The new IGP has many tasks on his hands

| by Shanie

"A few incidents that occurred during my period of training gave me a foretaste of things that were not going to be palatable to the four of us (Trainee Probationary ASPs) in the future. One was the visit by a very senior officer from headquarters. He attempted to teach us the meaning of espirit de corps and asked how we would define it. The four of us tried to explain it from our recent educational background (at school and the University). ‘No!’, said the Top Brass. ‘I will give you an example. If you find one of your men obstructed while on duty in a village, you will take every man at the station; go to the village and teach everyone a lesson they will never forget!’ We groaned inwardly. We were to run into this mentality on the part of the older generation of police officers on many occasions in our careers."

(October 08, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Douglas Ranmuthugala headed a batch of four who were selected in 1959 as Probationary Assistant Superintendents of Police. The above incident which took place during his initial training in the same year at the Kalutara Police Training School is related by him in his interesting memoirs Tales of the Blue Elephant – Life and Times with the Ceylon Police published in 2000. Ranmuthugala was an outstanding police officer and a gentleman but sadly resigned mid-career when he was the Deputy Inspector General of Police (Central Range) and migrated to Papua New Guinea and later Australia.

The Police hierarchy and civil society organisations need to get together and devise means of restoring law and order. This is too urgent a task to be left to politicians. It is sad but true that it is the politician who misuses the Police to serve his own personal ends; and thereafter leaves the police to the mercy of a hostile public.

The incident referred to in his memoirs, Ranmuthugala says, was a part of the mindset of some of the older generation of police officers. But we in Sri Lanka hear and read about the doings of the Police today make us wonder if the mindset of the police officers today is any different. Ranmuthugala is perhaps right because his generation of police officers probably produced officers and gentlemen with a code of ethics. But all that seems history now. We now have a new Inspector General of Police. He comes with a reputation of being an honest cop, intent on restoring the professional image of an apoliticised service. Will our politicians allow him to succeed? His task is a monumental one. He has to change the culture to which the police have been used and ensure that they enforce rule of law equally to all.

How monumental that task is can be judged from the almost daily reports of violence, torture and deaths of civilians at the hands of the Police throughout the country. We shall refer to some of the horrendous incidents that have been reported. But that said, we are not unmindful of the extremely difficult conditions under which the Police work. A lone policeman returning to the Station after duty was set upon and beaten to death at Puttalam in a case of mistaken identity. In Moratuwa, a constable who tried to intervene in a violent clash between two gangs was hacked to death. The Police are however trained to deal lawfully even with criminal elements. They are not trained to react in the way that Ranmuthugala’s senior officer suggested they should.

Police or Private Security Service?

But there is no doubt that the increase in acts of lawlessness today is the result of the failure of the policing system. Some years ago, Justice C G Weeramantry wrote: ‘The Sri Lankan law and order situation has reached an all-time low. Respect for law and order has broken down at every level. From the humble police constable seeking to bring an offender to book for a minor violation of street rules all the way to the highest levels, there is a denigration of the authority and rigour of the law and the legal process.’ Since Justice Weeramantry wrote that five years ago, the law and order situation has sunk to further low levels. Gamini Gunawardena, a former Senior DIG, probably hit the nail on the head when he wrote not long ago, that the Sri Lanka Police Service, from its earlier standing as a professional law-enforcement arm of the state has today become a private security service of the politician. ‘Even the most junior police constable knows that people are not the primary client of the police,but that his top client is really the politician. The politician’s requirement always takes priority.’ The new IGP has promised to make the police more people-oriented. Let us hope he will have the will and the resolve to do so withstanding any political pressure.

