Jo Baker, Journalist & Programme Coordinator, Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong
As President Mahinda Rajapaksa speaks of ushering Sri Lankans into a new era of peace, a slight, bespectacled man in his sixties watches him from across an ocean with the weariness of a man who has tried and failed to call his bluff.
MCM Iqbal was secretary to two of Sri Lanka’s ‘truth commissions’, presidential commissions of inquiry into the 30,000 or more forced disappearances that took place in the late eighties and early nineties in the south, during a dirty war that many believe has yet to run its course. He knows more than most about the skeletons that are locked away in the governmental closet; enough, he believes, for him to no longer be safe in his home country.
“I still remember when Rajapaksa was on the way to a UN session with photos of torture victims and was caught going through customs,” he recalls, during a recent visit to the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. “You know, as a minister he used to be at the front of the struggle against these incidents. Now I would consider his regime as one of the world’s worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances.”
Back in 1994 Iqbal was working as a senior government administrator when he was asked aboard. It was the first commission of its kind — the result of an election pledge by new president, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga — and was split up to cover three zones. Iqbal¡¦s job at the central zone inquiry force meant setting up a system that could allow a handful of officers to document thousands of possible atrocities across four provinces. The team, made up of Iqbal, the chairman and some of their two-dozen support staff, would travel around the country setting up shop for open questioning sessions. The idea was that they would compile a report for the president on the number and circumstances of the disappearances, who was responsible for them and how they should be charged, with a final analysis of how, legally, things had been allowed to get so bad. It was expected that the report would lead to legal action against the alleged killers; the public had been promised as much.
But the set up was grueling. For two years the small panel would spend two-week stretches in back-to-back interviews, and at night, away from their families they would dictate and record the cases they’d heard that day. “I had worked in public service for forty years, twenty of them in courts, so this procedure of listening to complaints was not new to me, but it was harder in the sense that some of them touched me,” Iqbal admits. “Sometimes I felt like sobbing. But my task at the time was to lead the evidence: what happened, who came, was there enough light for you to identify them, did you try to stop them?”
Iqbal remembers many of the stories, but he gives one example; not one of the worst, he adds. According to a woman they heard from in Badulla in the nineties, local police had arrived at her house in the night and taken away two of her three sons; she remembers running, screaming after the jeep. At the police station the following morning the officers denied having arrested the boys, but the woman made such a commotion that her sons heard and started shouting. She waited all day on the verandah, hoping for access. Yet when the night shift officers arrived, they invited her back into the police station, and they gang raped her.
Iqbal says that the women said she could hear her sons shouting throughout the ordeal. “I can still remember, she narrated what the five did to her, and after that she was almost dead from exhaustion,” he recalls. “But she went home and she complained to the elders who couldn¡¦t help her, and then finally she came to us.”
This act cost her. A few days after her testimony the same officers picked up her remaining son for a robbery. Little could be done for her two older boys–by then almost certainly dead–but the commission chairman was able to contact the magistrate and help prove that the police were framing the 17-year-old for theft. “She came running to the commission with her son, crying, and laying on the floor shouting thank you,” he remembers. “All we could tell her was that she better take her son and get out of the area.”
This was one of the more rewarding outcomes. After two years in the central zone and more work with a follow-up commission, Iqbal helped write the report, and says that though some of the cases were clear-cut, it was not made public (parts of it would be published in 2002, but without the names of those implicated). “We thought we had enough materials, we thought that this will at least send a signal to prevent this sort of thing happening in the future; that all victims would get compensation and at least some perpetrators would be punished,” says Iqbal. “But the compensation paid was a pittance for most: 15,000 rupees for a young boy ranging to 150,000 for a public servant. Hardly any of the perpetrators were punished.”
Not yet disheartened, Iqbal took a job with the National Human Rights Commission and the US-based Asia Foundation, logging the same cases in a database and lecturing on human rights. Still, many of those implicated continued to hold high-profile positions. The biggest blow then came when members of the National Human Rights Commission, considered relatively independent, were replaced. The new staff were appointed by the Rajapaksa’s government, and according to Iqbal they had different priorities; the move was also criticized in international press. “It had become a political commission,” he remembers. “I still remember the chairman, the late Justice Ramanathan, telling me to abandon [our work]. To use the exact words, he said: ‘Why are you raking up all the muck?'”
