Ghosts refusing to fade away

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.