WHEN WE TALK ABOUT victims in Sri Lanka, we must talk about everybody. There are but a very few who have escaped this fate.
The estate worker who is picked up while walking along a road and charged with a crime he knows nothing about: This is a commonplace, a standard case all over the island, remarkable only because the average Sri Lankan finds this man not worth remarking upon. The population of such victims can be counted in the many thousands. Those who spend several days in a jail and are beaten, humiliated, hung up like a side of beef, and sent home knowing there is a doctor prepared to testify that no torture has occurred: One could fill many months of research and then a book with the stories of these kinds of victims. I have heard many and will relate a few.
But there are other types of victims, who suffer in different ways. Saminda was a victim, waiting as he was “to go back.” The other judges were victims, too, of course. So were their families and anyone else who depended upon them or was close to them. There are the families of the dead and disappeared: How many hundreds of thousands are we counting now? There are those who live in uncertainty and often terror, and often not at home, amid the war in the north and the east. How many millions?
But let us dilate the lens. Let us understand this question of victimhood fully.
The police are victims. By numerous accounts they often find it necessary to intoxicate themselves before torturing a prisoner. Theirs are sordid lives. The lawyers and the colluding physicians are victims, too. So are the jailers and “henchmen” and those who collaborate in the creation of imagined crimes. Victimizers are almost always victims. They live in the same condition of fear they spread to others. They have their own designated place in the dreadful, paralyzing universe of “above” and “below”—the hierarchy made partly of inherited feudalism and partly of a modern form of arbitrary power.
This is also true of the politicians, the bribers, and the bribed. And it is true of the bureaucrats. None lives without fear. None has preserved any claim to personal autonomy or freedom (and certainly not freedom of conscience). All are subject to the same disorder they have helped to create, which means they are victims of their own corruptions and all the corruptions and violence around them.
What about ordinary Sri Lankans? The rich, the poor, the somewhere-in-between: Are they not victims, as well? Do they not suffer, too? The man living quietly in his comfortable Colombo home, looking after his family, keeping the bills paid and having the car washed at the weekend: He is a victim, as are all those around him. He may have succeeded in constructing a private order, but we cannot fail to note how small his world has necessarily become, the desperate quietude he must maintain within it, his silence and fear, the privatization of his consciousness, his unconscious need to remain “desensitized to violence,” as a psychiatrist friend with a practice in Colombo puts it.
As to children, they need not even be discussed. A look at the world that awaits them as their inheritance is enough.
And there are, finally, the disinherited. There are, by most counts, some three to four million Sri Lankans living abroad—as much as twenty percent of the total population. There are doctors, dentists, and professors among them, surely, but most expatriates are people of modest background and education—maids, construction workers, and so on. These, too, are victims of Sri Lanka as it has come to be. “They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything,” as the English writer John Berger put it recently in a wider context. Now they are part of “the poverty of the new capitalism”—victims of yet another kind.
“We are trapped,” a prominent member of the Colombo elite, a lawyer and a judge who has served in numerous posts, once put it in conversation. “All of us are simply trapped.”
This is not quite true. I would like to write about those who have left the trap behind and made themselves something more than victims. These are the Sri Lankans whom I came to respect most, in whom one could read some suggestion of a future, in whom one could find the glimmer of life amid all the wreckage: lights in darkness. They are Sri Lanka’s inheritors in one respect, and in another they are its escapees.
“HOW MANY CASES IN 2001? I think I missed those figures.”
“Fundamental rights jurisdiction, Article 11, cases in 2001: ninety-nine reported, of these twenty-nine decisions with compensation, sixty-seven cases dismissed, two pending as of now.”
“O. K. Let’s go over all these numbers again.”
And we do, from 2000 through the first half of 2006: So many cases reported, of which so many dismissed and so many are pending “as of now.” There appears to have been a peak in 2002, according to the figures read to me from a messy file at police headquarters in Colombo. In that year there were a hundred and five cases reported—marginally more than in the previous year, substantially more than in the years that followed. I point this out to the senior official who has agreed to see me in his office. His name is Jayakumar Thangavelu.
“There are violations of human rights which we cannot deny,”
Thangavelu says in reply. “But everything possible is being done to minimize these violations.”
This is boilerplate—a more or less worthless official response. Nothing near everything possible is being done to counter police torture, and the figures just given to me are equally without meaning: We know they are a fraction of the total, but we do not know what fraction. I know this, Thangavelu knows this, and Thangavelu knows that I know it. Still we proceed, making our way toward a more realistic conversation, at the point of which we go off the record.
Thangavelu is an attorney, and he is also the deputy inspector-general of the legal department at police headquarters. This makes him the top official addressing the question of official torture in Sri Lanka. It also makes him part of what we can call “the human rights community.” He is familiar with all the others—the lawyers, those active in civil society organizations. He seems to be recognized as a fundamentally principled man, but a man with an official job to do. He has, indeed, been more forthright with me than I had anticipated he would be.