At this point Iqbal resigned. But he would still receive calls from the families of the disappeared, telling him that they saw one perpetrator getting into a car, or that another was still officer in charge of the local police station. It appeared that the files had simply been put aside. “I believe the president did not implement our recommendations because she would have alienated the military and police on whom she depended — terrorism was at its height then and they protected her,” he says.
With no legal reforms made and very few held to account, disappearances continued in Sri Lanka. In 2006 17 locals working for a French NGO were notoriously massacred in a tightly controlled military zone. Scandinavian monitors pointed the finger at security forces but no one was charged. Iqbal refused the invitation to join another such inquiry.
However in 2007 when a group of international observers (the International Group of Eminent Persons) arrived to monitor the new commission’s work, the UN office in Sri Lanka suggested that they take on Iqbal as an adviser. He remembers dusting off his old files and indulging in a bit of straight talking. “I said, look at this list of perpetrators: So-and-so is now commander in chief there, So-and-so is minister of this district and the president knows and he keeps them there. Now he wants you to start making recommendations?” Three months later, when the observers gave their support for these earlier, buried recommendations (not long before resigning) Iqbal remembers the shock and displeasure from the attorney general and the higher ups. At that point the death threats started again.
“I’d had such calls in the past, but I didn’t take them very seriously, but these were too frequent and sounded a little more genuine,” says Iqbal. “They came to me and my wife, and to me they would say you’ll be killed if you keep working there (with the monitors). Finally the observers’ security services monitored the calls and they said you need to leave immediately”. Late in 2007, without a word to anyone, the Iqbals locked up their house and left the country.
And now from a colder climate, with six months in a refugee camp behind him, a schedule of seminars and workshops ahead and his name carefully removed from the phone book, this reluctant keeper of grisly secrets watches the latest Sri Lankan leader with a weary, wary eye. He has no regrets about the path he took, though it essentially led to exile; but he doubts he can say the same for the president.
“When Rajapaksa came to power he had the option of doing something. He was a minister at the time of all this, he knew the contents of these reports and that nothing was being done,” he says. “He knew who was involved in all the killings, and yet he has put all those people around him, given them positions.”
Last month the president made a speech. In it, he declared that he only wants to look to the future now, that the past, essentially, is dead and buried. This, to MCM Iqbal, is eerily close to the truth.
Man on a mission for women’s justice
For a free man, Nasir Aslam Zahid spends a lot of time in jail. “It does sometimes baffle callers,” says the Pakistani in clipped, wry tones, at the Asian Legal Resource Centre in Hong Kong. “Most of my phone calls these days are taken from prison.”
The former chief justice runs the Legal Aid Office, an organization based out of Central Prison, Karachi, which helps women and children incarcerated across his home province, Sindh. These days he is more worried about the renovation of toilets, administering of medicine and arranging of bail than passing judgments, but both roles have exposed him to the glut of problems facing women in his country: from honour killings and sweatshops, to drug use and the high rate of domestic violence. Also director of the Hamdard School of Law, Zahid has taught some of Pakistan¡¦s top female ministers. Now in his seventies, his decades in the field–and three daughters–have made Zahid a keen observer of the path of women’s rights in Pakistan for at least half of its 61-year history.
It all began with the political trailblazer herself. “I became federal law secretary for Benazir [Bhutto] in ’88; I was part of the small group that got the entire election held,” he says with pride, recalling the landmark election of the country’s first female prime minister. Back then Bhutto had placed Zahid at the head of a small working group called the Commission of Enquiry for Women, which included Asma Jahangir, now head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But if the country¡¦s women had expected a big change with Bhutto’s appointment, Zahid believes that they were let down.
“Firstly, Benazir didn’t call for it, the whole senate did–and when we finished I think just one or two of our recommendations out of 400 were ever implemented,” he remembers of the study, which took the group years to complete. “It was never officially published. If I want to see a copy I have to go to a women’s organization.” Bhutto had two opportunities to make a big change for women, Zahid notes (she was prime minster twice) but under her, he says, there was surprisingly little done.
In fact it was when military chief Pervez Musharraf seized power in 1999 and Zahid had moved from chief justice of the Sindh High Court to a Supreme Court judge that he says some progress came about. Musharraf, who stepped down last year, tripled the number of seats reserved for women in the national assembly (to sixty), and reserved 17 per cent of seats in provincial assemblies, though these would be picked by their parties rather than directly elected. Musharraf’s era also saw the Women’s Protection Bill passed, which brought certain crimes involving women, such as rape, under the penal code rather than religious law. In the old system rape victims could be jailed.
