again. And he seemed to conclude that to alter such a society can often look impossible.
He said, “I find it difficult to make change because I know the problems are connected with other problems and concern the authorities. I can’t confront this. I have no way of influencing.”
I disagreed with Clifford on this point. I reminded him of the video Chitral had shown me, the one recording his examination in Premalal’s hospital room. One can sometimes change things in a circumstance such as Sri Lanka’s simply by forcing them to work as they are supposed to work. The Premalal case was a good example. Clifford was one of thirty-five J. M. O.’s in all of Sri Lanka. And he had broken, or played his part in breaking, the chain of collusion for Premalal. His report on Premalal’s injuries had changed things—arguably even Premalal’s life and the lives of those around him. Sometimes change is so small we cannot see it, even when we are the agents of the change.
Clifford seemed to switch perspectives at his point. He spoke not for himself—perhaps out of modesty, perhaps because he did not accept my point—but for his profession.
He said, in his clipped, almost glib manner, “The best option is to ignore these problems. You either function in a low key or you leave. These alternatives are there for some professions, like doctors, for good or bad.”
DUSK WAS APPROACHING, and the light in Clifford’s office was attracting mosquitoes. I suggested we sit on the verandah, where I could smoke.
Outside, Clifford seemed to change again. He seemed to leave behind, if only for a few minutes, the intensity he brought to all the minute details of a J. M. O.’s job.
He said, “When you go a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometers from Colombo, you see rice paddies, you see tea and tea pluckers. A friend once asked me as we drove through this kind of countryside, ‘What if we educated them? The farmer will no longer farm, the women will no longer pluck. We don’t want this. We want them to be there. We want our beautiful scenery.’”
Clifford let the thought linger between us for a moment. Then: “We’re producing enough professionals, it’s true. But still there is a lot of underdevelopment in the rural areas. In the north and east, sometimes there is no doctor for two hundred to five hundred kilometers.”
It was odd, given all we had talked about, that only at this moment did Clifford seem to betray a subtle bitterness. Perhaps it was the failing light, the end of another hectic day, the quiet of the evening approaching as we sat on his verandah.
“There’s a deep division among us,” he said, breaking a silence that had settled among the three of us. “We want a certain number of people at the top—a certain number of people to lead—and we don’t seem to want any more than that.”