The first comprehensive effort to record police torture cases in Sri Lanka was completed in 2001. It was carried out by the Asian Legal Resources Commission, a nongovernmental organization affiliated with the human rights commission that sent me to Sri Lanka. The A. L. R. C. published another such report in 2004. A year later it produced a one hundred and eighty page document that was submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. This last was an “alternative report”—a report intended to strike closer to the truth than the document the government submitted to the C. A. T.
There are other such studies. In 2007 a global survey conducted by an American foundation found Sri Lanka among the world’s two or three worst offenders in the matter of official torture. At midyear the Asian Human Rights Commission reported that violations were escalating, not declining. The more comprehensive of such documents are freighted with data. There are figures, definitions, criteria, legal standards. Still, we do not appear to have any precise measure of the phenomenon: how many cases, the nature of these cases, where they are concentrated, and so on. We know only this, and it must be enough for now: Abuse, torture, and the attendant corruption is pervasive in Sri Lanka. And it is not precisely a problem in and of itself, something to be considered and addressed on its own, so much as it is a symptom of a larger, deeper, and yet more pervasive problem.
Thangavelu said toward the end of our conversation, when the files and records had been put away, “You cannot say there is no hope. The human resources are superb. You can turn around the mentality in a couple of years if you really concentrate on it.”
Thangavelu described the problem in two words. “The mentality,” he said. One hears numerous other ways of expressing the thought. But what does “the mentality” actually mean? In all the reports, studies, case studies, and so on it is not visible. But what Thangavelu implied is correct: Human rights abuses in Sri Lanka are finally a reflection of the way people think, the complex of assumptions we can call the structure of their consciousness.
THE PSYCHIATRIST I KNEW IN COLOMBO was named Rajiv Weerasundera. He was young, slim, composed, well-spoken. And he was dedicated to his practice, which was located at one of the major hospitals.
One afternoon when he had finished, Weerasundera came in his car to meet me at the corner of Thilaka Gardens, where the little lane meets Stanley Tillekeratne Mawatha, the busy commercial street. We drove to a nearby coffee shop to talk. I wanted to hear Weerasundera’s impressions of this question—the structure of consciousness among Sri Lankans, how (if it were possible to generalize in such a way) they think. And immediately our conversation was about one thing more than any other: looking up and looking down, as we came to put it. One does not look across in Sri Lanka, as to an equal. One looks up or one looks down when one is looking at others. This is why Sri Lanka is a society of gestures. Encounters begin with signifiers as to who is above and who is below.
“This was created a long time ago,” Weerasundera said. “Sri Lanka was ruled by kings. Looking up and looking down began then, and now it is still with us. The kings had special families around them”—he meant the mudaliyars—“and now they are there as this landed gentry. But instead of an old, aristocratic flow of power, we have a system with a ‘new aristocracy,’ if you like. These are the politicians. Indeed, a lot of politicians’ children are taking to politics, rather like the old succession. You get power, you get respected in society.”
Pre-modern hierarchy combined with modern power, power as the source of respect: The colonial period did not alter this feature of life in Sri Lanka. The British merely created “the brown Britisher.” In his last book, Late Style, Edward Said wrote of this phenomenon à propos the Middle East, but it holds as well for many other places:
Identity is the process by which the stronger culture, and the more developed society, imposes itself violently upon those who, by the same identity process, are decreed to be a lesser people. Imperialism is the export of identity.
This is Sri Lanka. This is “the brown Britisher.” Weerasundera said, “‘The black white man,’ or loosely translated, ‘the brown-skinned Britisher,’ is to some extent the foundation on which our hierarchical system is built.” This is what Said meant. It is a common feature of the personality, notably (but not only) among the prominent, in developing countries that were once imperial possessions.
The British, then—or, more properly, the British presence—added the element of self-contempt to the old hierarchical way of thinking. This is among the essential consequences of the colonial experience, it has always seemed to me. Then the politicians institutionalized contempt in a modernizing country. They created the internal “other.” There had been a chance, before and immediately after independence, to overcome this, to see other Ceylonese as equals—to look across. Then the lines of sight were fixed again, so that there was only above and below no matter where one stood in society.
This is “the mentality” to which Thangavelu referred. Police brutality, the abuse of ordinary Sri Lankans in police stations across the island, must be understood, first of all, as an expression of it. So is the indifference to this treatment among most middle-class Sri Lankans: It happens to “them,” to “the others,” not to “us.”
The police, as everyone knows, are ordinary people themselves. But they serve as the guards at the lower gates leading to those in power—those designated as being above. This is their identity. The police stand on the lowest rung of power and are the extension of power downward into the lower strata of society. Acting in such a role, they are also the clearest, most naked expression of the self-contempt that is now part of the hierarchical consciousness.
