Pictures from Peace Secretariat days 32

This post describes my last major achievement as Secretary to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights when, with the cooperation of all government agencies involved, we halved to about 2000 the number of those in custody on suspicion of terrorist activities, by affirming the principle that people should either be charged or released. I also record a visit to the East to promote training and reconstruction, when we were still full of hope that the government would work swiftly on developing training and economic activity for the people liberated from the LTTE. But planning was hopelessly inadequate, and indeed the paper the Secretary to the Ministry of Policy and Plan Implementation and I had done, about expanding its role, was ignored and the Ministry was abolished.

On the positive side it notes my checking on resettlement, and my relief that there was no trace then of government introducing new Sinhalese settlements to the North. Indeed I was touched at the reminiscences of the families returning to places from which they had been chased out by the LTTE in the darkest days of the war.

32 Efforts through the Ministry to release detainees, and a visit to the East

The following week I had another meeting of the Detention Committee that had been set up after the war ended. As Secretary to the Ministry of Human Rights, I had kept noting the need to either charge or release the many prisoners held under emergency regulations, but I had not thought I could press on this given the fear of suicide bombers.

But after the war I had pointed out that there was minimal risk in releasing those against whom there was no clear evidence, and the President had then appointed a committee which I chaired, including the army and the police and the prisons and the Attorney General’s Department. Following the guidelines I laid down, and active cooperation from all parties, we reduced the number of those in detention from 4000 to 2000 in the few months I had before giving up my ministerial position.

Then the next day I went East, where Nirmali was running workshops for teachers. I met the GA at the kachcheri and the CBSM staff and also Karuna, who had left the LTTE in 2003, perhaps the turning point of the war, for till then Prabhakaran had been able to use youngsters from the east as cannon fodder. I had lunch then with Nirmali at the Bridge View hotel she had discovered, which I was to use constantly in the years that followed, and then after classes at Kalawanchikudy and Kattankudy we went to Trinco where she stayed at the Welcome Hotel while I went on to the army Araliya Lodge guesthouse.

I saw the GA and the CBSM team at the kachcheri next morning and then went to Morawewa to see the Sinhalese families that had been resettled, pleased that they were all people who had been there earlier and fled when the LTTE became more vicious. I was also pleased that the Divisional Secretary introduced himself as a GELT student from 1994, and noted how encouraged they had been when I visited his class at Southlands in Galle.

After lunch with the GA I checked on NIrmali’s classes and visited the Education Office, before joining Nirmali and her daughter for drinks on the balcony of the Welcome Hotel and dinner there. And next day, having driven to Colombo, I went to Wadduwa for a reunion of my first intake at the SLMA, 51, to which Chamil belonged, delighted at the maturity of the raw cadets I had met ten years earlier. Despite a very convivial event, I managed to face two local interviews that evening.

On Saturday I got to the cottage in the afternoon, but had all of Sunday there before returning early on Monday to Colombo. I had a wedding that day of one of my students from Sabaragamuwa, at President’s House for she was marrying a Rajapaksa relation so the President and I were the two witnesses.

The following Saturday I took Dayan and Sanja, back in Sri Lanka now after his dismissal from Geneva the previous year, to the cottage for lunch, but then sent them back, returning to Colombo myself only the next afternoon. The Presidential election, which Mahinda Rajapaksa had called prematurely – only Gota and you told me not to, he said dismissively, when I asked if he had gone through the memo I sent him – was on Tuesday 26^th January, and he won handsomely.