WHEN WE STARTED getting messages that the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) website was not working, in the wake of an Al Jazeera interview with the former Sri Lankan president Ranil Wickremesinghe aired on 6 March, I assumed the site had been hacked or attacked. It did not occur to me that our server had been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of traffic to the site. Suddenly, a quarter of a century after it had been released, everyone wanted to read the “Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Establishment and Maintenance of Places of Unlawful Detention and Torture Chambers at the Batalanda Housing Scheme” – better known as the Batalanda Commission report.
I went to Sri Lanka as a BBC correspondent in late 2000, and I am ashamed to say that I, like so many others, had never heard about the report then; there were just occasional whispers about something from a previous time. Nobody mentioned the presidential commission of inquiry. The silence around the wave of disappearances and killings in the South of Sri Lanka during an uprising by the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in the late 1980s was pervasive.
It was only two decades later, while investigating alleged perpetrators in the security forces, that I finally learnt about the report. It was available online only in Sinhala; eventually, a friend who knew I was searching for the English version unearthed it from a box of old documents. Like so many historic human rights investigations in Sri Lanka, the report had been suppressed. It was remarkable that the Batalanda Commission report had ever been published at all, unlike many other inquiry reports.
In the Al Jazeera interview, the journalist Mehdi Hasan challenged Wickremesinghe over his violent response to the people’s protest movement that had forced the Rajapaksa clan out of power in 2022. Wickremesinghe became president in the aftermath, in place of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Hasan also asked him about the endless delays in justice for the victims of the Sri Lankan Civil War, his failures regarding the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, and whether he did enough to hold the Rajapaksa family to account for Sri Lanka’s terrible economic crisis. When Al Jazeera asked me to join a panel as part of the conversation, I had sent across the Batalanda report, so I knew it might also come up in the questions. The producers instructed us to come to the recording with just pen and paper – but some psychic instinct told me to also take a copy of the front page of the report, folded up inside my notebook.