SHANTHI, THE YOUNG, IDEALISTIC attorney who left the legal profession, was working with a human rights group in Panadura, a seaside town near Colombo, when I met her. One day she listed the kinds of abuse recounted by people who walked into the group’s offices.
She said, “Fabrication of charges, illegal arrest and detention, torture, harassment, intimidation, extra-judicial killings—we have cases supporting all of these. Most of the people we deal with are from marginalized sections of society. They are poor. They are from remote areas.”
Thus does hierarchy have multiple dimensions. It reflects class and status, economic position, and also geography. Colombo matters most; elsewhere matters less. The south matters: It is where money is made and spent and where government (such as it is) conducts its business. It is where people can still try to live orderly lives: There is enough illusion left for this. The north and the east are different: They are poor, violent, and remote. They are where the war is.
Accounts of police torture, Shanthi said, revealed common practices. Most common is to hang a prisoner by his wrists and beat him with steel pipes. (Steel pipes of roughly the same description are mentioned again and again in the accounts of torture victims, as if they are government issue in all police stations.) Sometimes the injury sustained by the hanging prisoner is apparent—bruises, contusions, broken bones—and sometimes not. Damaged organs (kidneys, intestines) can lead to death. Hearing is lost. There can be brain concussions. Or the soul dies: Psychological trauma is extremely common.
In all of this, the police are supported by the judges, who rule regardless of the evidence. Then come the lawyers, who work with the police and the judges to get cases assigned to them. Then come the doctors, who provide the necessary medical reports so that the police, the judges, and the lawyers can continue to avoid all responsibility to the public—to those below.
“The system works as a network,” Shanthi said.
The kind of collusion Shanthi described is more than self-sustaining: It reinforces itself, it multiplies and spreads, it turns a corrupted system into the system as it is, the system itself.
Shanthi said, “Even from the time I was a child it was known: If you go to the police station you’re going to get tortured. It was known, but no one would do anything about it.”
So brutality becomes a certainty. No basic rights under the law and no legal defense are also certainties. A psychology arises from these known things. Among ordinary people it is a psychology of fear. The police and the courts are to be avoided: They are places of danger. Among the police, the judges, the lawyers, and the physicians—in the network as Shanthi called it—a psychology of perverse power is advanced. The network is distant from society—autonomous, unaccountable, opaque, unbound by the very law it is supposed to stand for and deliver to Sri Lankans. The essence of this psychology is hierarchical. Ordinary people are below, the network is above: Ordinary people seem to believe this just as the network does.
SHANTHI AND I SAT ONE SUNDAY afternoon in the dim cool of the reception room of her family’s home. It was a pleasant house, simple and uncluttered, but modernization had overtaken it: The noise of the traffic outside sometimes made conversation difficult, and the odor of fumes from the road was constant. I sat below the picture of Christ, the one depicting the sacred heart. And it reminded me: Shanthi’s horror at what she had seen in the legal system, from top to bottom, and then in the human rights group, was mixed. It was the horror of an attorney who honored legal principle, but it was also moral, the horror of someone whose ordinary sense of decency and dignity had been betrayed.
Shanthi had said torture was a matter of common knowledge when she was a child.
“When was that?” I wanted to pin her down and could not guess her age.
“In the 1980s. Police torture was a fact of life by then.”
Thangavelu had said roughly the same thing. He had been in the Criminal Investigations Department for more than twenty years, beginning in the early 1970s, and remembered a different time.
“My boss, whose investigative skills were appreciated even by Scotland Yard—his belief was that if you lay even a finger on a suspect you’re no investigator. This was standard then.”
“When did things begin to deteriorate?”
“With the escalation of conflict in the country. Eighty-two, eighty-three.”
“What did this look like as you watched it? Can you recall?”
“The standard at C. I. D. was not observed by everybody. There had been proper monitoring of junior officers by senior. This is another serious cause. The responsibility of senior officers in monitoring became another serious problem—again, commencing in the 1980s.”
The war, then, induced a culture of violence that went beyond the acknowledged war in the acknowledged place—out there, in the north and the east, not here in the south. A war commonly considered an ethnic war became a war against ordinary Sri Lankans—a war made by those above on those below. This second war was a war waiting to happen. It is the wider war in Sri Lanka, and there is nothing ethnic about it. It is violence rooted in psychology and, ultimately, self-image.
A certain amount of work has already been done on the psychological effects of both of Sri Lanka’s wars—the war considered ethnic and the other, undeclared war conducted in police stations, lower courts, and jail cells. A detailed study of the impact of the war in the north and the east was published in the late-1980s, and other investigations followed it. In the 1990s came research projects on the lasting psychological damage sustained by torture victims, casualties of the other war, the war from which Sri Lanka averts its eyes.
