🇱🇰 Impact. Look what we just did!
Hello reader,
When I asked the former BBC correspondent and journalist Frances Harrison to write about a new memoir by Wasantha Karannagoda – the former Sri Lanka Navy commander sanctioned by the United Kingdom and the United States for gross human-rights violations – I knew it wasn’t going to be a typical book review. Frances had to take legal advice before diving in.
Now, the review has contributed to Karannagoda’s book being pulled from sale and Penguin India terminating his publishing contract. That’s the power of Himal’s independent criticism!
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Frances’s hard-hitting review not only interrogates the credibility of The Turning Point: The Naval Role in Sri Lanka’s War on LTTE Terrorism but also asks hard questions of Penguin India, the publisher that put the book out without regard for multiple factual problems or Karannagoda’s well-documented record of rights violations.
Why did Penguin India publish Wasantha Karannagoda, alleged war criminal?
The sanctioned former Sri Lankan navy chief’s memoir contains potential admissions relevant to alleged crimes committed during the country’s civil war, and raises serious questions of publisher accountability
By Frances Harrison
Karannagoda was Sri Lanka’s Navy Commander from 2005 to 2009, during the bloodiest phase of the country’s quarter-century-long civil war, when naval gunboats indiscriminately shelled the coastline of northern Sri Lanka as hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians sheltered there. The navy, with the Sri Lankan army, also enforced a sea blockade around the final war zone on the Mullivaikkal coast, restricting humanitarian supplies and resulting in civilian deaths from lack of food and medicine. During Karannagoda’s tenure, a secret torture site was run in the country’s most important navy base. A United Nations investigation found that the navy under Karannagoda was responsible for enforced disappearances in Jaffna and Mannar.
After Frances read the book, the organisation she works for, the International Truth and Justice Project, referred the book to authorities in the United Kingdom, where any entity that directly or indirectly makes available resources (such as royalties) to an individual sanctioned under the country’s Magnitsky laws could be committing a serious offense. The ITJP also raised the alarm with Penguin Random House, the parent company of Penguin India.
The impact has been swift. The book’s webpage has since disappeared from Penguin India’s site, and Amazon UK has confirmed that it has removed the book from sale. (It is also no longer available on Amazon’s India website.) Karannagoda himself has told the Sri Lankan press that Penguin India has sought to cancel his contract.
The uncritical publication and distribution of The Turning Point risks sanitising appalling atrocities committed during Sri Lanka’s civil war and erasing victims’ suffering. As Frances writes, the book is an affront to the thousands of Tamils who were shelled, tortured, raped, and disappeared by the Sri Lanka Navy. As Karannagoda’s memoir is taken off the shelves, read Frances’s review to understand what really happened during the civil war and how Karannagoda has been implicated in those terrible events.
For more than 38 years now, Himal has been reading critically, reporting fearlessly, and refusing to let power rewrite Southasia’s histories without challenge. Join us as a Himal Patron and become part of our mission to hold power to account.
All the best,
Shwetha Srikanthan
Associate Editor, Himal Southasian