Thursday 13th March, 2025

No sooner had the International Women’s Day been celebrated on a grand scale here than a female doctor became a victim of sexual assault at the Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital. That barbaric crime, which shook the conscience of the nation, points to the growing vulnerability of Sri Lankan women. Numerous laws have been introduced and ways of means of tackling the scourge of sexual violence have been devised, but there has reportedly been no discernible decline in sexual assault cases, and therefore much more needs to be done to make this country safe for women and children.

The Government Medical Officers’ Association (GMOA) launched a strike in protest against the incident of sexual assault in the Anuradhapura hospital, demanding the arrest of the rapist. It cannot be blamed for resorting to trade union action in a bid to jolt the government and the police into tracking down the suspect and taking urgent action to provide the state-run health institutions with adequate security. However, the doctors should have called off their strike yesterday morning itself when the police announced the arrest of the suspect, and Health Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa visited the Anuradhapura Hospital and ordered that action be taken to make the place safe for health workers. He also urged the Municipal Commissioner in Anuradhapura to clear all unauthorised structures around the hospital. What more did the doctors expect the government to do for the strike to be called off immediately?

All state-run health institutions, especially rural hospitals and Central Dispensaries must be provided with proper security so that doctors and other health workers do not have to worry about their safety. The need for a comprehensive strategy to be formulated to ensure the safety of women including health workers cannot be overstated, but that task cannot be accomplished overnight. The government should be given a reasonable amount of time to do so. It therefore defies comprehension why the protesting doctors did not return to work immediately after the arrest of the rape suspect, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, who were left without treatment in the state-run hospitals yesterday.

Not to be outdone, some government MPs lost no time in accusing the GMOA of using the Anuradhapura incident to settle political scores with the government. This, we believe, is a baseless allegation. They are trying to have the public see more devils than vast hell can hold. These ruling party politicians are stretching the truth to advance their political agenda; they are apparently trying to turn public opinion against the government doctors, who have threatened a strike in protest against the curtailment of their allowances.

Meanwhile, a health worker has been arrested for sexually assaulting a female patient in a northern hospital on Tuesday. This shows that not even government hospitals are completely safe for women. One may recall that the doctors’ unions did not call for action when a doctor raped a woman and murdered her by pushing her off the sixth floor of a building at the Negombo General Hospital in 2007. The hospital authorities shamelessly hounded a female janitor, named Beatrice, out of her job for giving evidence against the doctor from hell; an employee of a private cleaning company, she was the key witness, and but for her evidence the perpetrator of that heinous crime would have got scot-free. Many health workers ganged up against the witness, who intrepidly stood on the side of the truth. The rapist cum murderer was sentenced to death. This newspaper fought quite a battle to thwart sinister attempts to sack Beatrice.

Rape has been rightly described as a fate worse than death for women. Many rape victims in this country suffer in silence for fear of reprisal and owing to long drawn-out court cases, in which they are humiliated in the name of cross-examination. Some victims, who suffer sexual assault as minors, are married with children when their cases are concluded. This is one key aspect of the issue of sexual violence that needs to be addressed. One can only hope that the recent incidents of rape in hospitals will galvanize the government into doing everything in its power to ensure the safety of women.

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.