PRESS RELEASE
28 April 2000

Ilankai Tamil sangam is gravely concerned at the appointment of Major General Janaka Perera (20 April 2000), as the overall Operational Commander for the Jaffna peninsula and Joint Chief of [Army] Operations.

Despite the BBC reference to him as “one of Sri Lanka’s most decorated war heroes”, this Major General’s war crimes record is one of the worst in the island.

Sri Lanka has been cited again this year by the UN as having the second highest number of unresolved disappearances in the world. Major General Janaka Perera has been implicated in most of these disappearances.  He has also been implicated in ethnic cleansing, shelling of civilian areas and torture.

The sangam is concerned that civilians in the Jaffna peninsula are at grave risk of being the victims of further war crimes, particularly in a situation where the Sri Lankan Army is in retreat. Half a million civilians live in an area of only 1,000 square miles, bound on all sides by water.  We are concerned that the Army, particularly under Perera’s command, will use civilians as human shields and, in addition, vent their frustration from their military losses on civilians as they have on innumerable previous occasions during this war. 

Background: After the Riviresa operation (1996), the newly captured Jaffna peninsula came under the control of Brigadier Sri Lal Weerasuriya, today the head of the Sri Lankan Army. Under his command, the Jaffna peninsula was divided into two regions. Brigadiers Janaka Perera and Karunatilake functioned as commanding officers of these two regions.

Brigadier Janaka Perera was in charge of the area where nearly a thousand Tamil civilians disappeared (Amnesty International confirmed 600), many of whom are believed to be buried in mass graves in an area called Chemmani. According to witnesses, the murders were committed in different army camps in the vicinity and the bodies brought in truckloads to be buried in Chemmani.

It has been repeatedly pointed out that such large numbers could not have been killed and buried without the knowledge of the commanding officer. In fact several soldiers who participated in the burials have said as much.

The Sri Lankan government, soon after Brigadier Perera’s stint in Jaffna in 1996, rewarded him with a promotion to the position of Deputy Chief of Staff of the Sri Lankan Army.

Brigadier Perera has also been accused of being responsible for several of the mass killings in the south Sri Lanka. Major General Perera is said to have been in the list of 200 members of the Sri Lankan army slated to be fired by the newly elected President Kumaratunge (1995), for their role in the southern killings. President Kumaratunge was elected on a campaign promise to render restitution for these human rights violations. It is alleged that this plan was withdrawn at the urging of the Deputy Defense Minister Anuraddha Ratwatte, on the grounds that it would have had an adverse effect on the armed services’ morale.

In the mid-1980s, when he was stationed in the Manal Aru area in the Tamil homelands, Perera is credited with the wholesale uprooting of Tamil villages and with mass murder to facilitate Sinhalese settlements. In this ethnic cleansing exercise, thousands of Tamil homes were bulldozed and hundreds of villagers were massacred to make the rest flee in fear. Major General Perera is also an egomaiac, who even had a village renamed after him (the village Mankindimalai became Janaka Pura during this exercise).