Untitled - International Commission of Jurists

parents/witnesses were fabricated and hence there was no consistency with the
evidence given in court. 453
As observed previously, the 1994 Disappearances Commissions noted patterns of
deliberately ineffective investigations into the thousands of enforced disappearances
that occurred during this period. It was remarked that when the authorities were
compelled to investigate as a result of public pressure, the best that they did was to
categorise the incident as a violation committed by ‘subversives’ (the JVP, in this
case) and thereby avoid actual investigations that might implicate government
forces.454 Further, such practices of avoidance were categorized not as isolated cases
but as “a generalised direction”455 with the consequent implication that such
directions came from the high political command.
A feature that struck us most forcefully in our inquiries was the utmost care
that had been taken not only by individual perpetrators but also by the system
itself to prevent these occurrences from being reflected in the official records
of the country. Starting with the refusal of the local police to record
complaints – which was a general feature in all three provinces – through the
blatant use of vehicles without number plates right up to the refusal to allow
the bereaved to take possession of corpses identified by them let alone
obtaining death certificates in respect of them, there is clear evidence of a
systematic attempt to keep these deaths/disappearances from being recorded in
the official annals. A nation which takes pride in the fact of having a recorded
history of thousands of years should not leave a dark patch of unrecorded
events in the recent past. 456
Insofar as actions of the police in the North and East are concerned, systematic
attempts to cover up killings and disappearances apply with even greater force in
recent times.
The police record in respect of disappearances in Jaffna is heavily marred by
overwhelming evidence that they had initially refused to take down the
statements by the complainants in respect of the arrests and when they did
belatedly record statements, they were nearly all in Sinhala (which none of the
complainants understood) and moreover, were badly and systematically
distorted to avoid revealing the institutional identity of those making the
453 Comments of then High Judge Chandradasa Nanayakkara at a seminar, Law and Society Trust &
Women and Media Collective, ‘Preventing and Prosecuting Disappearances: Looking Back and
Looking Forward, Report of conference sessions, Colombo, June 2003.
454 Final report of the 1994 Western, Southern and Sabaragamuwa Disappearances Commission,
Sessional Paper No V, 1997, at p. 53. cited as a prefatory remark to discussing the February 1990
killing of Richard de Zoysa (examined later in detail) as well as the January 1989 killing of Sarath
Sepala Ratnayake, a human rights lawyer and the opposition’s area candidate at the then forthcoming
General Election and the Hokandara mass graves, where a bomb crater on a public highway was
transformed into an open grave containing several charred corpses.
455 ibid, at p. 55 citing the cases of the “Dambarella Incident”, the “Marawala Incident” and the
“Dickwella Incident” which all concerned disappearances of persons in state custody but with no
investigation or prosecution evidenced thereafter.
456 ibid, at p. xv of the Preface.
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