Impunity epidemic

The week kicked off with the release of a photograph that featured the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka posing beside a convicted murderer who was recently granted a highly-irregular presidential pardon. 

Duminda R. Silva was sentenced to death over the murder of long-time SLFP Trade Union Leader Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra by a High Court Trial-At Bar. The conviction and sentence were upheld by a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court, including former Chief Justice Priyasath Dep. The highest court of the land was satisfied that sufficient evidence had been put forward by the prosecution to prove the case for murder against the former MP.

Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra was killed on 8 October 2011 as a Local Government Election was unfolding. A vicious internecine polls battle was raging within the ruling UPFA and particularly in Kolonnawa, where Silva and Premachandra were both fielding proxy candidates. 

Both men were proxies of a kind too. Duminda Silva, then serving as monitoring MP for the Ministry of Defence, was a close ally of then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Premachandra was a SLFP stalwart closely aligned to then President Mahinda Rajapaksa. The Trade Union Leader spearheaded intraparty campaigns within the SLFP to secure the Opposition leadership, the premiership and eventually the presidential candidacy for Mahinda Rajapaksa. 

In a strongly-worded letter to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa soon after Silva was pardoned, Premachandra’s daughter Hirunika who campaigned for years to bring her father’s killers to justice, poignantly recalled the close relationship between the former President Rajapaksa and her late father, who she said had stood by Mahinda Rajapaksa “every step of the way”.

That relationship makes the photograph released on Monday with the claim that Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa had “congratulated” Silva on his pardon, doubly disconcerting. The photograph sends an unambiguous signal that sufficient proximity to power will allow lawbreakers to get away with literally any crime. But it is also a strange caricature for the present Prime Minister, who surely owes some loyalty to Bharatha Premachandra for helping him to shape an illustrious political career, to be standing next to his friend’s killer.

Within months of assuming office, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa pardoned the child-killer Sunil Ratnayake, who was found guilty of the murder of eight civilians in Mirusuvil in 2000. In the 20 months since the SLPP took power, all ruling party members and close associates of the ruling family who were facing serious criminal charges have been acquitted or released from all charges by the Attorney General, the Bribery Commission, or courts of law.

This week, the main Opposition SJB raised the alarm over investigations into the child sex racket busted in Mount Lavinia reaching a dead end as well-connected individuals and members of the clergy turn up as suspects and use their political influence to stymie the police probe. A monk, two millionaire businessmen, a former Maldivian minister, SLPP Mihintale Pradeshiya Sabha Chairman and a cardiologist holding the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Sri Lanka Navy are among the suspects the authorities have nabbed for involvement in the heinous racket to sell, rape and exploit a 15-year-old child. Officers of the Children and Women’s Bureau told a judge that their investigations had revealed that the monk arrested in connection with the racket had bargained 10 times to “reduce the charge” to be paid for the girl from Rs. 18,000 to Rs. 13,000. The monk and others are now out on bail, and their teenage victim is petrified that she will be harmed by powerful men who abused her.

As Silva walks free by Presidential fiat, all those who risked life and limb to put him behind bars for the Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra murder stand vulnerable and imperilled. Among their number are Hirunika Premachandra and her mother, and former SSP Shani Abeysekera who led the murder investigation.

Impunity is contagious – from the Tangalle PS Chairman who murdered British tourist Khuraim Sheik and raped his girlfriend in 2011, to the Mihintale PS Chairman who sexually exploited a child to Duminda Silva who gunned down a political rival in the cold light of day, to the Army sergeant who callously murdered a five-year-old boy 21 years ago but somehow became the poster child for the ruling party to scream witch-hunt against war heroes. Transgressors within the ruling class never face a reckoning, not for corruption, not for criminal negligence towards the citizenry and not even for murder. When proximity to power lets people get away with murder, the stage is set for an epidemic of impunity and a state of lawlessness to grip the country.