Wednesday 12th March, 2025

It looks as if the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) did political work full-time and investigated crime part-time. A regime change means more political work for the CID, which has to make numerous arrests and conduct many politically motivated probes, which enable the culprits to play the victim card and regain public sympathy. The CID bigwigs never own up to their mistakes and failures and blame them on others. However, a woman working for a crime syndicate has outwitted them and left them at a loss for excuses.

When the CID’s serious lapses that allowed the National Thowheed Jamaath (NTJ) terrorists to carry out the Easter Sunday attacks (2019) with ease came to light, the police top brass trotted out various excuses including the one that some state intelligence agencies had misled them. However, they continued to grope in the dark even in the aftermath of the carnage, which shook the world. If they had got their act together at least after the terror attacks, the most wanted suspect could have been arrested. Sarah Pulasthini Rajendra alias Sarah Jesmine is her name; she is the widow of Muhammadu Hastun, who carried out a suicide bomb blast at St. Sebestian’s Church, Katuwapitiya, destroying many lives. She has gone missing.

It was claimed initially that Sarah had died in a suicide bomb attack during a search operation in Sainthamaruthu on 26 April, 2019. DNA tests conducted on the remains of those who perished in the blast revealed that Sarah had not died, and the police subsequently said she had fled to India. If she had been arrested, it would have been possible to identify the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday terror attacks because she was privy to the NTJ’s secret plans.

The current Secretary to the Public Security Ministry was in charge of the CID as an SDIG when the Easter Sunday terror attacks were carried out, and the Director of the CID at that time is now the Director of the Central Criminal Intelligence Analysis Bureau. The NPP, which they and many other ex-police officers campaigned hard for, last year, is in power, and the new government has total control over the military intelligence and other spy agencies, we are told. So, one would have thought that tracing Ishara Sewwandi, the woman who aided and abetted the recent killing of Ganemulle Sanjeewa, an underworld kingpin, inside a courtroom, in Colombo, would be child’s play for the CID. But she is still at large, and the top cops have been left red-faced. What is the world coming to when a woman with underworld links succeeds in outfoxing the entire Police Department and all state intelligence outfits?

Perhaps, nothing could be more humiliating to a police force than its failure to find its own boss. IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon has been evading arrest much to the embarrassment of the police and the government. How can those who have failed to trace the country’s police chief be expected to track down terror suspects and other criminals?

Much publicity has been given to a report that the Institute for Economics and Peace has, in its annual Global Terrorism Index (GTI) 2025, classified Sri Lanka as the country least affected by terrorism in the world. GTI is described as a comprehensive study that analyses the impact of terrorism on 163 countries, covering 99.7 percent of the world’s population. This is certainly welcome news, which must have gladdened the hearts of all Sri Lankans in these difficult times. However, one wonders whether the underworld has moved in to fill the vacuum created by the defeat of terrorism.

Luckily, the LTTE was neutralised 16 years ago. Otherwise, we would have had to depend on a bunch of incompetent cops and spooks who cannot so much as arrest the Police Chief or the female accomplice of an underworld Sicario in custody to protect the country against Prabhakaran and his killing machine.

Tuesday 11th March, 2025

The JVP-led NPP government engages in smoke and mirrors with the same finesse as a professional illusionist, slipping away from its unfulfilled election promises. It is now making the most of a combative Al Jazeera interview with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Everybody is currently talking about the Batalanda Commission report released way back in the late 1990s, and nobody is cursing the government for soaring prices of essentials, broken promises, etc. The NPP could not have hoped for anything better, with only a few weeks to go for the local government polls.

The Batalanda Commission was established, following Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s meteoric ascent to the presidency in 1994, to probe allegations of torture and extrajudicial executions, levelled against some key members of the previous regime, including Wickremesinghe. However, Kumaratunga stopped short of having the commission report tabled in Parliament, presumably because of serious flaws therein.

Curiously, after securing a second presidential term by defeating Wickremesinghe in 1999, she backed him in the 2005 presidential race, for all intents and purposes, at the expense of her party’s candidate, Mahinda Rajapaksa. How she tried to prevent Mahinda from winning the presidency has been revealed by former President Maithripala Sirisena in Aththai Saththai, a hagiography about him. Sirisena was the SLFP General Secretary in 2005. Would Kumaratunga have supported Wickremesinghe in the presidential race, albeit covertly, if she had believed the Batalanda Commission’s findings? Or, was she driven by expediency, which usually takes precedence over politicians’ moral compass? She owes an explanation.