The lists of these effects are long in both cases—and, not surprisingly, quite similar. They include a variety of psychiatric disorders—prolonged grief, clinical depression, hysteria, panic attacks, and so on. A study of one hundred and sixty ex-detainees, published in the late-1990s, listed these symptoms as prevalent among them: deep sadness (139 of the 160), fatigue (139), nervousness (135), “recurrent intrusive memories” (128), memory impairment or poor concentration (125), loss of appetite (110), and so on through low self-esteem (92), nightmares (91), thoughts of suicide (61), and social withdrawal (61 of the 160). Eighty-six percent of those studied were diagnosed with what psychiatrists term post-traumatic stress disorder.
One set of disorders—a variety of them I have taken together—appears to be common among those traumatized by the official war and those traumatized by police officers, judges, and lawyers. A psychiatrist who studied the Tamil communities affected by the war in the north and the east uses the term “existential fear,” and it is very apt. The terms used to describe this condition are, again, many. Prominent among them are uncertainty, feelings of helplessness, one or another degree of terror, one or another degree of disorientation and anxiety.
This set of disorders was evident in all the people I met who had been victims of police torture. Relating their experience while in the custody of the police made them visibly nervous. Often they cried and could not go on. Often they were inarticulate, given to long silences, incapable of eye contact, and displaying what psychologists call flat affect, having an almost impenetrably vacant expression. They betrayed a sense of confusion so total that it is difficult to describe. They did not seem to know where they stood in the world. It was as if the world they knew had fallen away, as if they had glimpsed an abyss, as if they had discovered the absence of any limit in our capacity to inflict upon one another “useless suffering,” as Emmanuel Lévinas, the late French philosopher, once put it.
This is the existential fear noted by Daya Somasundaram in Scarred Minds, his study of the Tamils. I single out this condition among the long list of disorders among victims of official violence not because it is any harder for the individual to bear than other disorders. It may or may not be: Extreme suffering always has a dimension that is, for the sufferer, infinite. I single out existential fear because the disorders that comprise it are all related to a perception and experience of power, especially the use of power that is arbitrary, so that it is unknowable and in a certain sense totalized. To suffer fear engendered by displays of unpredictable, unknowable power is now part of what it means to be Sri Lankan. It is the trap, as my jurist friend put it, into which Sri Lankans have fallen.
To live in such a state is to live within a kind of collective neurosis, a disorder that arose from the incessant violence of the 1980s and 1990s. It is impossible to date the initial appearance of this phenomenon among the general public. Neither is it easy to discuss with Sri Lankans, since fear of this kind contributes to the cult of silence with which Sri Lankans also live.
“The real situation in this country is off the record,” a senior official in Colombo, an official I cannot name, once said to me. “The real situation is that people are not worried about what happens to others until it comes to their backyard. They’re not interested. This wasn’t there in the past—twenty, thirty years back. But now violence is so rampant people don’t want to get involved.”
As I talked with Rajiv Weerasundera in the coffee shop in Nugegoda, it occurred to me that in his practice he would be able to lift the lid on this silence. Surely his patients would articulate their distress over the violence all around them in such a setting.
“No.”
“You hear nothing at all of the violence, the war, the disappearances?
“It has been twenty-three years now. Take me. I basically grew up with it.”
Then Weerasundera mentioned that he traveled to Manchester every year and practiced for six or seven weeks there, in a clinic. He said, “I see no basic difference in the concerns of my patients there and here.”
I was very puzzled. Weerasundera seemed untroubled by the calm among his Sri Lankan patients. He described a detachment that seemed almost grotesquely unhealthy. The essence of what is called social therapy, or in Europe institutional therapy, is that a patient’s condition must be considered in the context of his or her circumstances. There are circumstances in which it is psychologically healthier to be disturbed rather than becalmed.
“How do you account for such a condition of…”
I searched for the word.
“… insensitivity? It reflects a pathology, surely.”
“They are not insensitive,” the young psychiatrist replied. “I say ‘desensitized.’ It’s different. ‘Insensitivity’ implies callousness. To be desensitized implies a sense of acceptance. ‘It happened. So what?’ This is the thought. I hear nothing that could be related to the conflict. Marriage, work, debts: This is what I hear about, just as in England. It is what I mean by ‘desensitized.’ The possibility of being killed by a bomb is there in the city every day we go to work. But it’s only recently we are able to sit and talk about it at all.”
The consequence of this state is similar to that of existential fear: It is more than a consequence born by the individual alone. To be desensitized is now typically part of being Sri Lankan, just as the fear is. It is collective. It has been made into a means of survival.
A FEW CASES—I HAVE NOTED one or two already and will describe others in later chapters—can illustrate just what it is Sri Lankans have chosen to turn away from. The following three are matters of record now.
The Case of Angaline Roshana
“THE LAWS OF THE COUNTRY ARE TOO WEAK.” This observation was not made by one of Sri Lanka’s uncounted victims of police abuse or official torture. Nor did a lawyer defending a victim in court articulate the thought. The remark belongs to a police officer who was, at the very moment he made it, in the act of torturing an ordinary citizen. Weak laws were the reason Angaline Roshana, who was twenty-five at the time, had to be assaulted in police custody and deprived of her legal rights. This was a police inspector’s reasoning on December 4, 2000, when Angaline was in police custody in the surburban town of Narahenpita, in the hub of central Colombo (zone 8). The law had to be broken to keep the law.
