Twenty years ago, Minister Ranjan Wijeratne, posthumously promoted General by President Ranasinghe Premadasa, stood outside the Joint Operations Command headquarters on Sir. Ernest de Silva Mawatha (Flower Road) in Colombo and spun an implausible yarn about how Rohana Wijeweera, the JVP leader who had brought the whole country to the brink of anarchy over the previous several months, had met his Waterloo. None of the two score and more journalists who crowded round Wijeratne, a tall imposing silver haired figure in spotless white tunic shirt and trousers, believed a word of what he said – how Wijeweera was taken to a hideout where he reached for a hidden weapon (or was it a grenade?) and his escort had to shoot him dead in self-defence. Wijeratne brushed off the few tentative questions that were asked and that was that.

Today it is accepted as fact that the JVP leader was taken to Colombo’s general cemetery where he was executed at a place close to the crematorium where his body was cremated. While nobody believed the official explanation of Wijeweera’s ignominious end, the vast majority of the people of this country, made to bear the consequences of the JVP’s second adventure, cared not a whit about how the man behind it all was liquidated. It did not take long for country’s conditions to then reverse from the sub-normal, where a boy on a bike delivering a chit to a factory could bring it to a grinding halt, and law and order to be quickly restored. Wijeratne was anointed a national hero and he surely was that. It was obvious that the insurrection that Wijeweera led from a hideout in Gampola could not be ended by an unequal contest where one side (the Sri Lanka State) fought according to the Queensberry rules while the other had free rein to do whatever it wished. Unlike the LTTE, the JVP at that time had no powerful Diaspora to speak for it. Nearly all Lankans were mightily pleased that their two-year trauma had been ended, whatever the means employed. Public opinion as well as parliament reflected this viewpoint. Remember that MPs too, both of the government and opposition, were targets of JVP terror. There were few voices in the wilderness such as that of former Habaraduwa MP and lawyer Prins Gunasekera. But he was forced to flee the country.

Since then there have been many extra-judicial executions, most so during the LTTE-led separatist insurgency, which the majority of the Sinhalese certainly accepted as necessary. But quite apart from LTTE suicide bombers and their many accomplices, we also saw suspects in particularly heinous crimes, also being bumped off. As columnist Malinda Seneviratne said in this page last Sunday, ``these killings are accompanied by a familiar and patterned script. There is a shoot out or attempt at evading arrest. Hand grenades are thrown at police officers pursuing the criminal. There is retaliatory fire. There is firing in self-defence. Justifiable homicide, the court would record at some point, I suppose. It is just too easy.’’ Especially in cases of particularly revolting crimes, public opinion would usually back the ``liquidators.’’ Should perpetrators of such crime be given the benefit of a fair trial as well as possible lacunae in the evidence or even loopholes of the law? Quite apart from the rights of the accused, are there no rights of the victim? These are questions that are seldom asked but consciously or subconsciously felt by the majority overtly or covertly approving such extra-legal law enforcement.

Those who would not dream of countenancing torture or third degree too often look the other way when the police use such methods to get somebody who had burgled their homes to `sing’ about where the loot has been hidden or to whom it had been sold. These are normal selfish human reactions of otherwise good people. But as is being pointed out after the most recent incidents, we seem to be rapidly approaching a point of no return or, as Bishop Duleep de Chickera said last week of police violence, ``what goes around comes around.’’ The inescapable reality is that with conditions of normalcy or near normalcy restored, the people are opening their eyes to cases of police violence against ordinary people. There was the recent case involving the son of the Colombo Crimes Detective Bureau head where a fellow-student had been severely beaten, allegedly by a group of cops escorting the policeman’s son to an IT campus in Malabe. One newspaper reported that the senior policeman had at last been transferred out of the CDB but what is mind boggling is that his juniors were similarly dealt with before the boss. Then there is the Angulana case where two young men were allegedly shot dead by the police. The OIC and five cops have been remanded by a magistrate and the IGP is quoted in a newspaper saying that the policemen were drunk.

There would be few if any who can disagree with the Bishop’s contention that ``when those who carry the responsibility as custodians of the law and civil security engage in extra-judicial violence, any society is on the brink of a serious law and order crisis.’’ Our fear is that we are already over that brink or very close to it. The need for cutting corners to deal with first the JVP insurrection and then the LTTE accelerated this process of getting to the edge of the precipice. Unfortunately, the courts too have been remiss in the process of investigating some suspicious actions at proceedings such as magisterial inquiries into killings where an independent judicial approach is most necessary. The government, obviously, has taken note of recent incidents if we are to go by the various public statements that have been made. That is all to the good but there is a long distance yet to go. Bishop Chickera says the culture of impunity and extra-judicial violence have turned some policemen ``into victims of a vicious system. They have come to accept the irregular as normative. They are unable to behave differently because they do not know a better way.’’