Justice must be balanced

2025/04/12

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake will appoint a committee to decide on instituting legal action against those named in the report of the Batalanda Commission, which probed extrajudicial killings, torture, etc., in the Batalanda detention centre, in the late 1980s, Leader of the House and Minister Bimal Ratnayake has said. The commission report has also been referred to the Attorney General for action, according to media reports quoting Ratnayake.

Parliament had a debate on the Batalanda Commission report on Thursday. The government MPs and their Opposition counterparts, true to form, traded allegations and abuse liberally, and it is doubtful whether their debate left the public any the wiser.

The Executive President is vested with powers to appoint committees like the aforesaid one, but such presidential action in respect of the Batalanda Commission report will be seen to be tainted with prejudice, for President Dissanayake is the leader of the JVP, which has prejudged those named in the commission report, especially their erstwhile chum, former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, and is calling for punitive action against them.

There is no guarantee that the presidential committee to be appointed will be different from the Parliamentary Select Committee that probed Chief Justice Dr. Shirani Bandaranayake and prepared the grounds for her wrongful impeachment in 2013. After all, the JVP/NPP has rejected out of hand the findings and recommendations of the Alwis committee, which has held two former high-ranking police officers accountable for their serious lapses, which, among other things, led to the Easter Sunday carnage. So, matters concerning the Batalanda Commission recommendations should be left to the Attorney General although he is not completely independent of the Executive.

It will not be possible to build a strong case against Wickremesinghe on the basis of the Batalanda Commission report, whose recommendations lack specificity, according to legal experts. However, one cannot but agree with the JVP/NPP that all those who committed savage excesses in the name of counterterror operations to crush the JVP’s second uprising in the late 1980s must be brought to justice. Similarly, the heinous crimes the JVP committed must also be probed, and the perpetrators thereof must be made to face the consequences of their actions.

The Batalanda Commission report itself has revealed the JVP’s crimes. The JVP carried out hundreds of political assassinations, committed a large number of armed robberies, including bank heists, destroyed state assets worth billions of rupees, such as Agrarian Service Centres, tea factories, Paddy Marketing Board storage facilities, buses, trains and countless CEB transformers, attacked military camps and police stations and grabbed a large number of firearms, most of which have not been recovered. The JVP unleashed mindless terror purportedly to extricate Sri Lanka from what it described as the tentacles of India, which it likened to an evil, giant octopus. Its reign of terror crippled the economy so much so that the then President Ranasinghe Premadasa offered to negotiate with it unconditionally. Today, the JVP leaders are eating out of the Indian leaders’ hands and entering into undisclosed MoUs with the ‘evil, giant octopus’, as it were.

All those who were involved in JVP terror in the late 1980s must be held accountable for their crimes, as former JVP presidential candidate and General Secretary Nandana Gunathilake has rightly said. Justice must not be lopsided, and both sides that unleashed mindless terror and committed brutal crimes in the name of counterterror, plunging this country into a bloodbath, must be made to face the full force of the law.

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