While he was the then incumbent Attorney-General, K. C. Kamalasabayson (of revered memory) delivered the Kanchana Abhayapala memorial lecture. Abhayapala was a young human rights lawyer working with the Sarvodaya Movement, who was gunned down at his home during the second southern insurgency. The crime was understandably never investigated. Kamalasabayson in his lecture lamented the fact there were so many unsolved crimes. While stating that there many reasons for this, he acknowledged that the ordinary layman felt that many of them could have been solved and it was not done because of the ineffectiveness of the investigators or for reasons best known to them. The result was that the public began to lose confidence in the system. And he stated, "What I wish to emphasize is that unless the object of our criminal justice system is properly translated into reality, viz. in that the actual offender is expeditiously tried and punished, there could never be a just society in which law and order would prevail…. I will only pose a simple question. Is it more important in a civilized society to build roads to match with international standards, spending literally millions of dollars, rather than have a peaceful and a law-abiding society where rule of law prevails?" That rhetorical question posed by the then Attorney General becomes very relevant to us today when we witness a spurt in extra-judicial violence and abuse of power by those in authority. We are building highways and super-highways, new airports and election promises of new airports, new sports stadiums, but the law and order situation keeps deteriorating to new lows.

There also seems to be a method in this madness. The Asian Human Rights Commission, the indefatigable champions of human rights based in Hong Kong and headed by Sri Lankan Basil Fernando, have written of another phenomenon in extra-judicial killings. In a report released this week, they write: ‘The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is making an exceptional Urgent Appeal after observing the increased numbers of systematic extra-judicial killings of beggars in Sri Lankan cities over the past few months. According to information that the AHRC has received, a beggar was clubbed to death by unidentified assailants with a sharp weapon during the early hours of 4 October 2011 at Kelaniya in Gampaha District. This is the eighth beggar who is reported to have been killed in the past 3 months. In the name of modernization and the beautification of the cities, around a dozen beggars were similarly killed in the city of Colombo in 2010. Investigation or prosecution of the assailants were denied in all of these cases. Therefore, justice was denied. The case is yet another in a very long list of extra-judicial killings.’ The AHRC has named whom they believe were responsible for this latest killing, but in the absence of proper investigation, we have avoided mentioning names.

The demise of the Police Commission

In the aftermath of the Delgoda massacre in 2007, the AHRC wrote: ‘After observing the situation of the rule of law in Sri Lanka for several years and meticulously observing recent developments, the Asian Human Rights Commission is compelled to announce that what Sri Lanka is facing now is a situation of lawlessness of epidemic proportions....Dealing with epidemics requires drastic strategies and if that fails, the whole society can suffer in ways beyond imagination.

The problem is compounded by the fact that with the passage of the 18th Amendment, there is no longer a National Police Commission. As the AHRC and many other observers felt, the National Police Commission when functioning under the Commissioners selected in conformity with the constitutional process were able to create a sense of protection to the law enforcement officers, that the NPC was capable of protecting them from undue influence of their own higher officers as well as from political interference. Now the police officers cannot turn to the protection of the NPC, thereby reinforcing their subservience to a degenerated system. The revival of an independent National Police Commission is a precondition to begin a process of recovery of the efficiency and professionalism of the country’s police service.

The Police hierarchy and civil society organisations need to get together and devise means of restoring law and order. This is too urgent a task to be left to politicians. It is sad but true that it is the politician who misuses the Police to serve his own personal ends; and thereafter leaves the police to the mercy of a hostile public. A woman who lost her husband, or whose husband disappeared after being taken from their home by the Police during the southern insurgency, stated in a testimony that the Police had become stooges of the government. No doubt, there should be laws that should be enforced and implemented by the ‘so-called law enforcement authorities’. But very often the ‘so-called laws’ are restricted only to a piece of paper. This widow with three children had some pertinent thoughts on disappearances: "We must create and establish a society which values human life and upholds the rule of natural justice today when implementing the laws of our country. If we can achieve this, then we can have some sort of hope that the type of disappearances which happened to my husband will not recur in our country in the years to come."

We need a thinking civil society to create such a society. During the period of the J R Jayewardene government, many middle class citizens applauded his authoritarian methods, unleashing violence on political opponents, sacking hundreds of workers to control strikes, intimidating the judiciary and promoting police officers who acted unlawfully against political opponents of the government. This class did not care that the government was creating a lawless society where the rule of law simply collapsed. It appears that it is the same class that is applauding the present lawlessness so long as it does not reach their doorstep. This cycle has to stop. A new IGP with a vision must rally the civil society with him to change the culture of a violent society. Politicians from both sides of the political divide have no real commitment towards such a change. The new IGP must take the initiative in this, discarding the false sense of an espirit de corps that a thinking police officer like Ranmuthugala also rejected fifty years ago.