The Global Reach of the Forces

Soon after the degree programme at the Academy was restored from July 2006 onward, following the abysmal record of what is termed Intake 53 which had been admitted that January, my involvement with the Academy diminished. I had been appointed in June 2007 to head the Peace Secretariat and though for a few months more I tried to take a few classes, that proved impossible as my workload increased, and I had to give up. Before that happened I had met Sarath Fonseka, and told him that I gathered his initial opposition to the degree course had vanished, whereupon he responded that indeed he had found the new breed well motivated. That was high praise from him, and indicated his satisfaction with the efforts of this group which had taken on a large share of the ground fighting that had developed apace with the new government and the new dispensations in Defence.

My experience at the Academy held me in good stead in my new role, for I had established good relationships with many of those who played important roles in the battle. In order to deal with adverse propaganda, much of it false, I had taken to monitoring Tamilnet, and requiring reports from the forces about all allegations. These were collated and allowed swift responses to accusations, most notably soon after I took office in dealing firmly with insidious falsehoods by Human Rights Watch.

They had claimed that civilians had been attacked in the offensive through which we took control of the east, but in fact their whole report recorded only one instance of civilian deaths, and that had been because the LTTE had fired out of a refugee camp. Indeed they themselves admitted that the LTTE had been taking weapons in, though naively or perhaps insidiously, they insisted that these were not heavy weapons.

Daya Ratnayake, the first Commanding Officer with whom I had dealt at the Academy, had designed the operation in the East, and he explained, with maps, the strategy whereby he had enabled civilians to escape, a strategy that sadly was not enforced later in the North. That allowed the LTTE to dragoon civilians to becoming human shields, but Daya’s record in the East made it very clear that what government had planned was very much a humanitarian operation. The fact that there were no civilian deaths, or even allegations of these, except for this Human Rights Watch claim, is ample proof of how careful our forces had been.

Human rights agenda

Significantly, this technique, or military action that demanded a response which led to civilian deaths, was brilliantly deployed by the LTTE in the next two years, but we should also reflect on the fact that it was encouraged by the deliberate distortion of Human Rights Watch. Such agencies which, even though some of their employees may be idealistic, are in effect devoted to the agenda of their paymasters, play a very destructive role but of course the Western media does not highlight this.

They took no notice of the immense care that was exercised for the most part, brilliantly by the Air Force, and it is a great pity that more has not been made of the care and concern for civilians of the Air Force Commander, Roshan Goonetilleke. His men were there with maps whenever I asked a question about anything claimed on Tamilnet, while at our weekly meetings I remember my navy liaison officer complaining that, when they identified targets, the airforce refused to take them out on the grounds that there were civilian settlements nearby. I do not think any airforce in the world was quite so careful about its own citizenry where there has been civil conflict.

Interestingly, in reflecting on all this, I was also reminded, given the report of the United States providing Cluster Bombs to the Ukraine, of another attack on us by a representative of Amnesty International, a man called Jim McDonald, claiming we had used Cluster Bombs towards the end of the war. This was total nonsense and indeed the Amnesty representative in Geneva, Peter Splinter, said that they knew this but McDonald tended to get excited. After that, said Peter, he was known within Amnesty as Cluster Bomb McDonald. Since he is now the country expert on Sri Lanka for Amnesty International USA so I have just asked him how he responded to the US initiative.

To return to how useful my association with leading military figures was for my work at the Peace Secretariat, I have described elsewhere other examples of how, through my liason with the forces, I could deal firmly with many allegations against us, prompting both Philip Alston and Gareth Evans, who launched attacks against us, to note that I was a difficult person to deal with. There is no need therefore to go into details here, but I will note a few more of those I had first worked with in the Military Academy who were invaluable allies during the conflict and its aftermath.

Inaccurate information

Jagath Jayasuriya, who had been Commandant at the Academy, was in charge of the Special Forces in the North, and I often stayed with him in Vavuniya. For much of this period his principal aide was Sudantha Ranasinghe, who had also been Commanding Officer, and through them I got a lot of information, though I must admit that the figures Jagath gave me at one stage about civilians stuck in the North were not accurate. But his office maintained records, and I was able through the information and documents supplied by ChamilaMunasinghe after the Darusman Report came out to refute much of its content.

Chamila, now a General, was delighted when I approached him, for he said that he had carefully preserved the records, but no one else had expressed the slightest interest in looking at them. Everyone else involved in those operations had now been transferred, and had I not appeared then, he too would soon have been gone, and the evidence that showed how well we had behaved would have been lost.

But perhaps it was indeed lost, for hardly anyone was interested in the detailed refutations I produced, the Foreign Ministry being totally unconcerned with dealing with issues as GL pursued his own ambitions.