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Bindunuwewa Massacre, Sri Lanka’s Human Rights record Façade torn asunder

Twentyeight Tamil youths detained under the guise of ‘rehabilitation’ in a ‘concentration’ type camp in Bindunuwewa in central Sri Lanka were butchered in the most inhuman manner in the year 2000. Several others were grievously injured in the gruesome attack on the innocent unarmed detainees. Officers who were involved in the attack were, hold your breath, promoted to higher positions, not punished. These are revelations made by the Asian Human Rights Commission in its latest report on the mass crime.

At the outset, a presidential commission was appointed to investigate into this crime. The commission submitted its report on completion of its investigations, but the report did not see the light of the day. Those responsible for governance acted irresponsibly and let the report gather dust. The government acted in the usual manner that is lackadaisical and smacks of its majoritarian outlook.

This action of the government in suppressing facts led to a situation wherein the serious crime could not be exposed in-country. The Sri Lankan law relating to Confidential Secrets helped the government to keep the blatant floutation of human rights under the carpet, not for long though. The Asian Human Rights Commission that had access to the findings of the commission let the cat out of the bag in a hard hitting report released in New Delhi.

A government that gloats in vain glory of legitimacy by democratic means in the international arena stands exposed in spite of its ability to maintain a semblance of fair play all this while. The Asian Human Rights Commission has gone the extra mile to point out the irony that the perpetrators of this heinous crime against innocent inmates of the Bindunuwewa ‘Rehabilitation’ camp, all of them Sri Lankan law enforcing officers, have been ‘honoured’ with promotion.

These officers were first charged with murder, aiding and abetting for murder and the condoning attitude they adopted when hooligans joined the fray in attacking the inmates. Ironically again, all these officers were acquitted for want of ‘evidence’, much to the astonishment of human rights activists.

On the one hand perpetrators of mass murder are acquitted in the trial and the government that carefully kept the commission report in darkness on the other hand awards honour to those very same people who stood indicted with mass murder. This is how ‘justice’ is delivered seemingly and otherwise in this country.

“Police torture in Sri Lanka has assumed disastrous proportions and deterrant measures need to be put in place to arrest this trend” says the Asian Legal Resources Centre based in Hong Kong in a lengthy report to UN’s Commission on Torture. Only three days lapsed and here comes the Bindunuwewa exposure by the Asian Human Rights Commission. The Hong Kong based centre continues its condemnation: “The Sri Lankan Police personnel are behaving like hooligans and rowdies. Their torture patterns have reached an unprecedented high. Main law enforcing entities, Police and the Judiciary are totally ineffective”. The exposure on the Bindunuwewa fiasco is a telling testimony to these responsible observations by a legal entity. While engaging itself in complicity with wrong doing law enforcers, shield them against publicity and promote them rather than punishing, the government, in a most deceitful manner, ventures to accuse the Tamil peoples’ representatives, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of human rights violation in the Tamil Homeland. This propaganda to discredit the LTTE internationally, has behind it a political agenda of the Sinhala polity to put down the Tamil struggle for justice and fairplay and it is very unfortunate that the international community readily believes it.

-Uthayan editorial-

27 October 2005

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