Yasmin Sooka on truth and reconciliation in Sri Lanka: State of Southasia #18

In December, the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), an international non-government organisation working to promote justice and accountability in Sri Lanka after its civil war, announced that it had in recent years submitted more than 60 sanction and travel ban requests against Sri Lankan officials and security personnel for alleged human rights violations committed during the country’s decades-long armed conflict and after it. The ITJP has sent these requests to countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the European Union and also the United Nations.

The requests are based on the ITJP’s extensive documentation of violations that include extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torture, and sexual violence. The people who the ITJP has requested sanctions against had various roles to play in these abuses and belong to the Sri Lankan military forces, paramilitary groups, civil servants – including judges and former government ministers – and also former members of the Indian Peace Keeping Force.

In this episode of State of Southasia, Yasmin Sooka, a human rights lawyer and the executive director of the ITJP, speaks to Nayantara Narayanan about the sanction requests, the importance of accountability and reconciliation in Sri Lanka and her hopes from the country’s new political dispensation that there will be some movement towards transitional justice.

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Episode notes

Yasmin Sooka’s recommendations

- No Fire Zone: In the killing fields of Sri Lanka by Callum Macrae (documentary film)

- Muttrupulliya by Sherine Xavier (documentary film)

- Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War by Frances Harrison (non-fiction)

- Truth Commission: Special report broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (televised series)

Further reading from Himal’s archives

- Anatomy of a murder investigation – the Lasantha Wickrematunge case

- The wait for justice for Nimalarajan Mylvaganam, murdered Jaffna journalist

- The devastating poetry of Tamil women who fought in Sri Lanka’s civil war

- The long wait for justice: On the chronic failures of criminal justice in Sri Lanka

- Sri Lanka’s complex dance of Sinhala and Tamil nationalist politics

This episode is also available on YouTube, Apple podcasts and on the Himal website

Himal Southasian is Southasia’s first and only regional news and analysis magazine. Stretching from Afghanistan to Burma, from Tibet to the Maldives, this region of more than 1.4 billion people shares great swathes of interlocking geography, culture and history. Yet today neighbouring countries can barely talk to one another, much less speak in a common voice. For three decades, Himal Southasian has strived to define, nurture, and amplify that voice.

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