In late 2014, the JVP joined forces with the UNP led by Wickremesinghe to ensure Sirisena’s victory in the 2015 presidential race, and subsequently opted for a honeymoon with the UNP. Anura Kumara Dissanayake served as a member of the National Executive Council of the UNP-led UNF (Yahapalana) government, in which Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister. The JVP was instrumental in ensuring the survival of the UNP-led government and enabling Wickremesinghe to retain the premiership when President Sirisena and the Rajapaksas sought to topple that administration in late 2018. The JVP leaders closed ranks with Wickremesinghe in Parliament, where Dissanayake and Vijitha Herath fought against the Sirisena-Rajapaksa alliance tooth and nail in defence of the beleaguered UNP government. The JVP leaders were in and out of Temple Trees during the Yahapalana government. The dysfunctional UNF government, which survived like Miracle Mike, the headless chicken, thanks to the JVP’s support, neglected national security to such an extent that the National Thowheed Jamath carried out the Easter Sunday terror attacks with ease in 2019. Would the JVP and its leaders have supported Wickremesinghe so ardently if they had believed the findings of the Batalanda Commission? The Treasury bond scams had already been committed and the involvement of the UNP leaders therein was public knowledge, but the JVP leaders had no qualms about backing Wickremesinghe and the UNP to the hilt. The JVP owes an explanation.

No crime must be allowed to go unpunished. The Batalanda Commission report should not have been shelved. The NPP ought to table it in Parliament forthwith. In fact, it has a moral duty to do so because most of the victims of torture and extrajudicial executions in the late 1980s were its members and sympathisers. There were many other torture chambers, including the one known as K-Point at Eliyakanda, Matara, and a special presidential probe should be conducted and legal action should be taken against those responsible for running those hellholes. Most of all, the JVP is duty-bound to conduct a presidential probe into the extrajudicial execution of its beloved leader Rohana Wijeweera in 1989 and bring his killers to justice. Similarly, another presidential commission must be established to investigate the crimes committed by the JVP in the late 1980s, including numerous killings, abductions, countless armed robberies and the destruction of state assets.

A Supreme Court order has caused Sirisena and several others to pay compensation to the Easter Sunday carnage victims for their failure to prevent the 2019 terror attacks. So, it is nothing but fair to make all those who unleashed terror and counterterror in the late 1980s pay for their crimes and compensate their victims adequately either with their own money or with the funds of their political parties.

Monday 10th March, 2025

Unity is not a virtue Sri Lankans, especially their elected representatives, are known for. This fact has been borne out once again by the ongoing argy-bargy over a census of some depredatory animals to be conducted on 15 March. A plan is reportedly underway to enumerate crop-raiding animals, such as monkeys, giant squirrels and peafowl, countrywide. Environmentalists, animal rights groups and the Opposition have dismissed the scheduled animal census as a hare-brained project. Government politicians and their backers are defending the programme to the hilt. Arguments for and against the animal census are not without some merit, but they have only confounded the confusion of the public, whose cooperation is vital for the success of the scheduled enumeration of crop raiders.

Opposition to the animal census could be attributed to four factors—a manifestation of the rising anti-incumbency sentiments among people owing to their unfulfilled expectations; the public perception that the government has made a mistake or is trying to use the enumeration of crop raiders as smoke and mirrors to cover up its failure to look after the interests of the farming community, and the predilection of the NPP’s political rivals for gaining propaganda mileage by attacking the government, the way the JVP/NPP did when it was in the opposition.

In 2023, then Agriculture Minister Mahinda Amaraweera revealed, citing official statistics, that monkeys had destroyed as many as 200 million coconuts in 2022. The crop damage caused by animals, such as wild pigs, porcupines, monkeys, peafowl, elephants and giant squirrels amounted to about 30-35% of national food production in 2022 and 2023, according to Anuradha Tennakoon, Chairman of the National Farmers’ Federation. This shows the gravity of the issue of depredation.

The success of any programme to tackle depredation consists in the availability of accurate data. There have been numerous instances where official statistics were found to be erroneous. In January 2025, a group of senior officials of the Ministry of Agriculture apologised to the Committee on Public Finance for having furnished erroneous statistics about the country’s paddy stocks. Equally, no reliable statistics are available about the populations of crop-raiding animals. There are only ballpark figures. This may be the reason why the new government has decided to conduct a census of depredatory animals.

Successive governments have addressed the problem of depredation only half-heartedly, and adopted some ad hoc measures such as issuing guns to farmers. They have not cared to get all stakeholders around the table and discuss ways and means of formulating a comprehensive strategy to solve the problem once and for all.

The root causes of depredation have gone unaddressed. When their natural habitats shrink due to human development, wild animals turn to agricultural land, where crops provide an easy source of food. Similarly, many forest tanks or kulu wew have become derelict. Therefore, during dry spells, driven by their survival instincts, wild animals venture into villages in search of food and water, causing extensive crop damage.

It will be prudent for the government to put the animal census on hold and invite all stakeholders including its critics to a discussion on how to enumerate the crop-raiding animals scientifically and mitigate the impact of crop depredation, which has taken a heavy toll on rural agriculture. If depredation can be minimised in a sustainable manner, it will be possible to increase the national agricultural output without increasing inputs such as agrochemicals; that will also help obviate the need to develop more land for farming. This is what the government, the Opposition and other stakeholders should strive to achieve collectively. Let them be urged to swallow their pride, sink their differences, political or otherwise, and cooperate for the greater good.