As it happened, in Angaline’s case the law did not prove to be too weak. She eventually won a fundamental rights case in the Supreme Court and, much later, a High Court judgment against the officers charged with assaulting her. Her story, then, ends with justice being served. But it is a rare story, an exception in Sri Lanka that regrettably proves the rule.
Angaline was at home on the evening of December 3, 2000, when at around 7:30pm, a group of men in civilian clothes arrived in a private vehicle and forced her to accompany them to the police station. No reason was given. When Angaline’s family protested, questioning the identity of the men, one of them (a man who later turned out to be the Officer in Charge (OIC) of the Narahenpita Police Station) threatened to break their teeth, and forced Angaline into the vehicle before speeding away.
The police station was not their immediate destination. Instead, Angaline was taken to the home of an affluent local woman for whom she had previously worked as a washerwoman. The woman had complained to the police that some jewelry had been stolen and had accused Angaline of the crime. Among the missing items was a watch, which the woman said was worth half a million rupees — about five thousand American dollars.
The woman accusing Angaline was a lawyer and appeared to be familiar with the police officers — perhaps by way of her legal work. While the woman, her family, and the police officers drank and socialized, Angaline was forced to search for the watch over a period of four to five hours.
Having denied any knowledge of the theft, and having failed to find the missing property, Angaline was then taken to the police station shortly after midnight. There she was detained overnight, severely tortured, and forced to sign a confession. Throughout the course of her detention, the police officers frequently threatened to hang her up and beat her; these threats were usually made when the Angaline’s former employer visited the police station.
Mr. Sanjeewa, a lawyer from the Human Rights Institute, and Dr. Nali Swaris visited Angeline while in detention, and demanded that Angaline’s legal rights be observed and that she be produced before the court without further delay. OIC Shelton Saley supposedly laughed sarcastically, and remarked; “the laws of the country are too weak. We are breaking the law to strengthen it.”
The act of taking a person into custody, without showing any police identification or wearing the police uniform, amounts to kidnapping. Moreover, Roshana was not informed about the reasons for her kidnapping or arrest. Furthermore, she was tortured to obtain a confession, and she is still being illegally detained.
Only on the following day, December 5th, did Angaline appear in the magistrate court. On the magistrate’s orders, the Judicial Medical Officer (JMO) conducted an official medical examination of Angaline’s injuries. The JMO’s formal report identified seven contusions; the left shoulder, left upper arm (front and back), right shoulder, left and right buttocks, and upper left thigh. The report also indicates that Angaline’s injuries were two-four days old, and caused with a blunt object consistent with the assault. His report is dated 7th December 2000.
At the trial Roshana herself, and several other persons gave evidence. The police officer also gave evidence, accepting the arrest but denying that any torture had taken place. The trial was protracted and lasted for a period of almost six years. The High Court judge held that the charges were proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Having received legal assistance from the Asian Human Rights Commission from the time of her arrest onward, Angaline took her case to two courts. The Supreme Court ruled in June of 2002 that Saley, the OIC accused of her torture had violated Angaline’s fundamental rights by way of torture and illegal detention; compensation of 100,000 rupees was awarded.
In apparent retaliation, the police subsequently charged Angaline with theft in the magistrate’s court — a case that was dismissed for lack of any evidence. In July of 2007, the court found OIC Saley and police Constable, Stanley Tissera, guilty of committing a gross human rights violation against Angaline. It is believed to be only the third such conviction under the UN Convention against Torture (CAT) Act of 1994, to which Sri Lanka is a state party. The act calls for a mandatory sentence of seven years’ “rigorous imprisonment,” or hard labour. Both officers were so sentenced; an additional year was added for each officer in lieu of fines in the amount of ten thousand rupees.
Angeline Roshana and those who supported her can count her long ordeal a victory. What is the truth at the core of this outcome?
Angaline triumphed, in effect, by subverting what must be recognized as the existing order. She did this by upholding the law, not by breaking it. So does her case lead us to the paradox at the heart of the Sri Lankan legal system — a paradox perfectly captured in the police inspector’s remark to Angalin’s family friend while she was in detention.
The paradox is very simply this: Those charged with enforcing the law in Sri Lanka are the very people who least respect it. Those who are supposed to uphold the law are the very people who often, and dangerously, break it. At the core of their reasoning is a distinction between law and order that is not valid.
The convictions Angaline won under the CAT Act are to be welcomed. But given the established record of the nation’s police and courts, three convictions under these laws over the period of thirteen years is simply not enough. The police inspector was wrong: Sri Lanka’s laws require strengthening, certainly, but as Angaline demonstrated, they are sufficient to deliver justice. It is their enforcement that is critically weak.
