SPECIAL REPORT : Part 409
By Shamindra Ferdinando
The Metropolitan Police Service, UK, has said that a person ,recently arrested in the UK over his alleged involvement in the killing of journalist Mylvaganam Nimalarajan, 39, in his Jaffna home on Oct 19, 2000 is a Sri Lankan national.
Jack Griffith, Press Officer – Specialist Operations at the London Metropolitan Police Service said so in response to the writer’s query whether the 48-year-old suspect is a UK national or a citizen of Lankan origin or a political asylum seeker from Sri Lanka.
The response was received on Feb 25th, the same day The Island posed the question to the Metropolitan Police Service. Appreciating the swift response from the British, it would be pertinent to question the status of the suspect as the Press Officer’s response suggested that the unnamed person hadn’t secured British citizenship yet.
The media, including the Tamil Guardian, on Feb 24th, reported the arrest of the suspect at an address in Northamptonshire on Feb 22. The media quoted the police as having declared the arrest ‘as part of a proactive operation’ and the first arrest made by the UK in connection with war crimes allegedly committed in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka brought the war to a successful conclusion in May 2009.
The Sri Lankan has been arrested on suspicion of offences under Section 51 of the International Criminal Court Act 2001. “This is a significant update in what is a sensitive, complex investigation,” the media quoted Commander Richard Smith as having declared. Smith leads the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command. However, the British police hadn’t explained how the first suspect, taken into custody in connection with such a high profile probe, could be released within 48 hours, pending further investigations.
In fact, by the time the media reported the arrest on Feb 24, the suspect has been quietly released. Unidentified persons killed Nimalarajan who contributed to the BBC Tamil and Sinhala services, the Tamil daily Virakesari and the now defunct Sinhala weekly Ravaya. The EPDP was accused of killing Nimalarajan, an accusation strongly and repeatedly denied by the political party.
Sooka hails UK action
NGO activist Yasmin Sooka hailed the British action though by the time she issued a statement in this regard the suspect has been freed. Sooka of the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), which investigates alleged Sri Lankan war crimes and crimes against humanity declared: “The proactive investigation which led to the arrest demonstrates the commitment of the Metropolitan Police to justice and accountability even 22 years later. Those who kill journalists are not safe anywhere in the world. It is abhorrent that an alleged killer of a BBC journalist should hide in the UK.”
The writer raised the issue at hand with Foreign Secretary retired Admiral Jayanath Colombage over the last weekend. One-time Navy Commander Admiral Colombage said that the Foreign Ministry was following the case. The official indicated that every aspect of the case would be examined.
Had he been involved in the actual killing of Nimalarajan or provided support for the dastardly act in some way? Would he be extradited to Sri Lanka? Or had the UK sought Sri Lanka’s support to conduct the investigation? Had he been a member of the EPDP, or some other Tamil group or perhaps a member of a paramilitary group? At the time of Nimalarajan’s killing, the suspect had been 26 years of age.
Against the backdrop of Sooka expressing disgust at a person responsible for a BBC journalist’s death taking refuge in the UK, wouldn’t it be pertinent to question the status of Adele Balasingham, the Australian-born wife of the late LTTE ideologue Anton Balasingham. One-time British High Commission employee and Virakesari staffer Balasingham, who received and enjoyed the status of a British citizen in spite of being the chief advisor to the proscribed terrorist group passed away in Dec 2006 in the UK. Perhaps ITJP should state its position on Adele Balasingham who had been directly involved with the LTTE and even pictured at terrorist parades handing over cyanide capsules to female LTTE cadres. Perhaps, even Subha and Dhanu, who had been assigned for Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, received their cyanide capsules from Adele Balasingham in the northern jungles of Sri Lanka. Dhanu carried out the suicide mission on the night of May 21, 1991 at Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu. Nearly 60 other innocents perished in the attack.
The recent British police action and the claim of the first arrest in the UK in connection with war crimes should be examined taking into consideration the failure on their part to take action against those promoting terrorism and ex-members of various Sri Lankan terrorist groups (some of them are now in Parliament) given citizenship.
Zooka, who had been a member of the Darusman Panel (Report of the Secretary General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka) that accused Sri Lanka of war crimes in March 2011, five years later acknowledged the presence of ex-LTTE cadres in several countries, including the UK. Had there been a specific procedure to accommodate ex-Sri Lankan terrorists beginning with those trained by India?
