At the height of Wanni War, President Mahinda Rajapaka had authorised the police to hold an accused for long period for interrogation but the diktat applied to crimes related to terrorism. Introduced in 2007, this draconian legal provision ended in May, 2009 as the country celebrated victory over the Tamil Tigers.
The government has not come up with a tenable case for the new power thus far. President Rajapaksa merely argues that the Lanka Police need to be armed with powers to combat crime. The post- war scene has not seen a burst of crime that warrants a new police regime.
Even without the new ‘Rajapaksa power’, the Sri Lanka Police have acquired notoriety with their regular recourse to torture and extra-judicial killing of detainees. Deaths in custody are common. The Asian Human Rights Commission has documented 1,500 cases of police torture of suspects in custody during 1998-2011. Most of these victims were Tamils and Muslims.
Well, that was understandable given the fact that the period of AHRC survey coincided with the Wanni War. What is not, however, understandable is the continued enforcement of Prevention of Terrorism Act even three years after the war has ended. The police and army are regularly invoking the draconian law to pick up people often at random in the North and subjecting them to what are generally known as third degree methods.
Unlike in the past, the present day victims are people who dare to stand up for their rights. Many of them simply disappear. Put differently, the LTTE terror may have gone but it has been replaced by terror by the Rajapaksa brothers and their cronies.
Instead of returning to its barracks, the army has converted northern and eastern Sri Lanka into a cantonment. It is not a suo-moto action but is a conscious policy decision of the government of President Rajapaksa. The result is that the army has come to control virtually every aspect of civilian Tamil life and is undertaking virtually every mundane duty of the government in the Tamil area.
As Simon Denyer said in The Washington Post (July 13), the end of the three-decade civil war instead of heralding a bright new dawn for Sri Lanka, is seeing the country descend ‘toward dictatorship, with dissent brutally crushed, the media cowed and the minority Tamils still treated like second-class citizens’.
Some commentators consider Simon Denyer’s conclusion as an understatement. ‘Sri Lanka is not descending towards dictatorship. It is already there’.
Colombo has not reacted to the new charge as yet.