The Case of Palitha Tissa Kumara
EXCESS IS A COMMON FEATURE of the Sri Lankan justice system. In one form or another one finds it in almost all the research one may conduct into the workings of the police, the lawyers, the judges, and the doctors. There is violence, there is abuse of a defendant’s rights, there are threats and intimidation, there is false testimony, there are excessive sentences, there are unwarranted delays. Every so often we find a case that reminds us of the pathology underlying these forms of excess. At its root, the problem of injustice in Sri Lanka is a psychological problem. If we look at this carefully, there are suggestions that the contempt authority displays for ordinary citizens, are a form of self-contempt.
The case of Palitha Thissa Kumara is such a case. There is no other way to explain some of its grosser excesses but by way of a psychological analysis.
Some of the facts in Palitha’s case will by now be familiar in our brief readings of other cases. The case begins on February 3rd, 2004.
Palitha was a craftsman from Matugama in the district of Kalutara. He was skilled in the arts of painting and stone carving. On the morning of February 3rd, six police officers arrived at his home and asked him to come to the station in Welipenna, a nearby town to paint the police emblem on the stationhouse in preparation for Sri Lanka’s celebration of its day of independence. Palitha agreed. Any aspect of Palitha’s encounter with the local police end at this point in his story.
Before the officers and Palitha reached the jeep in which they were to drive to the station, one officer turned and, out of nowhere, pistol-whipped Palitha to the point of causing an open wound on his chin. The police thereupon threw Palitha to the ground and assaulted him further before piling him into their vehicle.
On the way to the station the police stopped to arrest another man, known as Galathaga Don Shantha Kumar. Don Shanta would soon become a prominent figure in Palitha’s case. He, too, was tortured; he, too, was accused of plotting robberies.
At the police station, an all too predictable round of torture began. According to Palitha’s account, the police officer who had pistol-whipped Palitha beat him with a cricket pole on his neck, arms, head, spine, and knees. He then began demanding — again, out of nowhere — that Palitha surrender the bombs and weapons in his possession — bombs and weapons he had planned to use in the armed robberies he had been plotting. Don Shantha was there. The police officer made it known that the same would be coming to him.
The torture continued for approximately two hours, according to Palitha’s later testimony, during which time Palitha repeatedly denied any knowledge of bombs, weapons, or robbery plots. The abuse stopped only when about eight other officers intervened, one of them taking the wicket from the violent officer’s hands.
The assaulting officer then brought another detainee into the room. His name was Thummaya Hakuru Sarath, and he suffered from tuberculosis. The officer then issued what must stand as one of the most grotesque orders in the long, often-grotesque history of police abuse in Sri Lanka. Sarath was to expectorate into Palitha’s mouth so as to infect him. More than a year later, when the matter was in dispute, Sarath gave a statement confirming that he had been forced to act in a manner deliberately intended to contaminate Lalith. It also emerged the Sarath, too, had been beaten — a victim himself.
Unable to stand, in and out of consciousness, Palitha remained in a jail cell for several days, during which more torture ensued. He was finally taken to hospital — or, rather, hospitals, for there were two, both of which refused to admit him (one refusing twice) despite injuries that were by this time evident.
Back at the jail cell, the assaulting officer produced a grenade. Palitha was forced to leave his thumbprint in wax, whereupon the print was transferred to the grenade. The officer had already forced Palitha to sign a confession of guilt without reading it to him.
It is now the 6th of February, three days after Palitha was taken from his home. He is taken back to one of the hospitals that had refused him admission. There “a man wearing a pair of shorts,” according to court documents, signed some papers. Palitha was then returned to the police station and later that day made a brief pass through a magistrate court before being admitted at a third hospital — a prison hospital in the town of Kalutara.
Palitha remained in prison until his release on bail in July 1,2004 , after 4 months and twenty five days in jail. But during that time, he had filed two cases. One was a fundamental rights case alleging that the police had violated his rights as guaranteed in the constitution. The other, filed by the Attorney General in High Court, charged Kaluwanhandi Garwin Premalal Silva, a sub-Inspector and LPalitha’s principal assailant while in police custody, with causing torture by beating him with a pole and forcing a T.B. Patient to spit into his mouth.
Predictably enough, the threats against Palitha and his family began almost immediately. In mid-June he was offered five hundred thousand rupees, about five thousand American dollars, to withdraw his cases. In two separate incidents, he and his family received messages via third parties that his wife and child would be killed if he did not cooperate by dropping his complaints.
The court proceedings in Palitha’s cases are excessive in their own right. The Supreme Court heard Palitha’s fundamental rights case during several sessions in the course of 2005. The man in the shorts at the hospital, who had routinely signed police papers, turned out to be an assistant judicial medical officer, or A.J.M.O. His report on Palitha listed thirty-two separate injuries on all parts of the body, from scalp to feet. Among them were lacerations, multiple contusions, tinnitus in one ear, and a fractured anklebone. All but the fractures were judged “non-grievous.” Yes, the doctor noted in his report, these injuries could have been sustained as the victim claimed they were.
