Basil Fernando
The video footage is fairly clear. First we see a
tall policeman wearing a helmet standing with his arm stretched towards the
other side of the road. Then we see a scooter stopped just next to him. There is
one man sat on the scooter. Looking closer, we see that the policeman is
carrying a pistol in his outstretched hand. The pistol is directed towards
somebody on the other side of the road. Then we see the rider of the motorbike
stretching his hand out towards the policeman, in an obvious gesture telling the
policeman not to shoot.
Later, we get to know the story. The policeman
shot somebody who was on the other side of the road. The person had been taken
to a nearby hospital and there he died.
Then there comes a story that the man who was
shot had a sharp instrument in his hand with which he was trying to hurt another
policeman. Then there is a picture of a policeman being taken on a stretcher to
a hospital. Then the story is that the man was shot not at the time when the
video footage shows but eight minutes later.
Now we look at a different incident. Two young
men are stopped by a policeman and soon thereafter another group of policemen.
One of those policemen shoot one of the two men on the motorbike at point blank
range, aiming at their chest. The man dies on the spot.
Immediately thereafter, the police put up a
barricade about 120 away from the place where the shooting happened. For the
purposes of further inquiries, the place where the shooting happened is supposed
to be at this new place where the barricade is. There is a new story: the two
people were travelling on a motorbike and, when a policeman signaled them to
stop, they did not. Instead, they tried to run over the policeman and so the
policeman shot, and that is how the death is supposed to have happened.
The above two scenes are not from a movie or a
novel. Actual people are involved. Actual wounding takes place. Actual people
die.
The policemen are allowed to erase all that is
actual and factual. They are also allowed to create fictions and make up
whatever story they like.
This did not just happen in these two incidents
but thousands of times day in and day out. Such falsehoods are written as case
reports and produced in courts. And of course there is a sacred rule that no one
should lie to the court. Yes, but it’s not a rule for everyone. The police are
treated as an exception. They can produce false reports. They can produce
affidavits with false statements. They can lie from the witness box. How many
policemen have been punished by courts for perjury? None.
Yet the law is that the policemen should keep
their pocket notebooks with them and faithfully write down every detail on
everything they do and on every observation they make. They are supposed to be
involved in creating the actual narrative of crimes and these narratives are
supposed to be brought to court by way of indictments. The bases for trials are
these indictments. How is one to reconcile these two different roles? One role
allows any kind of lie; in the other, their substantive role, they are suppose
to be guardians of law. Recently a monk was charged for making false statements
to the police. Now he has been remanded. Here our interest is not in the truth
of that case. Our interest is merely to make a contrast. The policemen
throughout the country are making up stories in cases that would otherwise be
murders or other serious crimes. They file false affidavits to courts. They lie
from the witness box. But none of them are brought to trial in the way that this
monk has been brought to trial.
This is the reality that every Sri Lankan is
confronted with, including the President of Sri Lanka. Recently, the Minister of
Justice cried out that the way the law enforcement agencies ignored the law in
the recent attacks on Muslims made him feel ashamed to be a member of the
government. Surely the Minister of Justice knows that it is not only during race
riots that the police and the STF flout the law. However, he has not shown any
shame to call himself the Minister of Justice in those circumstances.
Perhaps shame or any other emotion do not have
any place in a country where the law enforcement officers are allowed to lie and
are in fact lying almost all the time.
EXTERNAL LINK : Video
footage by Newsfirst Sri Lanka
