Elusive justice for victims of Easter Sunday bombings

Lack of accountability for serious crime is a malady that has afflicted Sri Lanka for decades, the 2019 Easter Sunday bomb attacks among them. Since the tragic events of April 2019, fingers have been pointed at intelligence officials with close links to members of the Rajapaksa family as being complicit in the attacks, the latest such disclosure coming from Channel 4, the British public broadcast television channel, which in 2011, telecast a documentary about the final weeks of the civil war titled Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields. The latest documentary on Sri Lanka alleges links between the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), members of which carried out the multiple suicide bomb attacks in 2019, and allies of the Rajapaksas.

After Mahinda Rajapaksa lost the 2015 presidential election, it was in plain sight that he and members of his politically powerful family had only made a tactical retreat from the political arena and were plotting a comeback. Despite the defeat, Mahinda Rajapaksa was widely popular among the Sinhalese in particular and busloads of people visiting his house in Tangalle after his electoral defeat was all the rage at the time. 

His hopes of running for office of president for the third time were shattered after the Yahapalana Government repealed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which his Government had enacted, and re-introduced the two-term limit on the presidency. Thus, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was brought, more or less as his proxy in 2019, won by a landslide, mismanaged the economy and was booted out.  Through all this, the allegations that the Rajapaksas somehow were privy to information on the impending terrorist attacks in 2019 were floating about. That they used their links to those within the intelligence setup to keep information of the impending attacks under wraps till tragedy struck and then used it to win over voters playing into their fears of a return of terrorism, has been the allegation and the latest disclosure by Channel 4 seeks to give credence to these allegations.

Since the attacks took place, there have been a number of calls for an international level probe into these attacks. Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa made the call once again this week after the Channel 4 program was telecast. Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith has also campaigned for such an inquiry. It’s unlikely the Government will pay heed to such calls and will instead rely on the ongoing cases pending in the Lankan courts against those who stand accused of carrying out these heinous attacks. The US Justice Department in 2021 charged three Sri Lankan citizens who were part of a group of ISIS supporters which called itself “ISIS in Sri Lanka” for carrying out the attacks. The men are being held in Sri Lanka and face separate charges here.

As with previous high-profile assassinations or mass killings, a sizable section of the population is of the view that both the police and local judicial system lack credibility and hence the calls for international probe.

Many in Sri Lanka have commented that the Channel 4 linking the Rajapaksas to the bombings is something that was already known, an allegation publicly aired by many of their opponents. In reality there is no way of establishing these allegations as facts without a proper investigation by a credible team but that is expecting too much from the Sri Lankan system in place at present. Whether future Governments will have the resolve to do anything differently is yet to be seen because making bold statements when in opposition and forgetting them when in power is all too common. In all this back and forth, it is only the families of those killed and maimed in these horrific attacks who truly suffer. For them it’s the daily trauma thinking that the lives of their loved ones could have been saved, if not for the greed for power at any cost by some.