The police presented an entirely different story. Palitha had been armed with a grenade when they arrived at his house, and it had been necessary to subdue him. The injuries sustained reflected the use of the minimum force required under the circumstances. There had been no torture; there had been no incident involving Sarath, the man with TB.
Palitha won a modest victory in his fundamental rights case. On February 17th, 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that, given the danger Palitha presented when he was arrested — meaning the grenade and the threat he would set it off — the violence at the time of his arrest was justified. The appearance in magistrate’s court, although required by law within twenty-four hours of arrest, was lawful. However, the court accepted Palitha’s account of torture at the police station and ruled that his constitutional rights had been violated. The judgment — excessive in its paucity, one might say — called for restitution in the amount of five thousand rupees from the police officer who assaulted Palitha — about fifty dollars — and twenty-five thousand rupees from the government as damages and compensation for costs.
Those supporting Palitha’s case, despite its disproportionate award and the partial findings in the police officer’s favor, counted the Supreme Court ruling an advance. But an unusual thing occurred some months later. On October of 2006 the High Court found in the police officer’s favour. Sub-Inspector Silva was acquitted of all charges of torture — the judge ruling, in effect, that violence to the extent evident in Palitha’s medical report was not excessive. The High Court judgment is, at this writing, on appeal.
We can but speculate, at this writing, as to Sub-Inspector Silva’s motivations in his handling of Palitha’s case. It may have been that a crime had been committed and he was desperate to find a perpetrator to demonstrate his efficiency. Such often occurs. But it is not clear in this case. What is clearer are aspects of the case that require no further evidence.
There is a pathology of disturbance in Palitha’s case. The excess of violence — against three detainees, not only Palitha — is to be seen in numerous other instances. It is, indeed, not the worst case on record in this respect. The attempt to pass on a potentially lethal disease is another question. It indicates a depth of contempt that requires professional, clinical consideration.
The problem of injustice in Sri Lanka is, of course, a legal matter. There are also clear questions of a political and sociological nature. A case such as Palitha Tissa Kumara’s, however, urges the prominent inclusion a psychological perspective. The problems associated with a dysfunctional police apparatus and a similarly impaired judicial system cannot be solved without reference to questions such as contempt and self-contempt, the self and the “other” in Sri Lanka, and the consciousness of hierarchy that infuses every human relationship with a dimension of “above” and “below.” It is such complexities of consciousness that lead police officers to act as Sub-Inspector Silva did — and judges to defend him as they did in two separate courts.
The case of Lalith Rajapakse
IT IS COMMON, when making one’s way among the many victims of official abuse and human rights violations in Sri Lanka, to find people who have been waiting for three, four, or five years for their cases to be decided. Injustice may arrive swiftly — without notice, within a few seconds, out of nowhere. Then the years go by as the victim seeks redress. It becomes, in the end, another form of victimization, another form of injustice, not unrelated to the matter of official impunity. One is made a victim of abuse, and then one is made a victim again in the course of seeking to rectify the wrong.
Lalith Rajapakse was nineteen on the night of April 18, 2002. He is, at this writing, twenty-four, physically impaired and psychologically traumatized and still awaiting justice in the events that ensued.
On the night in question, several police officers arrived at the door of a friend’s house, wherein Lalith was sleeping. For no reason evident to him at the time he was awakened, arrested, and taken to the police station in Kandana, a town about 20 kilometers north of Colombo. The torture that was to become central to his case began immediately: Lalith was beaten even in the jeep into which he was bundled outside his friend’s house.
The U. N. Human Rights Committee later detailed Lalith’s treatment at the police station: “He was forced to lie on a bench and beaten with a pole; held under water for prolonged periods; beaten on the soles of his feet with blunt instruments; and books were placed on his head which were then hit with blunt instruments.”
These kinds of torture are familiar to those who study police practices in Sri Lanka. The last is intended to inflict internal injuries without leaving external marks. In Lalith’s case, his grandfather eventually came to the police station and found him, slumped and lifeless, in a cell. He lay unconscious in a hospital for fifteen days afterward and was unable to speak coherently for nearly a month. He remained in treatment for another month; thereafter, the psychological stress prevented him from work. For two years Lalith lived in hiding, and he and his family survived on charity.
Three charges were filed against Lalith, and the torture was intended to extract a confession validating them. But none held up. There were two allegations of theft, which collapsed nearly a year and a half after they were filed, when it turned out the supposed victims of robbery had never claimed Lalith had stolen anything from them. The third charge was for allegedly obstructing the police in the discharge of their duties. It was not quite three years before a magistrate court acquitted Lalith of this charge.