Had the British treated those who fought for the LTTE differently from the ones that served other groups? The tainted ITJP survey released in June 2016 inadvertently revealed the existence of clandestine networks, facilitating Sri Lankans of Tamil origin, including former members of the LTTE, to reach Europe through illegal means. Did the person, arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service, too, reach the UK through illegal means? The Sri Lanka Foreign Ministry should ask the British to reveal the status of the suspect and most importantly how and when he reached the UK.
The release of the expensive survey, titled ‘Forgotten Sri Lanka’s exiled victims’ by the ITJP, affiliated to the Foundation of Human Rights in South Africa, coincided with the commencement of 32 sessions of the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The much-touted study disclosed that LTTE personnel, including those who had been with Shanmugalingam Sivashankar alias Pottu Amman’s dreaded intelligence service, had secured citizenship in European countries, including the UK. That report was meant to intensify pressure on Sri Lanka on the Geneva UNHRC front, but ended up inadvertently exposing an ugly truth. But, Sri Lanka lacked a cohesive strategy to exploit such lapses.
The report dealt with information obtained from 75 Tamils, living in the UK, France, Switzerland and Norway. Almost all of them had fled Sri Lanka after the conclusion of the war, in May, 2009. The vast majority of interviews had been conducted in the UK. The ITJP claimed that those ex-LTTE cadres, based in Germany, had declined to contribute to the survey.
The architects of the project and their sponsors owed an explanation why those who had taken refuge in India during the conflict and post-conflict period were not included in the project. Actually how many ‘disappeared’ in India having gone there by boat across the Palk Strait and conveniently listed as missing and put on Sri Lanka account over the years?
On the basis of the interviews conducted, with the help of Sri Lankan Tamil interpreters, who had either worked for the UN or other International NGOs, in the Vanni, during Eelam War IV, the report estimated that the vast majority had served various LTTE units. The report named those combat and support units as Radha, Sothiya, Imran Pandiyan and Malathy regiments as well as the Intelligence Wing. The non combat units included the LTTE Media Unit, the TV station, the Political Wing, the Peace Secretariat, the International Secretariat, the Medical Wing, the Transport Unit, the IT division and the Education Section.
New identities for ex-terrorists
The Office of Missing Persons (OMP) should seek the cooperation of foreign governments to establish the whereabouts of those who had been categorised as missing. The Foreign Ministry should check with British authorities to find out whether the 48-year-old person suspected to be involved in the Jaffna journalist’s killing, too, has been categorized as a missing person. Had he been given an opportunity to change his identity? The possibility of Sri Lanka facilitating the suspect’s arrival in the UK, too, cannot be ruled out. It would be pertinent to mention that the UK humiliated Sri Lanka by exposing the issuance of a diplomatic passport to one-time LTTE commander Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan aka Karuna Amman after he rebelled against the LTTE. At that the time British officials arrested him, Karuna carried an official passport issued to Kokila Dushmantha Gunawardena whose occupation on the passport was given as Director General of Wildlife Conservation. Better known as ‘Colonel’, Karuna was deported in July 2008 to Sri Lanka, having been arrested and detained since Sept 2007. What made Sri Lanka issue a diplomatic passport to Karuna though he played a significant role in the overall strategy against the LTTE?
In spite of the OMP being created in terms of the 2015 Geneva accountability resolution, Western powers haven’t helped Sri Lanka to track down those living overseas under new identities while they remained categorised as ‘missing’ persons generally blamed on Colombo. The contentious issue of missing persons or those disappeared continue to undermine post-war national reconciliation efforts. Unfortunately, successive governments haven’t addressed the issue in earnest without the cooperation of relevant Western countries, who are obviously part of the conspiracy against Sri Lanka. This failure to properly investigate war time disappearances has allowed interested parties to harass the country at international forums and Geneva sessions in particular.
Lord Naseby once questioned the UK’s failure to prosecute Adele Balasingham in spite of the accountability on her part for child and suicide cadre recruitment. The Conservative Party veteran blamed his government for allowing freedom for Adele Balasingham whom he described as an LTTE leader living in the UK.
