Justice delayed, justice denied and a mockery of justice

The blood of the victims of the Easter Sunday bombings cry out for justice

On the morn of Easter Sunday 21 April 2019, suicide bombers exploded their deadly payloads of explosives in three Churches and three luxury hotels in the country killing over two-hundred civilians and injuring over five-hundred others. A particular Christian Member of Parliament -in the aftermath of the bombings admitted his father had warned him not to attend service that day.

Our then President was out of the country. The then premier was out of Colombo. Yet, the intelligence services reportedly had received information on the possibility of an attack taking place. Yet, did nothing to prevent the attack.

The attack was given a political twist to make it appear that the security of the country was endangered. The then government of President Maithripala Sirisena was not keen to make any progress regarding the mass killing. At the presidential election of 16 November 2019, we the gullible electors, voted into power Gotabaya Rakapaksa who promised to unveil the hand behind the killings.

Gotabaya made no serious effort to expose the killers but successfully roused anti-Islamic sentiments.

Following Gotabaya’s overthrow as President of the country, Ranil Wickremesinghe was elected President by parliament after President Gotabaya fled the country. Unfortunately Wickremesinghe has been accused of dilly-dallying and doing little to identify the ‘hidden hand’ behind the Easter Sunday killings.

Into this situation, at the end of Wickremesinghe’s term, strode Anura Kumara Dissanayake -our present president and then leader of the National People’s Power (NPP), who promised a corruption-free government if elected to power at the September 24 presidential election. He not only promised to uncover the hand behind Easter Sunday bombings but specified he would reveal all by 21 April 2025.

Like all politicians before him, Dissanayake too has betrayed the Lankan electorate in general and the grieving families of the Easter Sunday victims in particular. He produced no fresh evidence but merely handed over to the CID a report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Easter Sunday attacks

The blood of the victims of the Easter Sunday bombings cry out for justice. Our present president even visited a site of the bombings and met the families of the victims with the help of the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Lanka. He promised a quick end to their six-year wait for justice. 

It brings to mind a completely different scenario which took place in reaction to the cold-blooded killings in Dublin, Northern Ireland (part of the UK) in what has come to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ on 30 January 1972. British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry in Northern Ireland.
Thirteen protestors were killed. The death of another man four months later, was attributed to gunshot injuries from the incident. Many of the victims were shot while fleeing from the soldiers. Some were shot while trying to help the wounded.

Bernadette Devlin, an independent Irish Member of Parliament (MP) was a speaker at the rally and witness to the shootings. Having seen the event first-hand, she was infuriated that the Speaker of the House of Commons, repeatedly denied her the chance to speak about it in Parliament.

The Speaker permitted British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling to speak. The Home Secretary repeated the British Army’s version of events, that ‘paratroopers returned fire at gunmen and bomb-throwers’. Bernadette famously walked across the chamber and slapped Maudling on the face 

That slap reverberated across the world. The MP stood up for truth and justice. She neither cringed nor made false promises. Subsequently an independent inquiry confirmed that those shot by British soldiers were entirely innocent. 

Sadly this has not been the history of our country. Here, killers go unpunished because of political patronage.

Major massacres include the pogrom against Tamils in July 1983. In 2018 Lanka witnessed a rise in religiously motivated violence and discrimination against Muslim and Christian communities, often fuelled by groups associated with governing powers. Our country has also witnessed the killing of the editor of the ‘Sunday Leader’, the killing of ‘Tamil Net’ editor Sivaram and cartoonist Eknaligoda. 

The killers remain at large. In Lanka our rulers including our president make a mockery of justice.