Batalanda: The Case That Took 35 Years to Reach the Court of Appeal
By Lakbima News Investigations Desk
There are places in Sri Lanka whose names have survived long after the events that made them infamous.
Batalanda is one of them.
For many Sri Lankans, the name is associated with the violence that accompanied the second JVP insurrection in the late 1980s — a period when thousands of people disappeared, armed groups operated across the country and the State responded with an increasingly aggressive counter-insurgency campaign.
But the story of Batalanda is not contained in political speeches.
It sits in a Presidential Commission report, in witness statements, in police records and, decades later, in a court judgment concerning a young man who was taken from his home in 1989 and never returned.
That young man was Rathnachandra Liyanage.
His disappearance would eventually become one of the few Batalanda-related cases to reach a final judicial determination.
It took 35 years.
A boy taken from Delgoda
On the night of July 7, 1989, Rathnachandra was at his home in Delgoda.
He was only 16.
According to evidence subsequently placed before the courts, a group of men arrived at the house and took him away. His family was told that he was being taken to record a statement.
His brother was also taken.
The brother would later describe being transported in a white van and taken to a place where he was blindfolded.
He eventually came to identify the location as Batalanda.
There, according to his evidence, he heard his brother’s voice.
He never saw him again.
The disappearance did not disappear with him.
For his family, it became a question that would remain unresolved for decades: where had the boy been taken, and what happened after he entered the custody of those who had taken him?
The answer would eventually become part of a criminal prosecution.
But by the time the courts reached the case, much of the country that had witnessed the violence of 1988 and 1989 had changed beyond recognition.
The housing scheme at Biyagama
Batalanda was not originally designed as a secret detention facility.
The area contained a housing scheme associated with the State Fertilizer Manufacturing Corporation. It was a residential environment rather than an isolated military installation.
During the period of the southern insurgency, however, houses within the scheme came to be occupied by police personnel.
That development became significant years later when a Presidential Commission was appointed to investigate allegations concerning unlawful detention, disappearances and torture connected to the area.
The Commission examined how the houses had been allocated, who had occupied them and what had taken place there.
Its proceedings brought together testimony from people who claimed to have been detained, police officers and others familiar with the activities in the area.
The resulting report became one of the most important official records concerning the allegations surrounding Batalanda.
Why Ranil Wickremesinghe’s name appears in the report
By the time the Commission began its work, Ranil Wickremesinghe had already spent years at the centre of Sri Lankan politics.
In 1988–89, he was a senior minister and the Member of Parliament for Biyagama.
Batalanda was situated within his political constituency.
The Commission examined his connection to the housing scheme.
Wickremesinghe acknowledged before the Commission that he had instructed the liquidator of the State Fertilizer Manufacturing Corporation to make houses available to police personnel.
But he denied knowing that an unlawful detention or torture operation was being conducted there.
That distinction is important.
The Commission’s investigation raised questions about the political and administrative environment surrounding the use of the houses. Its observations about Wickremesinghe subsequently became a major source of political controversy.
They have also been repeatedly used by political opponents to attack him.
But the Commission report should not be confused with a criminal conviction.
Wickremesinghe was never criminally convicted by a court for operating a torture centre at Batalanda.
That is one of the facts that often gets lost when the subject is discussed during political campaigns.
What the Commission heard
The testimony before the Commission was considerably darker than the ordinary appearance of the housing scheme suggested.
Witnesses described people being detained and subjected to severe physical abuse.
Accounts included beatings, suspension, psychological intimidation and other forms of torture.
The name Dharmachakra appears in accounts of the period, referring to a method in which a detainee was bound and suspended.
There were also accounts involving electric shocks and the use of chilli and other substances during interrogation.
The material is disturbing.
But there is another reason it matters.
The testimony provides an indication of how ordinary buildings and state resources could become part of an unofficial security apparatus during a period when the government was attempting to defeat an armed insurrection.
The existence of an insurgency does not, in itself, answer the question of what methods were legally permissible in response.
That question became central to the Commission’s work.
The men who operated on the ground
Among the police officers whose names became closely associated with the Batalanda investigation was Douglas Peiris, a senior police officer who served in the Kelaniya area.
Peiris later became an accused in the criminal case arising from Rathnachandra’s disappearance.
His story would take another extraordinary turn.
During the years in which the Batalanda allegations were being investigated, Peiris left Sri Lanka.
The circumstances surrounding his departure and his subsequent return became the subject of further controversy and legal proceedings.
Eventually, he returned to Sri Lanka and was arrested.
But the prosecution that followed was not a trial of the entire Batalanda system.
It concerned a particular disappearance.
That distinction is crucial to understanding what the courts actually decided.
The case that survived the decades
The criminal case relating to Rathnachandra Liyanage moved through the Sri Lankan legal system for years.
Evidence was heard.
Witnesses grew old.