Lalith took action on his own part. In May of 2002, just out of the hospital, he filed a case in the Sri Lankan Supreme Court charging that his fundamental rights, as guaranteed under the constitution, had been violated. His grandfather was a party to the case. A few months later the Attorney General, in apparent response to pressure from the U. N. Human Rights Committee, ordered an inquiry into the events that had led Lalith and his family into the courts. This led to a case in the High Court.
But the delays and irregularities have been many. Chief among them has been the pressure applied to force Lalith to withdraw from the legal process.
Threats against Lalith and his family have been more or less constant. And there are other details — bizarre, petty details that reflect certain routines the police often follow. A month after Lalith filed his fundamental rights case, a local fish trader (and a longtime acquaintance of Lalith’s grandfather) was asked by the Kandana police to poison the fish the grandfather next bought. The fishmonger was also asked to let the police know where the grandfather liked to drink, so that his liquor, too, might be poisoned.
A few months later came threats to Lalith’s life. These arrived by way of anonymous figures claiming to speak for the Kandana police — a claim the police denied. All the while, the police officers alleged to have tortured Lalith were permitted to continue serving in their customary posts. It was not until December of 2004 that Sub Inspector S.I. Peiris in Kandana and two other officers were barred from service and transferred. Sub Inspector Peiris was also indicted under the Torture Act of Sri Lanka.
Lalith’s efforts to pursue justice have been more successful than those of many other Sri Lankans. And it is because of this partial success that his case affords us a particular window into the judicial system, its workings, and the limits of international authority.
In May of 2005, the U. N. Human Rights Committee accepted Lalith’s appeal, overruling the objections of the Sri Lankan government as to the admissibility of the case on the grounds that his human rights were violated. A little more than a year later, the committee ruled in Laith’s favour: “The delay in the disposal of the Supreme Court case and the criminal case amounted to an unreasonably prolonged delay,” the committee noted in its decision.
This represented a significant victory for Lalith, for his family, and for those human- and legal-rights organizations that have supported Lalith since he first filed his cases. But at this writing, in September of 2007, neither the Supreme Court case nor the criminal case against Sub Inspector Peiris has been settled.
Justice delayed, as the age-old principle holds, is justice denied. Yet for many Sri Lankans, justice delayed is all there is in the best of outcomes: It is a rare case that is accepted at the U. N. or by any other international organization devoted to upholding the rule of law.
Most of the time, the universe of the law ends at the national borders.
Lalith’s cases thus underscore a very uncomfortable truth in the struggle for justice in Sri Lanka: Even when cases of abuse and human-rights violations are taken up at the international level, the impunity with which the Sri Lankan authorities have long acted can still prevail.
In September of 2006, with Lalith’s cases still pending (along with many others), Chief Justice Sarath Silva sought to elevate this impunity to the level of legal principle. Once again, the thought appeared to be that anything was permissible so long as it had the appearance of proper procedure.
Chief Justice Silva’s ruling came in the case of a man charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government — a case connected with the war between the government and the Liberation Tigers. The defendant, having been sentenced to ten years of “R. I.,” or rigorous imprisonment — that is, hard labour — successfully appealed to the U. N.’s Human Rights Committee. The committee ruled in the defendant’s favour — a ruling Sri Lanka is legally committed to respecting. Silva, in an especially tortured instance of contorted legal reasoning, responded by invoking “the sovereignty of the People” to assert that Sri Lanka was, in fact, not bound to respect the U.N.’s rulings, despite being a signatory to the relevant covenants!
Among human-rights and legal-rights advocates and activists, the 2006 decision is considered a landmark in the all but complete corrosion of Sri Lankan justice.
SHANTHI SAID, THAT SUNDAY afternoon in her reception room, “The attitude of society, and the judiciary, is that if you’re detained for committing a crime you deserve to be tortured. It is an unwritten rule.”
There is something of fundamental importance in this thought. A certain consciousness is necessary to believe, in the way Shanthi described, in the validity of institutionalized torture of the kind that plagues Sri Lanka. It is the same state of mind one finds among the victims of violence themselves—the poor in remote areas, as Shanthi put it, those below. To accept torture is to accept the use of power as it is now exercised. It is to accept that those with power are sequestered and that one ought not impose on the space—public space in a long-ago time—that they claim. In this way it is also to accept the “above” and “below” of Sri Lanka, the hierarchy buried deep within.
There is ultimately a responsibility attached to becoming “desensitized” and to accepting the notion that torture is somehow just—an altogether indefensible idea by any modern standard (with the possible exception of the Bush administration in the United States). It is a passive position, this acceptance, but it serves to enable torture—and therefore it is to participate in it. The passive participant, after all, lives in the order, grotesque and disorderly as it may ultimately be, created by the torture.
In the end, acceptance of this kind awards one the status of victimhood. One joins the victims by becoming one, so making Sri Lanka a nation made mostly of the victimized, whether they exercise power, or suffer from its exercise, or whether they watch in fearful silence.
