IT IS RARE that one has to take legal advice before reviewing a book, but that was the case here. That is because the author, Wasantha Karannagoda, the former commander of the Sri Lankan Navy, is sanctioned for gross violations of human rights. For British persons or entities (I am a British national), it is a criminal offence to directly or indirectly make available resources (such as royalties) to an individual sanctioned under the United Kingdom’s Magnitsky laws. Any infringement carries a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment or a substantial fine – or both.
This review examines Karannagoda’s The Turning Point: The Naval Role in Sri Lanka’s War on LTTE Terrorism, published by Penguin India, both as a literary work and as a document of potential evidentiary significance. Karannagoda was Sri Lanka’s Navy Commander from 2005 to 2009, at the bloodiest phase of the country’s quarter-century-long civil war, when naval gunboats indiscriminately shelled the coastline of northern Sri Lanka as hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians were sheltering there. The navy, jointly with the Sri Lankan army, also enforced a sea blockade around the war zone on the Mullivaikkal coast, restricting humanitarian supplies and resulting in civilian deaths from lack of food and medicine. During Karannagoda’s tenure, a secret torture site was run in the country’s most important navy base. A United Nations investigation found that the navy was responsible for enforced disappearances in Jaffna and Mannar, both in the Northern Province. Despite allegations of involvement in war crimes and human-rights violations, Karannagoda retired in July 2009 as the navy’s most decorated officer, and later received an honorary promotion to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet.
I can declare at the outset that my review of this book will not boost its sales and thereby add to Karannagoda’s royalties. Additionally, the organisation I work for, the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), has referred the book to the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation in the United Kingdom for investigation, to ascertain whether its sale there breaches UK law. The ITJP also wrote to the holding company of the book’s publisher, Penguin Random House UK, as well as to Amazon and Ebay in the United Kingdom. After writing (as of 19 August 2025), the book’s webpage on the Penguin India website appears to have been taken down, and it seems to have been taken off sale on Amazon India. A private and confidential response was received by the ITJP from Penguin Random House UK directing correspondence to the Indian publishing house, but to date there is no clarity from anyone in Penguin over whether the book is now withdrawn from sale, including in Sri Lanka and India. Penguin India was contacted for comment for this article but has not responded.
The Turning Point, presented as Karannagoda’s memoir, is yet another in a long series of war-criminal memoirs in Sri Lanka. Typically of this genre, it uses the hideous language of “rescuing” Tamils amid the civil war, obscuring how such “rescue” entailed bombing and shelling and detaining and torturing Tamil civilians. This aligns with how the Sri Lankan military branded the final and bloodiest phase of the war, in 2009, a “humanitarian operation” purportedly meant to save Tamils trapped amid its assault against the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The United Nations deemed the Sri Lankan government’s conduct of the war a grave assault on the entire regime of international law. Describing this phase of the war as “humanitarian” is frankly obscene.