“Before that we had many cases where the man accused his wife of an affair.” Zahid also remembers. “In one case I interviewed a woman in the jail and she told me: ‘I was not well, so husband took me to hospital, and he and his brother would come and see me. One day the brother brought his friend, and the friend stayed outside the door of the room. When they went away, my husband asked me, who was he?’… The woman didn’t know, and the man took a case against her. She remained in jail for three years until she was acquitted.”
As the lone man in a family of women, and married to a doctor, Zahid has long struggled with his country’s views on women, so for him this was a singular triumph. “Now such cases are almost extinct,” he notes, with a deep satisfaction. But he adds that sex outside of marriage remains illegal for women, punishable with up to five years in prison if proven by pregnancy.
When the new government came to power last April, human rights watchdogs noted the boost given to civil and political rights, and many foresaw a similar lift for women. President Asif Ali Zardari is the widow of Benazir Bhutto, assassinated last year, and there are women prominently placed in his party. But a year on, Zahid has yet to see much real change from his place in the field. Though a sexual harassment and domestic violence bill are inching their way slowly through the parliamentary process, with more than 100 girls’ schools in the north demolished last year by religious radicals and an estimated 80 per cent of Pakistani women having experienced domestic violence, is this enough?
“If you are being mistreated by your in-laws or your husband in Pakistan, even now, you will not take this case to the provincial courts,” says Zahid. “Many judges have not been trained or sensitized to gender issues. They say, how is this woman allowed to come to court? The law has been made by men, courts are men, police are all male and when a court case involves a woman, everything is against that woman.” In Karachi prison Zahid estimates that 17 to 20 per cent of the inmates are there for murdering their husbands. “They think it¡¦s their only way out,” he says.
At the Legal Aid Office and its sister organization, the Women Prisoners Welfare Society, partly run by his wife Dr Farhat Nasir Zahid, women are given pro bono representation by sympathetic advocates. Before the LAO, Zahid says, there was little effort made to arrange bail for the women or attend to their needs, and some might not hear news from the outside for months at a time, their cases dragging on for years. Some had their children in jail with them. Under the LAO the prison population has gone from about 700 to 300 inmates, most released early or on bail.
But to be a woman alone in Pakistan is also a daunting prospect, Zahid notes, and he worries about the circumstances his clients go back to. Most of them, female and juvenile, worked in the ‘informal sector’ before they were arrested–in factories or offices where they weren’t registered and received no benefits or protection from labour laws. Many are government-owned, he says. “Social empowerment is important, but unless women are economically empowered they will always remain under the control of the man,” he says. “They will always be vulnerable.”
Out in the country’s rural perimeters women walk a particularly perilous line. Here, tribal customs and radical Muslim principles have evolved apart from the liberalization of the cities, with community elders and religious leaders still preaching a fiery, misogynistic brand of Islam and ruling through unregulated tribal courts. It is from the ‘deep south’ in Balochistan and Sindh that details of horrific honour killings have been escaping. A combination of fear and religious rigour in these areas keeps most cases from court. Zahid remembers a recent seminar on domestic violence, run by an NGO and attended by 17 district judges. “For two to three hours I listened to speeches. When my turn came I said, I would like to know how much experience is in this room?” he says. “The total in the room was about 200 years. I said, how many cases of domestic violence have you had between you?” He pauses. “Not one! And I asked, how many cases of honour killings? Just one.”
Zahid believes that this mindset has little chance of being changed from the top down anytime soon. As well as its general inaction, Zahid and commentators across the country have noted at least two grave missteps on the part of President Zardari’s government. When five women were buried alive in Balochistan last summer, two of them girls on their way to be married, one federal minister (Senator Mir Israrullah Zehri) defended the acts in parliament as ‘custom’. Another minister was revealed to have helmed a tribal court ruling that saw five young children handed over between families as a compensation payment (they were later returned). Not long after these incidents, both ministers received promotions and the latter, Mir Hazar Khan Bijarani, is now minister of education. Pakistan’s human rights community was horrified, and so was Zahid–he had taught Bijarani in law school.
“Why did Mr Zardari accept them?” he asks. “What does that say? If you’re going to make compromises you’re not going to make any headway. It means that no change is going to come about as far as women are concerned in Pakistan.”