The recent arrest in the UK of a key suspect in the Nimalarajan killing should prompt Sri Lanka to freshly examine the contentious issues of missing persons and impunity provided to terrorists living overseas. There is no point in denying some excesses on the part of the Sri Lankan military and the police during the nearly 30 year cruel internecine war, as all wars are. There had been reprisals, deaths in custody and extra judicial killings during the conflicts in 1971 (JVP led insurgency), 1987-1999 (the second JVP led insurrection) and 1983-2009 (war in the North and East). However, Sri Lanka hadn’t resorted to genocide or war crimes as alleged by interested parties. It wouldn’t be fair to examine the accountability issue without taking into consideration the Indian military intervention (July 1987 to March 1990) and the period before when India trained armed and deployed thousands of Tamil terrorists in a large scale destabilisation project here to counter JRJ’s obvious pro-Western stance and it was meant to pave the way for the ultimate deployment of the Indian Army here. New Delhi achieved its objective in July 1987. But, by the time, India terminated its military mission here thousands of LTTE terrorists and Tamil civilians perished. Those who demand justice for Tamils are conveniently silent on victims of the Indian military action. Today, no one remembered how a group of PLOTE (People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam ) cadres died while fleeing the Maldives in early Nov 1989 following an abortive bid to assassinate the then Maldivian President Gayoom. The Indian Navy sank the vessel commandeered by PLOTE cadres in the high seas.
TNA seeks media attention
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) at the forefront of the ongoing campaign against the government last week demonstrated opposite the Presidential Secretariat demanding solutions to their grievances. Having recognised the murderous LTTE in 2001 as the sole representative of the Tamil speaking people, the TNA solidly backed its terrorist cause until the very end, thought it today demands justice for the Tamils. The TNA leadership never bothered to issue a public statement in 2009 against the LTTE employing human shields of its own people on the Vanni east battlefield. The Western powers never found fault with the TNA for its despicable role during the war. Throughout the war, the TNA served the LTTE, diligently. In fact, the LTTE-TNA alliance set the stage for the final war by engineering the defeat of Ranil Wickremesinghe at the 2005 presidential election. The rest is history. Years later, Wickremesinghe in his capacity as the yahapalana Prime Minister declared that those who had been categorised as missing were either killed in the battlefield or were living abroad. Unfortunately, even this government never exploited Wickremesinghe’s statement to our advantage.
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Antonythasan Jesuthasan is perhaps the only ex-LTTE cadre to receive international acclaim as an actor after fleeing Sri Lanka during an early phase of the war. In an interview with Tom Seymour (Dheepan’s Antonythasan Jesuthasan: from Tamil Tiger to star of a Palme d’Or winner in The Guardian) posted online on March 31, 2016, Jesuthasan, perhaps, unwittingly revealed how he deceived the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to secure political asylum. Seymour said that Jesuthasan after having shown him a dense lattice of scars on his forearm declared: “I did those to myself. I was 22, and I had spent years trying to come to the west. I wanted to get a fake French passport, but I had to be accepted as a refugee. I went to the UNHCR [the UN High Commissioner for Refugees], but they wouldn’t believe my story. So I cut myself, and held up my arm, and said to them: ‘Look at my blood. This is my word.” Jesuthasan is just one among thousands who obtained political asylum on false claims. Jesuthasan ended up as the star of Dheepan, directed by Jacques Audiard, possibly France’s most celebrated modern director. There cannot be a better example than Jesuthasan to highlight the web of deceit pertaining to the vast majority of those who successfully secured political asylum. But, Sri Lanka Foreign Ministry never bothered to set the record straight. Born in Allaipiddy, on the Velanaitivu islet, Jesuthasan claimed he fought the Sri Lanka Army in August 1990 and subsequently fled the country and managed to reach France.
Antonythasan Jesuthasan is perhaps the only ex-LTTE cadre to receive international acclaim as an actor after fleeing Sri Lanka during an early phase of the war. In an interview with Tom Seymour (Dheepan’s Antonythasan Jesuthasan: from Tamil Tiger to star of a Palme d’Or winner in The Guardian) posted online on March 31, 2016, Jesuthasan, perhaps, unwittingly revealed how he deceived the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to secure political asylum. Seymour said that Jesuthasan after having shown him a dense lattice of scars on his forearm declared: “I did those to myself. I was 22, and I had spent years trying to come to the west. I wanted to get a fake French passport, but I had to be accepted as a refugee. I went to the UNHCR [the UN High Commissioner for Refugees], but they wouldn’t believe my story. So I cut myself, and held up my arm, and said to them: ‘Look at my blood. This is my word.” Jesuthasan is just one among thousands who obtained political asylum on false claims. Jesuthasan ended up as the star of Dheepan, directed by Jacques Audiard, possibly France’s most celebrated modern director. There cannot be a better example than Jesuthasan to highlight the web of deceit pertaining to the vast majority of those who successfully secured political asylum. But, Sri Lanka Foreign Ministry never bothered to set the record straight. Born in Allaipiddy, on the Velanaitivu islet, Jesuthasan claimed he fought the Sri Lanka Army in August 1990 and subsequently fled the country and managed to reach France.