RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Again, Crime Wave Fuels Calls for Death Penalty

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Dec 7 2000 (IPS) - Buyers of sophisticated weapons here can take their pick in the underworld market: an automatic rifle selling for 35,000 rupees (about 500 U.S. dollars), an automatic revolver for 357 dollars, a grenade for less than 30 dollars.

Sri Lanka is fast becoming the Chicago of South Asia — apart from Mumbai in India — where contract killings, hiring gunmen or purchasing weapons is as easy and cool as walking into a shop looking for a shirt.

Murder, rape, bank robberies, theft and inter-gang rivalry have become so commonplace that try as much as they could, police are at a loss on how to combat the wave of crime and people are questioning the government’s ability to handle it.

The rising crime rate has rung alarm bells in the government and prompted a call — for the third time in six years — for the resumption of the death penalty that has been suspended since 1976.

Although death sentences have been handed down by Sri Lanka’s courts and there are 52 convicted murderers in death row, their sentences have normally been commuted to life imprisonment since capital punishment was suspended.

But on Nov. 23, the executive committee of the ruling People’s Alliance (PA) coalition, chaired by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, decided to re-introduce the death penalty. The move has already triggered a huge debate amongst human rights activists and even a government columnist.

“I am totally opposed to the death penalty. Bringing it back will expose our lack of civilisation,” argues Sri Lanka’s Radhika Coomaraswamy, U.N. international rapporteur on violence against women and a rights activist.

She says the issue raises serious moral questions and adds that the death penalty is not a deterrent to punishment, as proven by its failure in the United States and Britain.

Karunachala, a pseudonym for a government columnist, wrote in the state-run ‘Sunday Observer’ last week said of the death penalty: “The fundamental objection is that the death penalty is the one punishment against which there is no possibility or purpose of appeal, after it is carried out.”

This is the third instance in which the People’s Alliance government is trying to revive the death penalty, normally carried out by hanging convicts.

In June 1995, Parliament unanimously adopted a motion to bring back the death penalty but then Justice Minister Gamini Lakshman Peiris said no final decision had been taken and the debate ended there.

Then in March 1999, Kumaratunga vowed to re-introduce capital punishment on the heels of the rape and murder of an Indian woman.

But public opposition to capital punishment ended that debate as well. Now the government and the new justice minister, Batty Weerakoon, are determined to carry out the death penalty. “It will take effect. It will be done,” he said in a newspaper interview.

Asked what procedures the government would follow before the first man is hanged, he said, “We will follow the normal procedures.”

Yet as in the previous two attempts, the government is certain to run against opposition to the revival of the death penalty. “I feel they won’t go through it,” said professor Siripala Hettige, the country’s best-known sociologist and head of the department of sociology at Colombo University.

“But talking about it is the easiest thing to do because the government can create an illusion that they are dealing with crime,” he said.

In the past month, there have been at least 25 killings and 20 high-profile robberies from various parts of the country. A recent study by criminologists has revealed that youngsters under 25 years were involved in more than 90 percent of the crimes mainly due to unemployment, poverty and political rivalry.

Sociologists attribute the rise in crime to the growing gulf between the rich and the poor and a breakdown in acceptable norms in accumulating wealth. Hettige adds that in the present economic scenario, people have a tendency to make money at any cost.

“There is a kind of anarchy in the system of distribution and the acquisition of wealth. People want to amass wealth through any means,” he said.

Much of the blame on the violence has been placed on the 35,000- odd army and police deserters who are prowling the streets looking for easy money and prepared to handle contract killings or robberies for a fee.

Violence in society has turned even personal disputes into bloody confrontations, according to local media.

Sociologists add that the ongoing ethnic conflict is much to blame for the growing violence with the loss of lives become meaningless nowadays. “People are dying like flies in the war, so taking one’s life is no big deal if there is a fee involved,” one sociologist, who declined to be named, said.

More than 60,000 people have died and thousands more maimed in fighting between government troops and Tamil rebels since 1983. The rebels are demanding an independent homeland in the north and the east for their minority Tamil community.

According to some newspaper reports, Colombo gangsters have a nexus with the rebels and offer them sanctuary in the city in return for arms and cash.

According to police figures, the number of non-ethnic war murders are increasing by the day. In January to June, 608 killings were reported along with more than 4,000 robberies, bank hold-ups and minor thefts. In the whole of 1999, there were 1,711 killings and in 1998, 1,385 killings.

Two other high-profile murders last year also drew attention to the death penalty debate. The murder of a young teenage schoolboy by another teenage gang and the bloody massacre of an entire family of six outraged and shocked people and revived calls for the death penalty.

The accused in both cases have been sentenced to death.

Meantime, Justice Minister Weerakoon reckons quick trials and indictments in addition to eliminating political interference in the police force can to some extent address the rising crime statistics.

“There has to be a revamp of the police service. The police has lost its professionalism over the years due to political interference which came by way of patronage extended by parliamentarians,” he said.

But others are convinced the police are not entirely to blame for the problem.

“In our country, criminals are easily accepted back into society and not made to feel they have done something wrong. So they conveniently go back to committing the same crimes after serving a short jail term or pay a small fine,” said Jayatissa de Costa, a lawyer and member of the state-run Law Commission.