[But in early April, a private investigator tracked Mr. Rajapaksa, now an American citizen, to a Trader Joe’s parking lot in a Los Angeles suburb. He was then personally served with civil court complaints accusing him of a journalist’s murder and the torture of an ethnic Tamil who had Canadian citizenship, court documents show.]
By
Mike Ives and Dharisha Bastians
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Gotabaya
Rajapaksa, brother to the former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa,
at
home in Colombo in December. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times
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In the decade since Sri Lanka’s civil war
ended, a former wartime defense chief has successfully dodged accusations of
crimes against humanity. He may soon run for president.
But the accusations, which are supported by
United Nations inquiries, recently caught up with him in a California parking
lot.
The former official, Gotabaya Rajapaksa,
oversaw the final stages of a quarter-century-long conflict with Tamil
separatists that ended in 2009. So far he has avoided prosecution at home and
abroad over the allegations of crimes against humanity.
But in early April, a private investigator
tracked Mr. Rajapaksa, now an American citizen, to a Trader Joe’s parking lot
in a Los Angeles suburb. He was then personally served with civil court
complaints accusing him of a journalist’s murder and the torture of an ethnic
Tamil who had Canadian citizenship, court documents show.
Supporters of the lawsuits say they were
brought in California since opening criminal trials in Sri Lankan courts is
politically impossible for now, not least because Mr. Rajapaksa’s family has
significant influence over the country’s institutions. They say the California
cases are a logical interim step in a long campaign for justice.
“There is no doubt that the case has caused
enormous interest because Sri Lankans are amazed to see a powerful and feared
figure, who still has his people inside the security establishment, being
openly challenged,” said Yasmin Sooka, a South African human rights lawyer who
specializes in Sri Lanka and worked on the torture complaint.
Mr. Rajapaksa’s spokesman, Milinda
Rajapaksha, said on Friday that the defendant “does not acknowledge any kind of
official delivery of legal documents by any party.” But he said Mr. Rajapaksa’s
legal counsel in the United States would take action “if required.”
Separately, Mohammed Ali Sabry, the head of
Mr. Rajapaksa’s legal team in Sri Lanka, said that California litigation would
be handled exclusively from the United States.
Mr. Rajapaksa was Sri Lanka’s defense chief
from 2005 to 2015, when his brother, Mahinda, was president. Thousands of
people disappeared or were tortured during the war’s final years, including aid
workers, journalists, ethnic Tamil civilians and the Rajapaksa family’s
political opponents.
Many of them turned up dead, according to
United Nations reports, and millions of people in the country are still traumatized
by the war’s painful legacy.
Last week in Sri Lanka, Mr. Rajapaksa told
reporters that he had started the process of renouncing his American
citizenship, a requirement for contesting the presidency, which his brother
relinquished after losing a 2015 election.
Harshana Rambukwella, a political scientist
at the Open University of Sri Lanka, said that if Mr. Rajapaksa runs for
president, he could potentially leverage the California litigation to drum up
nationalist sentiment among his base within the country’s Sinhalese ethnic
majority.
The essence of the candidate’s argument, Mr.
Rambukwella said, would be that human rights campaigners are persecuting
leaders who liberated Sri Lanka from civil war.
But rights advocates say that the California
cases are important because they focus international scrutiny on the Rajapaksa
family’s wartime actions.
The first case concerns the 2009 killing of a
prominent Sri Lankan investigative journalist, Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was
bludgeoned to death by men on motorcycles who had surrounded his car.
In court papers, lawyers for the journalist’s
daughter, Ahimsa Wickrematunge, accused Mr. Rajapaksa of instigating,
authorizing and covering up the killing as part of a “systematic” targeting of
journalists who were perceived to be critical of the government. The suit seeks
unspecified damages.
“My family and I have been pushing for
justice for my father’s killing for 10 years now,” Ms. Wickrematunge said in an
interview. “This pursuit isn’t tied to any election. It is tied to a need for
truth.”
The second case was brought by Roy
Samathanam, a Tamil civilian with Canadian citizenship who was arrested in Sri
Lanka in 2007 on what his lawyers say were false charges of illegally importing
a GPS device. They say he was beaten with clubs, metal pipes and rifle butts,
and forced to sign a false confession. The suit seeks at least $75,000 in
damages.
Toby Cadman, a British lawyer in London who
specializes in war crimes, said the Sri Lanka cases were another example of
lawyers acting in a more “innovative manner” when the criminal justice process
fails victims of violence in their own countries.
“Although the jurisdiction for bringing civil
claims in the U.S. has been significantly narrowed in recent years, it remains
an important tool for holding political and military leaders accountable for
gross human rights violations,” he said.
Nushin Sarkarati, a lawyer at the Center for
Justice and Accountability in San Francisco who is representing Ms.
Wickrematunge, said such civil claims were first filed in the 1990s in Europe.
In the United States, she added, they have typically been filed against former
officials from countries in Latin America.
In a recent case in the United States, one of
Mr. Samathanam’s lawyers, Scott Gilmore, represented the family of the American
journalist Marie Colvin in an effort to hold Syria’s government liable for
killing her as she reported on that country’s civil war. In January, a federal
court awarded $302.5 million to Ms. Colvin’s relatives, though collecting the
money will be difficult.
Mr. Rajapaksa’s lawyers are expected to
formally respond to the California complaints by late April. Lawyers for the
plaintiffs said they had no specific information about the defendant’s assets
in the United States.
However the cases turn out, it is an open
question how far they could go toward healing the wounds of the bitter war.
“Even if we win, it’s not justice,” said
Steven Butler, the Asia program coordinator at the Committee to Protect
Journalists, an advocacy group in New York. He said opening criminal cases in
the country where the atrocities occurred was still the primary goal in both
the Wickrematunge and Colvin cases.
Amarnath Amarasingam, a Toronto-based expert
on political violence in Sri Lanka, said that most people in the Tamil
community supported the effort to prosecute Mr. Rajapaksa in the United States.
But some worry that bringing the Rajapaksa
family to justice could be seen as an end in itself, he added, thereby
minimizing the racism and discrimination against minorities they say was built into
Sri Lanka’s constitution and institutions.
“There’s an argument to be made that the
Rajapaksa family, because they were in power during the war, should be held
especially responsible” for human rights violations committed during its final
years, Mr. Amarasingam said. “But there’s also an argument that it’s just a
symptom of what caused the war in the first place.”