But back in Sindh province, no longer in court, Zahid takes satisfaction from the small victories. The Karachi jail has sixteen modern new bathrooms and an expanded outdoor area–there are even fans and TVs–and it has become a model for women’s prisons in the country. This has been managed, Zahid says with a grin, because most of the officials he has to deal with have appeared before him in the court at some time or another. He might have reduced the scope of his work but the former judge now gets to enjoy concrete, visible change. “There is such a difference among the women. You can see it in their eyes, that there is hope,” he says. It’s a sentiment he would like to see move beyond the prison walls.
Civil Action
Caught on a rare tea break, Father Nandana Manatunga bats at the ‘tsunami’ flies that whirl around his head and ponders a Sri Lankan newpaper headline: “Witness protection bill boost to human rights”. You get the feeling he’d like to be batting at something or someone else. “It’s absurd,” he says. “Most of the victims here don’t want to associate with the police or the authorities in any way, so to be protected by them…”
His misgivings aren’t surprising: Manatunga has run one of the country’s few witness refuges for six years–in Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands–and it’s often the authorities he’s hiding people from.
Manatunga and his small team at the Kandy Human Rights Office are preparing for a biannual “victims’ get-together”, a mix of Buddhists and Christians, ethnic Sinhalese and Tamil, refugees from sexual abuse and police brutality–far from the conflict-ridden north of the country. Because many of the party-goers are youngsters, presents are being wrapped in brown envelopes: Mickey Mouse mugs, bright pink photo frames swaddled in hearts, small plastic flashlights. Tomorrow, the gifts’ new owners will be distracted from the fact that they are in hiding, many taking a range of powerful people to court.
The violent three-decade conflict waged between the Tamil separatists and the government probably claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 people but, as Manatunga will tell you, it has also wrought damage in less direct ways. Decades of emergency rule have allowed the military and the police force to run rampant, corruption and intimidation becoming the order of the day for Tamils and Sinhalese alike. With the war declared over, rebuilding Sri Lankan society is going to be as much about fixing a broken rule of law as reconstructing schools and hospitals.
The witness-protection bill proposed in parliament for the first time last June is a start, suggesting the country will take seriously the protection and care of people who are waging human rights cases, such as those against overzealous police interrogators. Until now, such victims have been largely on their own, on the fringes of Sri Lankan life, scuttling to and from court appearances like frightened birds and assisted only by small NGOs. With corruption rife in the police force and the courts, they know that filing a suit against the wrong person guarantees years of intimidation and harassment and, now more frequently, death.
Anjana Fernando, a small, sad-eyed boy of 12, is one of those taking part in the centre’s festivities. Five years ago, his Sinhalese family decided to follow through with a list of complaints against their local police station, despite constant harassment. One evening, more than 30 police officers descended on the Fernando home and Anjana was punched in the head and stomach. His father, Sugath, was knocked unconscious and his mother, Sandamali, had her nose and jaw fractured, before they were both thrown in jail. They had repeatedly asked for protection. Months later, last September, Anjana’s father was shot through the head by masked gunmen as the two sat together in the cab of the parked family lorry. [The full story is contained in article 2, vol. 8, no. 1, March 2009.]
The boy doesn’t speak much anymore but his mother and older sister are full of fight, investing their anger in a legal case, while the family is being supported and hidden by a network of small NGOs. Both children are finding life in hiding tough and they have been out of school for months. “My husband fought for justice and he was killed by cowards,” says Sandamali grimly, at a safe house. “On behalf of him I will fight and if I die, my daughter will take it up.” Kalpani, 17, nods her assent. Then Anjana pipes up: “Then me,” he says.
But the damage is not only being seen on a personal level: the court system itself seems to be grinding to a halt. Crime levels in Sri Lanka aren’t lowering but the rate of complaints being filed with the authorities is, and only about four per cent of those are successfully prosecuted.
At the Kandy party, victims and their relatives talk about the mistrust in society and of neighbourhoods turned against them by the police. It’s not that people don’t want to help, says Mary Allen, the wife of a torture victim, but just not in cases where they have to give evidence, go to the police station or go through the courts. “If there is a funeral or something everyone will come together,” she says.
Even the lawyers in Sri Lanka need protection: both the men representing the Fernandos have received death threats and narrowly escaped serious injury or death: JC Weliamuna was saved when one of two grenades thrown into his house didn’t explode and Amitha Ariyaratne and his wife had been out of their home office for just a few minutes when it was burned down, in February, reducing every one of his case files to ash.
