An old black and white photograph of two men in white shirts and ties crouching on the ground near a tyre. The man on the right is holding a small container while the other on the left appears to be handling an object. The setting is a semi-enclosed space, with a white wall in the background and a leafy vine partially obscuring the left side of the frame.

Two officers from Sri Lanka’s Department of Government Analyst examine bloodstains at the Batalanda Housing Scheme. The Batalanda Commission found Ranil Wickremasinghe and the police officer Nalin Delgoda “responsible for the maintenance of places of unlawful detention and torture chambers.”Chandraguptha Amarasinghe / Batalanda Commission Report

Ranil Wickremesinghe in the hot seat over Batalanda torture site

Why I confronted the former president with the Batalanda Commission report during his Al Jazeera interview – and why Sri Lanka must face up to the torture, disappearances and human rights abuses of the 1980s JVP insurrection

Frances Harrison is the author of ‘Still Counting the Dead’ (2012), a book of survivors’ stories from the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka. She set up and runs the International Truth and Justice Project alongside the South African human rights lawyer Yasmin Sooka. She was a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Sri Lanka (2000–2004), as well as in Pakistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Iran.

Published on:

21 Mar 2025, 10:32 am

WHEN WE STARTED getting messages that the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) website was not working, in the wake of an Al Jazeera interview with the former Sri Lankan president Ranil Wickremesinghe aired on 6 March, I assumed the site had been hacked or attacked. It did not occur to me that our server had been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of traffic to the site. Suddenly, a quarter of a century after it had been released, everyone wanted to read the “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme” – better known as the Batalanda Commission report.

I went to Sri Lanka as a BBC correspondent in late 2000, and I am ashamed to say that I, like so many others, had never heard about the report then; there were just occasional whispers about something from a previous time. Nobody mentioned the presidential commission of inquiry. The silence around the wave of disappearances and killings in the South of Sri Lanka during an uprising by the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the late 1980s was pervasive.

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Sri Lanka

human rights

Ranil Wickremesinghe

jvp

Chandrika Kumaratunga