In Sri Lanka, Torture and Impunity Remain Big Problems

Frances Harrison co-founded and runs the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) in London. She’s a former BBC foreign correspondent and author of the book “Still Counting the Dead: Survivors of Sri Lanka’s Hidden War.”

This interview has been edited lightly.

The ITJP has recently published another report. Would you tell us a little bit about it?

Some of the twists and turns of this story would be better suited to a soap opera or thriller if they were not so tragic. The team that worked on this report kept having what we called “you couldn’t make this up” moments. At one point the country’s most senior military officer, an Admiral who remains in office, was arrested for allegedly attempting to abduct a sailor. He was also accused of hiding an absconding suspect in plain view inside Navy Headquarters while the Sri Lankan police were running around issuing public alerts and Interpol notices for him.

This report is the result of years of intense research. In 2015 the ITJP was the first to identify the existence of a secret underground torture site in the country’s largest naval base in Trincomalee. We published its GPS coordinates and named two alleged perpetrators. Then the UN visited the location and corroborated the site’s existence.