The witness protection bill was announced with much fanfare–and much was made of it in Sri Lanka’s report for the UN’s Universal Periodic Review last summer-but it seems to have sunk without trace since. Many local human rights activists have pegged it as a weak attempt to ease international pressure. One journalist for a local newspaper, in hiding himself at the time, was convinced that it wouldn’t be passed while the civil war lasted: “In the name of war the government can take anyone into custody right now and do anything to them; torture them, detain them, and this kind of bill would just get in their way.”
Lalith Rajapakse and his grandfather were given a form of police protection after the teenager was tortured into a coma in a jailhouse in 2002 and chose to press charges. The policemen assigned to look after them just ate, slept and drank, remembers Rajapakse, now a gangly, intrepid 24-year-old. The memory, unbelievably, makes him laugh. “They would follow me to the toilet… but when I went out of the house, they would stay behind. In the end, we couldn’t afford to feed them, so we asked them to leave.”
Rajapakse has spent the seven years of his trial in hiding with Manatunga’s programme but while visiting his home last year, towards the end of the case, he saw men with guns creeping around his house at night.
“I hid, jumped over a wall and ran to a relative’s house,” he remembers. “I haven’t gone back since. Recently, during a court case, the police admitted it was them coming to get me.” Rajapakse and his grandfather repeatedly turned down large, out-of-court offers of compensation from those involved–a form of bribery–and his grandfather was given a human rights award a few years ago for his courage.
In Negombo, a beach town not far from Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, Brito Fernando considers bribery his biggest obstacle. The organisation he runs, Right to Life, was set up a few years ago to give legal support in human rights cases and Fernando is tired of throwing his support behind a victim only to have them back down from the case part of the way through.
“Many different forces start putting up pressure to settle, offering money, even sometimes bringing in [the support of] well-respected people in the area, like the MPs,” he says wearily. “In cases involving police, the officers start going everywhere saying, ‘Oh, I did something wrong but I’m ready to pay because I’m going to lose my pension, my job and my whole family’. Sometimes they cry too and this builds up pressure.”
Over the years, the small team at the Kandy Human Rights Office has fine-tuned a system of legal help, trauma counseling, security and education, but just as important, say those it helps, is the atmosphere of care. “The people here are the ones I’m closest to now,” says Chamila Bandara, 22, who lost the use of his left arm after a particularly violent session in an interrogation room when he was 16. He had been accused, falsely, of stealing a water pump and he got to take his case before the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva in 2003. “My sisters have been placed in a convent, where I can’t see them, and my mother’s in another province for safety. You can¡¦t really make friends in hiding because you’re always frightened, but here they know me well.” But being a small operation, there is a limit to how many people it can help.
Few victims of abuse in Sri Lanka recognise trauma, or know how to handle it. Sister Mabel Rodrigo is a counsellor who works with minors such as Rajapakse and Bandara and has seen the damage first-hand. “Torture victims have a lot of anger towards the perpetrators. This anger is energy and that has to be channeled in a very positive way,” she says. “If it isn’t, then the person will become bitter and want to take revenge and may even sink to killing people. They will become sociopathic.”
She says in the Kandy Hospital’s psychiatric ward there exists a good system that combines science with vocational training. If this kind of programme could be expanded and combined with protection, she says, things would start to improve. The law can help, she adds; actually winning a court case does untold good to any victim of crime. There is, though, a long hard road to travel to get that far. After a six-year battle, Rajapakse lost his case last October and has had to appeal. Rodrigo says she finds it frustrating to have made progress with a patient only to have them return from court every eight months with their wounds reopened. “Even after six years they are expected to remember every detail: who hit them where, what they were wearing,” Rodrigo says. “It makes my job very difficult.”
For other witnesses, the idea of being tied to a court case for half a decade is enough to make them look the other way; and so silence prevails.
The debate has been a significant turning point in this small island society but even if the bill is reborn, there are many issues that need addressing before victims will trust a state-run system with their safety and before the rebuilding can start in earnest.
Still, as more Sri Lankans begin to understand their rights, more are choosing to speak out and brave the legal path. Thanks to those supporting them from the wings, they stand a chance of holding out until the verdict is given.
Brito Fernando and his colleagues talk powerfully of their dreams for a stronger civil movement at home; Manatunga believes only a strong, legitimate rule of law will bring change; Kalpani Fernando wants to become a human rights lawyer and has clear ideas on the society she wants to help build. “First, I want to find out who did this to my father, then I want to show them that I can live in front of them,” she declares, her chin held high. “Only civil society can change the system.”
Footnote: This article consists of the three interviews published in the South China Morning Post on 22 August, 8 March and 5 July 2009 respectively.