Families who had waited for answers themselves began to disappear through death.
And the people facing the allegations also aged.
More than three decades after Rathnachandra was taken from his home, the case finally reached the Court of Appeal.
On July 25, 2024, the Court of Appeal delivered its judgment.
The court upheld the convictions and five-year rigorous imprisonment sentences imposed on four of the accused, while one accused was acquitted.
The case was about the abduction and disappearance of Rathnachandra Liyanage.
It was not a judicial finding that every allegation made about Batalanda over the previous decades had been proved.
Nor did it provide a legal answer to the fate of every person who disappeared during the southern insurrection.
It did, however, establish something significant through the judicial process: after 35 years, a Sri Lankan court reached a final decision in a case involving a young man whose disappearance had been linked to Batalanda.
Thirty-five years is more than a number
The length of the case deserves attention in its own right.
Rathnachandra disappeared in 1989.
The Court of Appeal judgment came in 2024.
Thirty-five years had passed.
By then, the parents who had once waited for their son to come home were no longer alive.
The accused were elderly.
The witnesses had lived through an entirely different Sri Lanka.
And the political circumstances that had surrounded the original disappearance had changed repeatedly.
This is one of the most difficult features of cases involving enforced disappearance.
Time does not necessarily resolve them.
Sometimes it makes them harder to resolve.
Records disappear. Witnesses die. Memories fade. Institutions change. Political priorities shift.
For families, however, the unanswered question remains exactly where it was.
Beyond one case
The Batalanda Commission was never simply about one young man.
Its wider subject was the conduct of the State during one of the most violent periods in post-independence Sri Lankan history.
The late 1980s saw attacks by the JVP and its armed network, assassinations, threats and widespread violence.
The government responded with a counter-insurgency campaign.
Thousands of people disappeared during the period.
Some were involved in the armed movement.
Others were alleged to have been associated with it.
And questions have remained over people who were never proven to have been combatants at all.
That is why the Batalanda record remains important.
It forces a distinction that is sometimes uncomfortable in discussions about Sri Lanka’s violent past.
The crimes committed by an insurgent movement do not automatically answer questions about the conduct of the State.
And criticism of abuses committed by the State does not require ignoring the violence committed by the insurgents.
Both parts of the history can be examined.
The meaning of the white van
The white van became one of the most enduring symbols of Sri Lanka’s disappearance culture.
During the late 1980s, unmarked vehicles were associated in witness accounts with abductions.
In later years, particularly during and after the civil war, reports of people being taken away in white vans became a recurring feature of Sri Lankan human-rights reporting.
The symbol eventually became larger than the vehicle itself.
A family seeing an unmarked van outside a house could fear that somebody was about to disappear.
For families of missing people, the uncertainty was often more painful than receiving confirmation of death.
A confirmed death allows mourning to begin.
A disappearance leaves a question.
Is the person dead?
Are they being held somewhere?
Will they ever come home?
For thousands of families affected by Sri Lanka’s cycles of violence, those questions have lasted for decades.
What happened to the Batalanda findings?
The Commission’s report did not automatically become a series of criminal convictions.
That is an important feature of the story.
A Commission of Inquiry can investigate, record evidence and make findings or recommendations.
Criminal liability is ultimately determined through the courts, under a different legal process and standard.
This explains one of the apparent contradictions surrounding Batalanda.
There is an official Commission report containing serious findings and testimony.
There are political figures whose names have remained associated with the controversy.
There are police officers who faced criminal proceedings.
And yet the number of cases that ultimately produced final judicial outcomes is small compared with the scale of the allegations surrounding the period.
The 2024 Court of Appeal judgment therefore represents one chapter of the story, not its entirety.
A history that refuses to disappear
Sri Lanka has repeatedly attempted to move beyond the violence of the 1980s and 1990s.
Governments changed.
Presidents changed.
Political parties that once stood on opposite sides of the issue later shared power.
New crises replaced old ones.
But the families of the disappeared did not receive the luxury of forgetting.
For them, history is not an academic subject.
It is a photograph kept in a drawer.
A name that still appears on an old document.
A house where somebody was last seen.
A mother who waited for a son who never returned.
That is why Batalanda continues to matter.
Not because every allegation made about it has been legally established.
Not because every political claim surrounding it should be accepted as fact.
But because an official investigation was conducted, people gave evidence, serious allegations were recorded, and at least one disappearance eventually produced a final court judgment — 35 years after the person disappeared.
The Batalanda story therefore leaves Sri Lanka with a question that extends beyond any one political party or individual.
When a country emerges from political violence, how long should it take to account for the people who disappeared — and what does it say about justice when the answer takes an entire generation to arrive?
Tags: Batalanda, Batalanda Commission, Sri Lanka history, Rathnachandra Liyanage, Douglas Peiris, JVP insurrection, Sri Lanka disappearances, political violence, human rights, 1989 Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe
