News: rehabilitation

ASSISTANT SECRETARY BLAKE: It is a pleasure to return to Colombo and see so many old friends. I have had a series of productive meetings with Defense Secretary Rajapaksa and External Affairs Minister G. L. Peiris, members of the opposition, and representatives of civil society.

A group of 206 LTTE cadres who surrendered to the security forces during the military conflict in the North and the East were released yesterday after being rehabilitated for one and half years. They were residents of Vavuniya, Kilinochchi , Mullativu and Jaffna Districts. Additional Secretary to the Minister of Rehabilitation and Prisons P.W. Kodippili was the chief guest at yesterday’s ceremony at the Vavuniya cultural centre.

Prime Minister DM Jayratne said in Parliament yesterday that four hardcore LTTE cadres arrested in Vavuniya recently have confessed that 60 soldiers who were held in LTTE custody were executed by them during the last days of the humanitarian operation. The Prime Minister speaking at the committee stage debate said that the soldiers had been shot dead and their bodies burnt by the terrorists.

Once in a while you may have seen local media reports about persons referred to as former combatants or members of the LTTE. These reports were probably either based entirely on content sourced from a state official or written by apparatchiks. Or you might have read one of several interviews given by the Commissioner-General of Rehabilitation (CGR), the self-styled patriarch/paternal figure Brigadier Ranasinghe. If you are an ardent follower of the reports, musings and creative pieces on the Ministry of Defence (MOD) website, you might have noted regular updates on the progress of the rehabilitation programme of supposed ex-combatants along with colourful descriptions of the ways in which the programme is laying the foundation for reconciliation and a united (and of course unitary) Sri Lanka. On the other hand, international human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) have found that rather than being a progressive and positive force for reconciliation as posited by the government, the ‘rehabilitation’ process instead constitutes collective punishment and arbitrary detention and therefore violates both international and national law. In contrast, veteran Tamil journalist DBS Jeyaraj, thought to be one of the foremost voices articulating the concerns of the Tamils, in one of the few articles by a Sri Lankan journalist on the issue, has stated that ‘While the Rajapakse regime is to be faulted for not effectively and efficiently addressing the political causes of the conflict it must also be acknowledged that the government is attempting to in various ways to rectify and resolve some of the consequences of this conflict’[2] thereby more or less voicing support for the entire process. In the cacophony created by these multiple voices, how does one differentiate fact from fiction?