A news item that didn’t seem to get any traction at all this week was the filing of war crimes charges in Brazil and Colombia against the former chief of the Sri Lankan army Gen Jagath Jayasuriya who is reported to have fled Latin America.

The charges relate to the alleged war crimes, including summary execution of surrendered/captured Tamil Tiger cadres, rape and torture of men and women, disappearances, and then mass-scale targeting of civilians in ‘no-fire-zones’ recorded in eastern Sri Lanka using rockets and artillery.

Jayasuriya was the operational commander as a major-general in northern Sri Lanka during the last stretches of the war which saw the army finally crushing the terrorist Liberation Tiger of Tamil Eelam and declaring victory in May 2009, bringing to a close the quarter century-old conflict.

Later, after his elevation as army chief which was followed by his retirement from the army in 2015, Jayasuria was posted as his country’s envoy to Brazil with simultaneous accreditation to Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Suriname based in Brasilia.

The charges were filed by the South Africa-headquartered International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) in partnership with human rights organisations in Latin America. They were represented by Spanish lawyer Carlos Castresana Fernández. Charges relate to Jayasuriya’s role in the final phase of the Sri Lankan civil war when the UN estimated between 40,000 and 70,000 Tamil civilians were killed. In 1996, Fernandez was among the Spanish lawyers who filed cases against Chilean dictator Gen Augusto Pinochet in the Spanish National Court.

As head of the Commission Against Impunity in Guatelama (CICIG), he indicted Guatemala’s former president Alfonso Portillo and a number of other Guatemalan war criminals including members of organised crime.

He was also involved in the cases against Argentine dictator Gen Rafael Videla for crimes committed during his tenure from 1976 to 1981.

“I am shocked to see there is even more evidence of grave crimes in this lawsuit than in the cases we started against Gen Pinochet or Videla,” said Castresana, according to the ITJP.

“Nobody believed at first that the Pinochet case would go anywhere or that the Argentinian courts would ever be able to make the military juntas accountable; nobody believed the Guatemalan security forces could be held accountable, but with a handful of good, committed people I want to tell you that it is possible to deliver justice for the victims. I don’t care that he fled Brazil; the case is just starting. He has made things easier for us, because fleeing he will not enjoy immunity anymore.”

The ITJP says the charges relate to Jayasuriya’s role in the final phase of the civil war in 2009 when the United Nations estimated between 40,000 and 70,000 Tamil civilians were killed and a 2015 UN Investigation found reasonable grounds to conclude the Sri Lankan military had committed systematic and widespread violations of international humanitarian law.

The lawsuit filed in Brasilia and Bogotá on Monday alleges that Jayasuriya bears individual criminal responsibility as the commander of units that committed repeated attacks on hospitals, carried out acts of torture and sexual violence and were responsible for enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Jagath Jayasuriya was the Vanni Security Force commander from 2007- 09 and, by his own admission, overseeing the entire conduct of the final phase of the war during which Tamil civilians were indiscriminately shelled and bombed and hospitals targeted.

He oversaw the offensive from one of Sri Lanka’s most notorious torture sites, known as Joseph Camp. The ITJP has collected testimony from 14 survivors of torture and/or sexual violence in this camp that occurred while Gen Jayasuriya was in command of the site.

Joseph Camp had purpose-built torture chambers, equipped with manacles and chains, pulleys for hoisting detainees upside down, bars for handcuffing them to the ceiling and underground holding cells.

Victims describe hearing other detainees screaming at night, which the general would also have been able to hear from his house in the camp. The lawsuit also alleges Jayasuriya, who went on to become Sri Lankan army commander, had command responsibility for acts of extrajudicial execution and the enforced disappearance of hundreds of those who surrendered at the end of the conflict. The Sri Lankan government, for its part, rejected the charges against one of the country’s war heroes and described them as part of the Tamil diaspora’s ‘propaganda’ against Colombo and its forces. It has also said it is happy to investigate any credible charges of such crimes.

Having read through the details of testimonies of some of the survivors a picture of immense horror emerges of brutal torture and sex crimes against the detainees before their summary execution. In many cases, soldiers involved in the actions were making videos of the whole exercise on their phones, lending credence to charges that this was an orchestrated effort. One is, of course, not naïve about how vicious this war was and how nearly insane was the LTTE’s founder-leader Vellupillai Prabhakran as his quest for a separate Tamil homeland in the north of the country included using child soldiers and deploying suicide bombers.

He also spurned a credible peace effort a few years before being killed in the final phase of the conflict. But that a country’s trained armed forces would so systematically disregard the law and trample on human rights is shocking to say the least. Whether Jayasuriya is ever brought to court anywhere in the world one can’t say. What one can say is that such cases should serve as a warning to other autocratic governments and officials that one day their horrible crimes will chase them and leave them with no place to hide.

Look at the Sri Lankan general’s fate. From representing his country in several countries in South America, he will now live the rest of his days on his small island state, too fearful to step out let alone travel abroad for fear of facing justice.

(Dawn/ANN)