Why did Penguin India publish Wasantha Karannagoda, alleged war criminal?

IT IS RARE that one has to take legal advice before reviewing a book, but that was the case here. That is because the author, Wasantha Karannagoda, the former commander of the Sri Lankan Navy, is sanctioned for gross violations of human rights. For British persons or entities (I am a British national), it is a criminal offence to directly or indirectly make available resources (such as royalties) to an individual sanctioned under the United Kingdom’s Magnitsky laws. Any infringement carries a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment or a substantial fine – or both.

This review examines Karannagoda’s The Turning Point: The Naval Role in Sri Lanka’s War on LTTE Terrorism, published by Penguin India, both as a literary work and as a document of potential evidentiary significance. Karannagoda was Sri Lanka’s Navy Commander from 2005 to 2009, at 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 were sheltering there. The navy, jointly with the Sri Lankan army, also enforced a sea blockade around the 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 was responsible for enforced disappearances in Jaffna and Mannar, both in the Northern Province. Despite allegations of involvement in war crimes and human-rights violations, Karannagoda retired in July 2009 as the navy’s most decorated officer, and later received an honorary promotion to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet.